WEEKEND

WEEKEND // FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 2014

MARCHING INTO THE

UNNAMED What do students think of the two new residential colleges // BY LEAF ARBUTHNOT AND RACHEL SIEGEL PAGE 3

CONVERSATION

B5

CASH

B6, 7

?

CONTAGION

B9

IS NOW A GOOD TIME?

HOW TO SPEND IT

THE OTHER VIRUS

Keni Sabath has Conversations with Things, but not with Karsten Harries.

WKND has some friendly advice for Yale about the budget surplus.

How the fear of Ebola spreads, independent of the disease itself.

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

MATTIA

WEEKEND VIEWS

WE WERE ALWAYS WANDERERS // BY MATTHEW MATTIA

“What was it that called me: madness or reality?”

— Clarice Lispector

MCCULLOUGH

I do not think I am too young to have regrets; to worry that my heart is so violent and desperate that it cannot be loved; to have felt emotions of such terrifying grandeur that I am left raving and wild upon the New Haven Green, daring God to exist. If I am old enough to be committed to a psychiatric hospital against my will; to be told “having you at school would be unsafe for the community,” then I am old enough to look back upon my twenty years and wonder: Why do I want to live? And the butterfly — as it drifts among the flowers? So easily crushed and yet she dares to be delicate. To live and be delicate. Oh what madness drives the earth to give birth to itself (the mangoes full of sweet juice; the grasses lush; the peonies, fragrant as grand dames at the opera), what madness drives it, each spring, to be born? Only to die? The dying earth is my nightmare and my nightly worry.

Don’t you see that reality is so delicate? Don’t you see that flowers die because we stop believing in them?

I watch the leaves fall from the trees and wring my hands. Spring is a season of weeping because the perfume of the flowers barely exists. I know that it will soon be gone and I may not grasp it. But because it barely exists it leads me into a reality that is all the more intense for being delicate. All is refined; all is fragile. This reality is my immaculate and secret life. It cannot be touched except with eyes closed and breathing gently.

I try to save it; to save it I believe in it all the more. But every year and in despair I discover again: Spring was a dream after all.

Yet some mornings I look at myself in the mirror and think: to be this beautiful I cannot die. Ah but I am beautiful because I will die. (That is what I discover, dreaming of last spring’s flowers.) But I do not want this beauty. Take it from me. I pray to God: Take it from me. But God (who is a voice I created in the garden), God says: Look again at the flowers. So like a nun I bow my head and silently accept this stricture. I watch the flowers and speak to them and listen to the perfumes they pass between each other for this is their language.

If I am old enough to die (as did the eighteen-year-old boy who crashed his car into a tree my sis-

ter’s senior year of high school), then is it not true that all the myriad emotions which play in my heart (as I delight in the unfolding of colors at dawn, as I walk worrying from class to class, as I read “Mrs. Dalloway” in the desert) demand my reverence? So when I see a six-yearold crying I do not think: If she only knew how much harder life will get.

Because I remember when I was six and Michael coerced me into getting naked in front of him, into taking a shower with him, because I had to learn “not to be modest.” I remember the shame I felt when I told my mother, and the vague fear I felt when I saw his picture on Facebook last night. (For he was looking at me.) At what point did that fear begin to merit your attention? And take on value? Become tragic? Worthy of a narrative? Was it at six? Or twelve? Or twenty? Or will it not become so until I’m forty?

WE ARE ONLY THE TREMBLING OF EMOTION AS IT COMES IN CONTACT WITH THE WORLD; WITH FLOWER; WITH TREES; WITH THE BODIES WE LOVE. (And I do not think this fear is any more significant than my fear of touching doorknobs. For I struggle against the doorknob daily and think of Michael only every so often.

At what point do you stop telling me, “Ah, but you are young! Give it a few years”? The doorknob stands before me and I tremble. You would not laugh if I told you that Michael had forced me to nakedness (I wasn’t even comfortable using a urinal for fear of being seen); why laugh when I tell you I cannot touch a doorknob? or when I stutter? Every conversation terrifies me (what if I am boring? or make you angry? what if you no longer want to be my friend?).

For when I speak, my crown tumbles from my forehead. My majesty is lost. Only in silence do I remain enthroned. Only in the garden.)

(What matters is not what it is, but how I’ve felt it. But here we are

// EMILY XIAO

understanding only “what makes sense”.)

I refuse to accept that what I felt at three is any less tragic, any less magnificent than what I feel at twenty.

(Or that what I feel now is any less than what you feel at thirty, or forty, or, for God’s sake, twenty four.)

Innocence is a state created after the fact. It is created nostalgically.

For we cannot bear the idea that we have always suffered; that children, too, suffer. That all of human life is suffering. So we piece together from the dreamy sweet fragments of childhood a state of grace. But it was always piecemeal. Innocence is a false idyll. Children, too, are part of the grand tragedy.

(Some have wondered if my gender identity is a phase. But don’t you know that the first piece of clothing I wanted to buy was a bikini? “A green bikini,” I thought. “Just for me.” Yet even then I knew it was forbidden.

Even then, as a three-year-old child, I knew that my desire was a scandal. I yearned; I yearned. And how can you say my yearning then was foolish; immature; fleeting? When I remember it seventeen years later?)

Delicate being that I am, the slightest disturbance along the fil-

aments of those thoughts by which I remain tethered to life shakes me dreamless and dead. (I fall before the barbarous shock of a phrase; an unlovely reflection in the mirror; a passage I cannot decipher in a book.

The smallest disagreement throws me into disarray; I cannot bear it; and I have stared at my reflection, rearranged my hair and rubbed my eyes, until the image it produced matched my inner vision of myself, which would suffer, pierced and bleeding, when I looked unlovely (for the crown would tumble; I would be a fool). And to read a book by an author whom I hold dear, and to come upon an incomprehensible passage, is as if I were denied a goodnight kiss by my own mother. Who am I, after all, if I cannot understand that which I love? But is it true that what we love most is most incomprehensible to us? For I cannot understand an orchid in a glass dome. Nor can I touch it; the glass denies me; the air of the orchid denies me; its majesty and detached beauty. I can only fall down in praise.) But I do not believe my emotions are more valuable than those of anyone else because I have a mental illness.

Though sometimes I have won-

dered: am I ill or is my sensibility simply more finespun? Do I feel more subtly the trembling of the earth? (This delicacy is my coup de grâce — for though I suffer, at least I suffer aesthetically.) As Clarice Lispector wrote, “Our best eye is at the same time more powerful and more delicate. [But] does this only happen to our eyes? Could it be that those who see things more clearly are also those who feel and suffer most?” But then I think of that boy who died at eighteen: If his emotions were not then as valuable as yours now, what was the worth of his life?

We are only the trembling of emotion as it comes in contact with the world; with flowers; with trees; with the bodies we love. We exist only in that contact. Do not deny me that.

For I have fought so long to fall in love with the world and confront every day the failure of that love. Reality is too delicate for me. I am rudderless, I am adrift. I am tired. There are only ever fragments of a revelation — nothing comes together. Someday I will fall out of love and it will end just like this: without an ending.

Then, as I stepped outside, body stiff, mind numb, there it was: the Moon. Thin wisps of clouds drifted across it, moonbeams falling so thick you could catch them in a jar.

The faint outlines of craters and plains faded in and out of the crescent, hinting at the dark portion of the circle. The sense of fall in the air seemed a flirtation. Moonlight drenched the rooftops. Numberless stars chimed in. For a moment, my backpack felt weightless. And while staring up at the first edition of the universe, all the data of “Universe: The Ninth Edition” seemed to fall a bit short.

To the newly landed Martian in problem number (13), the moon is a rock, 3,476 kilometers in diameter, 384,400 kilometers from the Earth. The surface holds no pixie dust, nor is it cheese; it doesn’t even glow. In fact, the surface more closely resembles the Mojave desert than a glimmering porcelain ball. It has an escape velocity and a confusing luminosity. Science can even explain the magical mutations the moon undergoes every

night, through all the months of the year. All of these, the Martian on the moon might understand. But from the Earth, from the steps of Bass Library at 1:45 a.m., the moon is also Debussy’s “Clair de Lune.” It’s Méliès’s “Le Voyage Dans la Lune.” It’s the white spot peering out of the ocean in Georgia O’Keeffe’s “Wave, Night.” Its light cloaks Gatsby in his reveries of Daisy. And it’s Margaret Wise Brown’s “Comb and brush and bowl full of mush.” Apart from the facts and figures — likely since before those numbers were even discovered — the moon embodies the endearing, incalculable human appreciation for beauty and romance. And every now and again, when the hour is late, and the air clear, and the thin crescent of white light beams down from the sky, through still leaves, and onto the ground in front of you, the moon is simply lovely. I think even our Martian would agree.

Contact MATTHEW MATTIA at matthew. mattia.91@gmail.com .

The Unlearn’d Astronomer // BY DAVID MCCULLOUGH

When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lectureroom, How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick; Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself, In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

— Walt Whitman At last, the eve of the astronomy exam rolled around. The midnight oil had near burnt off, the text of “Universe: The Ninth Edition” began to blur, and the PA system in the library crackled to life: “It is now 1:30. Bass Library will be closing in 15 minutes. 15 minutes.”

Time for one last review problem.

(13) A Martian lands on the surface of the moon closest to Earth.

(A) What does the Martian see?

Describe the surface features and geological composition of the moon. (B) The Third Quarter phase occurred a week and a half ago,

what phase is the moon in now?

(C) What is the luminosity of the moon in this phase?

Let’s see, surface composition… Well, according to the collision-impact theory, the moon was formed millions of years ago when a small planetary body collided with Earth, kicking up rock and rubble that eventually, by gravity, condensed to form a large orbicular mass in a geosynchronous orbit slightly offline with the Earth’s celestial equator. Over time, through bombardment of meteors and asteroids, various craters and Lunar Maria formed over the surface of the moon. Furthermore, we know the moon orbits the earth over a period of about 28 days.

Therefore, there are exactly seven days between the first quarter, full, third quarter and new phases of the moon. Since the Martian landed a week and a half after the third quarter, the moon is likely in the waxing crescent phase.

Okay, A and B, done.

Now, part C … Luminosity?

How the heck do I calculate Lumi-

nosity? Well, we know the moon has a diameter of 3,476 kilometers, an albedo of .11 and a vastly fluctuating surface temperature from -180˚C to 130˚C …

WHILE STARING UP AT THE FIRST EDITION OF THE UNIVERSE, ALL THE DATA OF “UNIVERSE: THE NINTH EDITION” SEEMED TO FALL A BIT SHORT. Suddenly the pounding in my head turned into a rapping at the door of my cubicle. The security guard. Dang, out of time. I shut the book, gathered the loose papers and pencils into my backpack and shuffled out of the library.

FRI D AY NOVEMBER

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RESTAURANT WEEK

Contact DAVID MCCULLOUGH at david.mccullough@yale.edu .

WKND RECOMMENDS:

A Restaurant Near You // All Day It’s the last day to get your fill of good deals and New Haven noshes.

Judy Garland and Barbara Streisand’s duet of “Get Happy.” Beautiful, unhappy women singing about happiness makes WKND happy.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

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WEEKEND COVER

TAKING STOCK OF EXPANSION // BY LEAF ARBUTHNOT AND RACHEL SIEGEL

little over 50 years ago, Yale underwent a massive change.

Two residential colleges were added to the 10 already in place, two colleges whose unremittingly modern architecture was a testament to their newness, and whose names — Morse and Ezra Stiles — felt woolly and unfamiliar in the mouths of their freshly minted undergraduates. To mark the occasion, a time capsule was created and filled with twenty student essays, local and regional newspapers and several copies of Yale publications. The capsule was enclosed in a stone that became a bedrock of the new colleges. It was laid during a ceremony on Alumni Day in 1961, with much pomp and pride; only the colleges’ total demolition would be sufficient to coax the time capsule back into the open air.

One News columnist, aware that he was writing for posterity, observed, “We’re hoping to do or say something that will be remembered 300 years hence.”

We find ourselves at a comparable moment in Yale’s history. The 12 colleges housing the undergraduate student body are to be expanded to 14 in August 2017. They have yet to be named. They have yet to be crested. They have yet to be given masters, deans or dining staff. But they have been assigned a space — a scrubby no-man’s-land between a cemetery and a hospital, whose apparent insignificance seems to pose a haughty challenge to the notion that anything, ever, could be built there. But the donors have been petitioned, the architects consulted; the show is officially on the road. Expansion really is going to happen. *** Of course, the addition of two new colleges will change Yale. Yet it is a curious mark of institutional life that even the slightest alterations to the “system” are often met with anxiety by those cozily closeted on the inside — students can be unexpectedly conservative.

As plans for the Beinecke neared completion in 1961, for example, the library was condemned as a “decorated box” by a history of art professor. Six undergraduates, one graduate student and one history of art instructor wrote in an open letter to the News that the library would stand as “a white elephant to be ridiculed by succeeding generations,” a repository for dead leaves, hand-tossed refuse and a simmering sense of resentment.

Fast-forward a couple of decades, and the Beinecke is many Yalies’ favorite landmark,

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an obligatory but agreeable stop on the Grand Tour. You present the library to your parent/ friend/grandmother, freestyle for a couple of minutes on the fragility of its marble panels, the Tolkeinesque beauty of its innards, and then move on to visit Sterling, a gooey feeling of pride in your gut. The “decorated box” is not resented decades after its construction: It is loved.

Still, in many ways, the addition of two new colleges will be a more significant change to the University than an architecturally radical library. After all, once you’ve built your library and rammed it with books, you can — to an extent — rest on your laurels, much of the marathon completed. New colleges, on the other hand, are another matter entirely.

You have to fill them with people, not books — undergraduates who arrive and leave in yearly cycles, who have sweated their way into the University and who are hungry for their slice of the Yale pie.

For Maria Cortez, who just submitted her application to Yale, potentially being placed in the new colleges would not diminish her undergraduate experience.

“I think that students will still feel part of the community no matter what,” Cortez said.

“The residential college system itself brings [students] together, so there wouldn’t be feelings of isolation because, from what I know at least, the residential colleges are small communities within the University itself.”

Of the five prospective students interviewed, none were aware of the planned expansion. All five added that they would have no concerns for their social lives if placed into one of the new colleges.

For Julia Kharzeev, another aspiring Yalie, students placed in the new colleges — particularly underclassmen — would bear the responsibility of socializing outside their collegiate community.

“I think it really depends on whether [the students] integrate themselves well on campus in other ways,” Kharzeev said. “It would be awesome to be in these new residential colleges.”

When they finally arrive in 2017, the undergrads at the new colleges will want intimate classes and seminars just as much as we do.

They too will expect unhampered access to Yale’s music, drama and gym facilities. And they will want to participate, like the members of the older colleges, in the intramural sports league, amongst lots of other student pastimes.

The two new colleges will grow Yale’s

AN AMERICAN IN PARIS 7:30 p.m. //Woolsey

The charmingest music you ever heard.

You can’t go wrong with Gershwin (but WKND does regret there won’t be any tapdancing to accompany the orchestral performance).

undergraduate community by 15 percent.

The student body will thus come to a total of roughfly 6,200, an increase of 800 undergrads in all. Of course, the newbies will bring dough to the table – their tuition will fill Yale coffers with a net revenue of approximately $30 million per year. According to the University administration, much of that money is expected to help staff and infrastructure to deal with the extra people.

The Yale Corporation made the original decision to expand back in 2008, disregarding the weighty evidence suggesting that students were opposed to the idea. (In a 2008 survey sent out by the News, of the 362 students polled, only 25 percent favored expansion.) Adding more space for qualified undergraduates was a leading factor in the Corporation’s choice — in 1999, Yale College accepted over 20 percent of applicants; now, it admits something closer to six percent.

Every year seems to present record numbers of applicants, and it was felt that Yale would best serve its educational mission by getting bigger.

But the recession hit, shelving the development plans until Yale’s economic future looked rosier. The past few years have looked up, with the Yale Division of Finance reporting a surplus of $51 million this year. Now, there are enough pennies in the piggybank to give expansion another shot. *** For many, enlargement is a cause for skepticism and gloom, not celebration. Some students worry that it might be easier to get into Yale — but perhaps the facts should be allowed to stand on their own. Yale College received a record 29,790 applicants for the class of 2017, of which only about 2,000 were accepted.

The notion that increasing this number by 800 each year will lower academic standards doesn’t quite compute, said Eleanor Marshall ’17.

“I find that argument pretty offensive,” Marshall said. “I think it’s pretty elitist and I’m pretty disappointed to have heard people complaining about it.”

Peter Wang ’18 agreed, cautioning that an obsession with the number “800” undermines the fact that many candidates Yale rejects are undoubtedly qualified.

“Letting more students into Yale doesn’t mean that if you set the number larger, you set the standard lower,” Wang said.

In addition to fears of a less gifted student body, many have voiced the concern that the new colleges will be ‘ghettoized’ due to their

location by Science Hill — or peopled entirely by sports-mad economists. The plot of land chosen is seen as out of the way, cut off, a gray buffer zone by Ingalls Rink with little commercial activity.

In a 2007 News article, Michael Pomeranz argued that “the new colleges, up on Science Hill, would create a sub-campus away from most of the undergraduate housing.”

In response to such criticism, Dean of Yale College Jonathan Holloway said that campus has changed drastically since the Corporation first proposed expansion. With the addition of the police station, the construction of the Center for Engineering Innovation and Design and the completion of Rosenkranz Hall, foot traffic in the area has increased.

Some students, too, expect that on-campus social life will move with the opening of the new colleges. They reject Pomeranz’s notion of the “sub-campus” as a little overdramatic. “[Students in the new colleges] will be closer to the students in TD and Silliman,” Kellen Svetov ’16 said. “We may see a shift of the social center.”

In addition, according to the Yale website “The New Residential Colleges,” the University will create “stepping stones” that connect students to the new neighborhood. These will include an expanded shuttle service and enhanced security. And yet, the freshmen who are parachuted into these colleges will join institutions that have no accrued prestige and no timeworn traditions that they can inherit. Moreover, there is a historical precedent for suspecting that the new colleges will not be respected as much as the older ones, at least initially.

Ronald Allison ’63 recalled the stigma he faced when he transferred from Silliman into the newly created Morse College in the early ’60s. “You were disrespected for being there,” he said. “Morse had less prestige.”

In any case, it seems likely that the first wave of Morse and Stiles undergraduates were particularly sensitive to the sting of perceived inter-collegiate snobbery. Eero Saarinen, the Morse and Stiles architect, explained in a 1959 statement that his team’s primary aim had been to create “an architecture which would recognise the individual as individual instead of anonymous integer in a group.” Many who transferred were introverted types who craved the single rooms that the colleges offered, having been uncomfortable in their original SEE COLLEGES PAGE 8

WKND RECOMMENDS: Being an American in Paris. It’s a very nice place, and if you don’t speak the language, you won’t be able to tell when people make fun of you.

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND BLADDERBALL “People don’t ask questions about Bladderball. They just show up to play it every year, assuming that, like Kingman Brewster, 36 required courses, and hating Harvard, Bladderball always has and always will exist,” Ruth Marcus ’79 wrote in the News on Friday, Nov. 5, 1976, the day before the 22nd annual Bladderball game.

Marcus is only two for four.

Though Yalies still need 36 credits and hate Harvard, Bladderball has gone the route of Kingman Brewster, who departed Yale’s presidency in 1977.

But for approximately 30 seconds on Nov. 3, Bladderball returned, albeit ephemerally. After cryptic emails and signs appeared around campus advertising Vesica Sphaera, which means “bladder ball” in Latin, students believed the long-awaited return of Yale’s most famous game was upon us.

Thanks to the game’s violent legacy, however, it was not to be. Yale Police stopped the game within the first minute.

The Beginning Bladderball, a big-kid version of kill-the-carrier featuring inebriated college students and the occasional helicopter, began in 1954 as a contest between four Yale publications: the News, the Yale Broadcasting Co., the Yale Record and Yale Banner. The game was an innovation of Banner staff member Philip Zeidman ’55, who intended it as a preliminary festivity the weekend of the YaleDartmouth football game.

In 1954, each publication fielded a 15-man team and invited Berkeley College Master Thomas Mendenhall to serve as the referee.

That November, Sports Illustrated ran a three-page spread on the strange new sport, including a picture of Mendenhall in a top hat and tails “officiating” the game.

Bladderball expanded in 1958, when freshmen spontaneously joined in. As the decade progressed, residential colleges, student organizations and other informal groups — including a student laundry troop and a collective of annexed students who called themselves the “Hillhouse Hard-ons” — fronted teams.

Despite the expanding scope of the game, there were still no distinguishable rules. Mayhem was king; victory lay not in possession of the Bladderball but in overthe-top declarations of supremacy. The News faithfully reported its annual win, often claiming victory by thousands of points.

Bladderball, according to the News, has a very specific recipe.

“In a large Old Campus, mix 5,000 undergraduates and one very large ball. Add one jigger screams, one teaspoon old college rivalries and a dash of insanity. Drink.”

This recipe, which eventually proved toxic, led the administration to step in. In 1961, Security Director John Powell and Yale College Assistant Dean Henry Chauncey, Jr. jointly issued an ultimatum: The game had to take place at the Yale Bowl, or not at all, according to Bladderball historian Sarah Hammond ’99.

Without the game’s traditional location, Bladderball did not technically take place in 1961.

The groups refused to go all the way out to the football field but

did hold a “Non-Bladderball Game” on Old Campus. The Yale Record brought an effigy labeled Dean Powell, and the News team burned it.

“Since there was no actual bladderball, the teams first played with a cardboard box, then a student [Frank McGuire, chairman of the Record] and eventually with a large trash barrel,” a reporter wrote in 1961.

Bladderball returned to Old Campus the following year.

The Most Dangerous Game This year, posters bearing the words “Vesica Sphaera” and the image of a bladderball appeared around Branford and Jonathan Edwards Colleges on Halloween. Although originally scheduled for 4 p.m. on Saturday, Nov. 2, an email sent from the account jesux.1975@gmail.com notified a select group of students that due to rain, the game was moved to the following day.

News of the game made its way online thanks to posts on Yik Yak and Overheard at Yale. By 4 p.m. on Nov. 3, approximately 200 hundred students were milling around on Old Campus.

At 4:08 p.m. the ball emerged from Farnam A. Two unidentified students pushed it through the door, leaving it to bounce once and roll past Battell Chapel. The Yale Police got their hands on the ball in front of Durfee C, and a female officer used a knife to puncture the ball. A chorus of boos from the students accompanied two officers as they carried the Bladderball through the Elm Street Gate and to a police minivan stationed on High Street.

“There’s a balance between having fun and public safety,” said Yale Police Chief Ronnell Higgins. “It was common knowledge that Bladderball is banned. My thoughts about it initially were, why is this game being yet again revived when the University made its position on it abundantly clear.

Notwithstanding the obvious risk to safety of those who are playing the game, the danger to innocent community members — pedestrians, bicyclists, motorists — these are city streets that run through our campus. This is a dangerous game.”

Higgins confirmed that the remains of the bladderball are still in the police’s possession.

So how did we get here? How did a beloved tradition go from tolerated nuisance to unacceptable danger in the eyes of the administration?

Funny as the aggressively offbrand humor of Bladderball was, it became more difficult to ignore the risk inherent to the game.

The self-mockery of the 1960s and early 1970s had devolved into bedlam by the early ’80s, which ultimately harmed the University and its students.

Bladderball’s prohibition was anything but abrupt. The ban was the result of decades of injuries and damages camouflaged by humorous bluster. Although many current students don’t know this side of the game, the truth is that Bladderball has, if not a dark, then at least a checkered history.

It’s All Fun and Games …

The week before the Bladder-

ball game, the News would run other teams’ boasts, which ran from outlandish to clever to selfdeprecating. Samples include the Stoner Hall Bowling team’s 1976 threat that “We will disjoint you, bong you over the head and weed you out. When we ignite our attack, you’ll all cough up another victory for the perfect parallelogonal alignment.”

That same year, David Rose ’79 executed the most unbelievable Bladderball prank.

“Teams would start drinking at seven, get themselves all lubricated, so by the time it got to ten, you had 4,000 drunken crazy Yalies trying to push this ball back to their college,” Rose said. “You can imagine the forces of physics involved. It got to be a bit of a zoo.

You couldn’t win by force, so you had to win by guile.”

Rose chartered a helicopter and flew over Old Campus so he and Pierson College’s then-master Gaddis Smith ’54 could drop leaflets encouraging other teams to surrender to Pierson’s inevitable victory.

The original plan was to fly in on a helicopter and scoop up the bladderball, according to Rose.

Rose and fellow Piersonites were designing a tool to do so when they realized that they would have to fly the helicopter too low to safely pull off the trick. Instead, Rose used the Pierson Press, which he ran at the time, to print flyers.

“We did leaflets modeled after German propaganda leaflets,” Rose said. “We dropped three or four thousand leaflets across the whole thing.”

In order to fund the project, Rose used crowdsourcing — promising aerial photographs of Bladderball to anyone who purchased stock in the newly-formed Pierson Bladderball Attack and Lifting League — to pay for the helicopter. Just in case other colleges had the same idea, Rose reserved all other helicopters in New Haven, he said.

But the prank did not stop with the game.

“The press being so important, I figured there should be a record of this,” Rose said. “I arranged it so Channel Eight News could cover it. I took a film camera up with me and filmed the whole thing from the air. I raced over to Channel Eight and wrote the story along the way, which of course proved Pierson won Bladderball, and they put it on the air.”

Those who helped fund the helicopter did receive their dues.

Each shareholder received an 11 by 14 aerial image of the Bladderball game.

But not everyone was entertained by the antic. The New Haven authorities went searching for the litterbug responsible for the thousands of papers (which ultimately got picked up by students as collector’s items) and traced them back to Pierson.

Master Smith denied knowledge of the incident, according to Rose.

“It was a wonderful tradition and very uniquely Yale,” Rose said. “But as it was at that point … [Bladderball] had gotten out of hand. The administration was really trying to tamp things down.

This wasn’t the final straw, but getting up there.”

TIMELINE A BRIEF HISTORY OF BLADDERBALL 4 5 9 1 Philip Zeidman ‘55 invents Bladderball.

3 6 9 1 Kingman Brewster assumes

the presidency and attempts to protect the game by introducing regulations, issuing permits and inviting the police.

“The players started attacking each other before the ball came. When the ball finally did arrive, everybody started hitting it with no apparent purpose in mind…But I don’t mean to quibble. Bladderball is bladderball. And Yale is therefore, as far as I’m concerned, still Yale.”

— Calvin ‘Bud’ Trillin ’57

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BLADDERBALL BUSTERS // BY MAYA SWEEDLER

// ASHLYN OAKES

… Until Someone Gets Hurt Harmless jokes slowly approached — then crossed — a line in the 1970s. In 1976, frenzied students chased the ball through the High Street gate of Old Campus and over a tourist’s car, damaging the stationary car but, fortunately, not the tourist.

That same year, other serious incidents of vandalism took place.

The News reported an incident at Branford in which Saybrook students spread excrement on dining tables, smeared fake vomit on the ceiling and hung a smoke bomb from the rafters of their opponent’s dining hall. These episodes, in conjunction with the copious amounts of alcohol consumed during the game, led the News to run an editorial questioning how far Bladderball ought to go.

The violence that characterized the game in the ’70s was pervasive. In 1982, despite the presence of officiating marshals, the game ended early when three students were hospitalized. Two of the three students suffered seizures, one of which was related to epilepsy, and a fourth student was taken in an ambulance to University Health Services.

“The attitude and the aura surrounding Bladderball pose just as much danger as the facts of the game,” the News’ board wrote on Monday, Nov. 8, 1982. “Too many people, it seems, view the tradition as an occasion to promote drunken hysteria, boundless aggression and thoughtless violence … Yale ought to give Blad-

5 7 9 1 A group of Jonathan Edwards students puncture the bladderball with a hook when attempting to corral it. A chorus of “JE sucks!” erupts in response.The chant is later adjusted to “JE Sux,” the college’s motto today.

The bladderball is pushed out of Old Campus and travels through New Haven for half an hour, accompanied by over 200 students, before the police deflated the ball in Beinecke Plaza. Students seized the ball’s carcass and bring it up Hillhouse to present it to Brewster.

1 7 9 1

WAVEMACHINE16

Bingham Hall Library // 8 p.m.

Poetry collective whose name WKND can’t really make head or tail of. But poetry collectives!

derball one more try. But if a contest advertised with caution and promoted as fun results in further injuries and another early end, the traditional game should be called to a halt — for good.”

The following day, University President A. Bartlett Giamatti banned Bladderball.

Bladderball Bounces Back Bladderball did not return until 2009. After a 27-year ban, over 1,000 people flocked to Old Campus to see the tradition reappear.

The ball came through Phelps Gate, traversed Old Campus and moved towards Cross Campus, blocking traffic in the process.

Eager students ripped the bladderball apart, and although the News reported the largest pieces of the ball ended up at Ezra Stiles Master Stephen Pitti’s house after a battle that lasted a full hour, every college and the News claimed the victory.

Nobody was seriously injured in the revival, though several students suffered minor battle wounds. The game drew a strong response from the administration: All 12 deans and masters signed an open letter condemning Bladderball, reiterating its illegality.

In 2011, an 11-minute game ended when the Yale Police got involved. Though the bladderball had popped two minutes after emerging from Dwight Hall, over 300 students were fighting over its remnants when the authorities stepped in. Dalton Johnson ’14, then a sophomore, was one of the

lucky undergrads who managed to snag a piece of the ball.

“I hung the piece up above my bed until the end of junior year,” Johnson said in an e-mail. “I meant to get it framed.”

What happened last weekend is part of a trend of ever-shortening Bladderball resurgences. Yale seems unable to let go of the custom, even as the administration comes down harder on it.

“A self-conscious caricature of Yale’s devotion to tradition, Bladderball became a tradition in its own right,” Hammond wrote.

“Bladderball’s absurdity was contagious. Whatever one chose to identify with so patently silly a sport looked equally silly by comparison.”

At its heart, Bladderball is a contradiction. Both a parody of itself and a much-needed release, the game weathered the latter half of the 20th century with humor and guts. Yet it still retained its dual nature, a combination of savagery and satire unique to the game.

Both a brutal game and an emblem of school spirit, Bladderball is not the only thing that makes Yale, Yale. Neither is Kingman Brewster, or 36 courses, or hating Harvard. Bladderball is a fundamental part of the school’s history, and although it probably should not be played as it was 30 years ago, the game’s spirit still endures — limited to descriptions on Wikipedia, archives of the News and the strains of JE’s cheer.

Contact MAYA SWEEDLER at maya.sweedler@yale.edu .

7 7 9 1 The Joint Council of Social Chairmen (JCSC) convinces the administration to allow Bladderball to be played at the Bowl. The game goes on as planned, but with low attendance. JCSC returns with 14 of the 20 kegs it bought.

“Sure we’re stupid, but no dumber than Pierson. And we drink more than they do…D’port is gonna bring the ball back alive—and then we’re going to play with it and roll it around, and have fun, just like we did in kindergarten last year.”

—Davenport College, in the News

President A. Bartlett Giamatti bans Bladderball after three students are hospitalized.

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WKND RECOMMENDS: Cymbals Eat Guitars’ newest album, “Lose.” The band name? Terrible. The album title? Kinda whiny. The music?

Hair-raisingly, head-bangingly awesome.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

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WEEKEND ARTS

WAITING FOR HARRIES // BY KENI SABATH

A PSA for the art community: The Whitney Humanities Center event “Conversing with Things: Drawings, Paintings, and Pastels” is not a gallery walk-through with the exhibit’s featured artist, professor Karsten Harries ’58 GRD ’62. The artist won’t be on hand to offer any “meanings” to his modern art pieces. Instead, any “conversing” will be a direct and unfiltered exchange between you, the works of art and hopefully some of your fellow attendees. So enjoy some sensual studies of flesh-like conch shells — just don’t expect to see the artist in the flesh.

The exhibit’s publicity materials don’t make this obvious: Every person who attended the 3:00 p.m. event last Wednesday arrived with the erroneous impression that we would be meeting Harries himself. But 30 oppressive minutes of waiting for the absent artist gradually made for an enjoyable, unique, experience — now that I’ve spoiled the surprise, yours won’t be the same. Admittedly awkward at first, the afternoon turned pleasantly communal and eventually liberating once we realized that the onus of “conversing” with the paintings fell entirely upon our own amateur-art-critic selves.

Our laid-back group’s transformation from passive audience to active appraisers appropriately parallels Harries’s own elevation of commonplace objects to artistic subjects. The venue, too, reflects Harries’s approach to identifying art amidst the ordinary. The Gallery at Whitney is comprised of the WHC’s busy main hall and a large meeting room at the end. As you walk down the hallway, Harries’ eclectic collection of eggplant studies, paintings of tropical

// JULIA HENRY

Illuminating the “Night” // BY EDDY WANG

On Monday evening, approximately 50 Yale students, professors and New Haven residents wrapped around the long oval table of LC 319 in anticipation of a conversation with Yale professor and renowned poet Louise Glück. Overflow chairs were placed behind Glück’s seat, and when those were filled, attendees sat crosslegged on tables and positioned themselves awkwardly on window ledges. Still others clustered by the narrow doorway. A member of the Literature, the Arts and the Environment Colloquium — the academic organization sponsoring the event — gave a brief introduction, and then the podium was Glück’s. She commenced by first making clear that, “This is not a poetry reading.” Instead, a one-hour question and answer session ensued that focused mainly on Glück’s new book, “Faithful and Virtuous Night.”

Two characteristics of Glück’s manuscript become apparent upon a first reading.

One is the placement of prose poems among a larger number of verse poems. During Monday’s conversation, Glück revealed that it was not until she tried her hand at prose poems (which look like prose but retain the imagery and delivery of poems) that the manuscript started coming together. “[The prose poems are] what the manuscript needed to be aerated,” she said.

The book’s second striking feature is the shared settings, themes and syntax among the poems: parks, trains, night, wooden toys, music, nature, the moon, silence and more. When discovering one of these recur-

FRI D AY NOVEMBER

7

rences, the reader can’t help but flip back to find its kin. The connections between poems mean that each complements the others; they become a chorus, rather than a series of individual voices.

One such interwoven theme surfaced during Monday’s conversation, when Glück described her attempts to write about the inability to write.

“Cornwall” and “A Sharply Worded Silence,” two of her new poems, seem to have been influenced by this theme. Both make mention of silence, but on a deeper level, both poems may describe periods where Glück was unable to write.

“Cornwall” begins: “A word drops into the mist / like a child’s ball into high grass/ where it remains seductively / flashing and glinting until / the gold bursts are revealed to be / simply field buttercups.” Later, when the mist has cleared, the word has become “flattened by the elements / so it was now both recovered and useless.” It seems here that “mist” stands for consciousness or the landscapes of the creative mind. The poem’s opening lines depict the frustrating experience of a writer trying to retrieve a thought. Equally depressing are the times when Glück does fish out the thought and realizes it is much less appealing and stimulating than she had first imagined. Later in the poem, Glück describes both trying to keep a journal and moving her chair to the balcony in order to coax herself into writing. In Monday’s conversation, she mentioned that, for a time, she used to keep a typewriter close to her for the same purpose. When asked

what to do during these periods of internal resistance, Glück replied, to laughter, “Despair.”

In “Cornwall,” she feels that perhaps her best days have come and gone: “It was all behind me, all in the past. / Ahead, as I said, was silence.” She writes that there were wooden eggs in her studio, suggesting her current creative state: inert and infertile.

In “A Sharply Worded Silence,” in which the narrator searches for meaning in a conversation she once had with an old woman, Glück writes, “so I assumed there would be, at some point, / a door with a glittering knob / but when this would happen and where I had no idea.” The door does not appear; once more, the poet finds herself at the whim of some uncontrollable power which hampers, but ultimately inspires, her creativity. Glück suggests that for her, writing about a period of creative infertility is the best cure for emerging from it.

Other poems in “Faithful and Virtuous Night” dwell on related themes: doubt, fear, disorientation. The manuscript is further strengthened by a “voice” that Glück found ten years ago and hadn’t been able to put to use. And the author’s own comments futher illuminate her work’s hidden undercurrents. To know what one wants while being unable to get near it is a well-documented struggle, but in Glück’s beautiful web of images that echo and inform each other, this struggle takes on an ethereal dignity.

Contact EDDY WANG at chen-eddy.wang@yale.edu .

SHAGGY

9:00 p.m. // Toad’s Warning: This show is 18 and older only. WKND can’t wait to get our reggae on.

flowers and 1946 sketches of post-war Munich are punctuated by flyers advertising a talk on Ebola and windows peering into WHC’s administrative offices.

Even in the main room, massive streetlevel windows look out onto a busy downtown intersection; the gray New England sky ominously overshadows the artist’s diminutive and dreamy seascapes of tropical Viques, Puerto Rico.

The diversity and distinctiveness of Harries’s subjects define the exhibit.

In his official description of the collection, Harries emphasizes an intentional lack of a singular narrative: “These pictures do not try to make a point. They do not demonstrate anything. They seek to respond to some often not particularly memorable objects, a rock formation, a seashell, roots, flowers, fruit, garbage and especially the sea.” Rather than the subjects themselves grabbing your attention, the dynamism of their representation mesmerizes you. Soft pastel portrayals of seaside rocks seem to bloom into gentle grey flowers reflecting the sunlight. The charcoal sketch of a dancing girl condenses into a drawing of a flower only after you’ve seen the piece’s title: “Hibiscus.” And in the three “Garbage” pastels, no signs of decay mar the refuse — every cabbage piece, papaya peel and eggshell emits a refreshing, tropical island energy.

My favorite example of Harries’s artistic vivacity is the wall containing three sets of pastels: “Conch Shells 1–3,” “Eros 1–3,” and “Annunciation, Christmas, and Good Friday.” They combine Harries’s penchant for realism with his use of abstracted human forms and biblical themes. Together, they represent a spectrum of verve and animation that

Harries imbues in all his works. A lifeless shell nonetheless oozes with the sensuality of blushing flesh, pink and pale; abstracted images of female sexuality dance through the triptych of “Eros 1–3”; the final set celebrates the celestial conception of Christ, his birth and death.

The lack of a consecrated space for viewing the art was my only grievance with the exhibit. In congruence with the participant-centered turn of the experience, a stronger art gallery atmosphere was only achieved when I myself shut the curtains on the large windows and asked a staff member to turn on the gallery lights. The resulting soft radiance facilitated our focused meditation on the images and our silent dialogue with objects — the prayerful conversation that Harries intended.

One final PSA: If your secret society has a picture of “an orange view of the church in Avioth and a somewhat Feiningerish blue image of the start of a sailboat race,” please consider returning these paintings forthwith to the Gallery.

According to Harries’s description in the program, these pieces were removed from his office a few years ago. Word on the street is that they may be hanging in a society’s tomb right now.

Even without those pieces, I recommend the collection — it is on view every Wednesday from 3:00–5:00 pm until Dec. 10. But to make the most of the experience, make sure that the viewing environment is on par with the art itself. And also, don’t wait half an hour for Harries to show up.

Contact KENI SABATH at keni.sabath@yale.edu .

Fragile Posters, Enduring Themes // BY MARTHA LONGLEY When I think of World War II-era propaganda, I think of top-down attempts to bolster patriotism: women elated to be working in factories while their husbands proudly massacre cowering enemies. I don’t think of a grassroots campaign against governments in Mexico City. Or, I didn’t, until I went to see “Vida y Drama de México,” an exhibition at the Yale University Art Gallery that runs Oct. 17 until February.

While absurd caricatures and demonization of the enemy may slightly resemble standard propaganda, prints from the Taller de Grafica Popular — a small collective of poor teachers and devoted activists whose work makes up the exhibition — have a distinct style. The posters combine clear, journalistic fonts with neo-indigenous artistic styles to both send a message and reclaim the artists’ native culture.

Artistically, some posters are stronger than others, and the collection as a whole offers a spectrum from purely political to purely aesthetic. Some posters were printed solely to raise money for the TGP’s expenses, and so focus more on visual appeal. One such poster, “Raíces” or “Roots,” simply shows a tree, gray and shadowed, with its roots rising from the ground. Other pieces, like “Libertad,” combine romanticism and surrealism while also conveying political messages. The wall of “Villains” is complex and artistic; skeletons lurk in backgrounds, and every element of every print is a symbol. But some other posters are just words or generic caricatures of international politicians — one simply features Joseph McCarthy standing in a trashcan.

Other posters focus on internal issues. “El Día Internacional de la Mujer,” or “The International Day of the Woman,” is unique because unlike posters of its time, it both celebrates women and was crafted by a woman.

The issues addressed were those of immediate relevance to the artists, who had to constantly juggle their jobs, their activism and their printing. They printed their signs on fragile wood pulp and pasted them on telephone posts and building fronts to advertise for upcoming rallies. The posters, says the exhibition’s co-curator Lucy Gellman, “were meant to be ephemeral and transitory — they would oftentimes be washed away in the next rain.”

Yet they have certainly stood the test of time.

Not only are these prints physically intact, but their messages remain relevant. Many prints are devoted to solidarity among workers; they plead for eight-hour workdays, health care, six-day weeks. This is surprisingly relevant given the Mexican government’s current efforts at undermining labor rights by allowing employers to modify contracts. Messages against the privatized oil industry are also pertinent today, given its recent re-privatization. One wall of prints focuses on promoting Mexican education reform, still a deeply conflicted issue; just last month, Mexican authorities found a mass grave of schoolchildren whose bus had been ambushed while they campaigned against new education laws. The TGP itself still operates, but its members must stay hidden to avoid being captured or imprisoned.

THE POSTERS WERE MEANT TO BE EPHEMERAL AND TRANSITORY — THEY WOULD OFTENTIMES BE WASHED AWAY IN THE NEXT RAIN. LUCY GELLMAN, CO-CURATOR

The endurance of the exhibition’s themes is a credit to Monroe E. Price ’60 LAW ’64 and Aimée Brown Price GRD ’72, who , in their collections, focused on discovering obscure works of art, particularly ones related to the Chicano movement. A central theme of their collection is “the relationship between art and politics,” which explains the refreshing timelessness of the issues the prints tackle. Where most art exhibits are either traditional or modern, these progressive posters effectively bridge the gap between the old and new, making it well worth the walk up all four flights of stairs to see this early intersection of art and activism.

Contact MARTHA LONGLEY at martha.longley@yale.edu .

WKND RECOMMENDS: Getting your reggae on.

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

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WEEKEND $PEND$

$$$$$$$$$$$ WHAT WOULD YOU BUY WITH $51 MILLION?

H

ave you heard about the Yale budget surplus? In brief, the University opened its coffers one bright autumn morning and discovered an extra $51 million. Yale immediately sought WKND’s wise counsel — what should be done with the money?

Personally Victimized by a Yale Shower

Yale 2.0: Better, faster, and almost bug-free

// BY HALEY BYRNES

// BY JACKSON MCHENRY

The showers are too damn small. Don’t pretend like you haven’t noticed. It’s not just a “Silliman thing.” Like, shaving — and if you are a man and you are reading this, don’t even, because legs. Like, the other day, me shaving, which ended in a killer impression of that French painting with the dead guy in the bathtub with all the blood and the libertay and the ega-lee-tay and the — But I am not even asking for much! Just a few more square feet and — poof — problem solved. And yes, I sure would like to talk about “fiscal responsibility.” Can you think of a better way to please the masses? Because literally everyone showers. Except that weird

These days, you could get a pretty good education online, but you’d miss out on the true undergrad experience. Now that Yale has $51 million at its disposal, it’s time to start funding change.

Yale 2.0 will be the world’s first Massively Multiplayer Online Liberal Arts Education Game, bringing subscribers into a fullyimmersive simulation of our New Haven campus. After a brief tour-guide run tutorial (volume settings non-adjustable), players will choose customizable avatars (though you must wear a lanyard until you acquire a Y-sweater) and begin exploring VirtuCampYale. Network at parties to boost your campus celebrity rating (+1 to charisma)!

But remember to save energy for that first round of midterms (-3 to sleep)!

On Yale 2.0, you’ll participate in a persistent world, which means that your decisions affect the way you get to play the game.

For instance, if you choose English in the “declaring a major” quest, you’ll find some

kid who never leaves the computer room and chews gum the way I always imagined Hannibal chews his victim’s flesh. That kid has probably not noticed the shower issue.

Also: Why do drugs when you can take a fucking shower. Has anyone ever overdosed on shower? Exactly. You think I’m kidding.

Okay, enough with all the ha-has. Perhaps it would be fruitful to remind the Corporation of the larger stakes at play. “Oppression,” as it were, is maybe a loaded term. To wit: Have you or anyone you’ve known ever felt personally victimized by a Yale shower?

Contact HALEY BYRNES at haley.byrnes@yale.edu .

cool easter eggs — like an increased postgame difficulty level! But don’t worry about consequences, you also have the option to spend real-world cash on in-game bonuses: Why waste time on the “student income contribution” quest when you could skip straight to the Toad’s level?

But while Yale is pretty great, we have plans to make Yale 2.0 even better. The first patch will replace some of areas that betatested as “off-brand” with four separate J. Crews. And in response to reports of bots in the initial release, we’re looking to implement mandatory “reflection” mini-games after you pass certain crucial life markers: loss of virginity, first Wenzel, etc. They’ll ask: “What is the meaning of life?” “Why didn’t you go to a smaller, less competitive e-college?” “Look into your heart and answer honestly: Are you a good person?”

By 2018, we’ll be excellent and sheepfree!

// THAO DO

Hot Tubs for the People

Yale’s Coffers in Numbers

// BY CORYNA OGUNSEITAN Let’s get hot tubs! Right? 51 million dollars is definitely enough for at least one Jacuzzi per college, one in Commons, one on Old Campus, four in Woodbridge Hall, three in Bass and maybe even a few private ones for select suites in JE. I know what you’re thinking: That’s a conservative estimate, as the demand for hot tubs on this campus is close to immeasurable. Well — sorry that Yale’s not made of money?

Honestly, I got this idea from the most recent episode of Portlandia, in which Fred Armisen buys a hot tub for his front lawn.

His wife gets mad at him, but then it turns out that this particular hot tub has antiaging effects. So basically, I propose we install anti-aging hot tubs all over campus.

SATURDAY NOVEMBER

8

If you’re sprouting a few gray hairs during reading week, jump in and they’ll vanish! The science behind this is a little tricky, I know, but don’t worry — I’m a literature major.

Also, Jacuzzis are perfect for winter!

Freezing? Jump in the hot tub! Haven’t showered for a week because your heater’s broken and you can’t get out of bed? Jump in the hot tub! Putting on that winter 15(000)?

Jump in the hot tub!

Suddenly, every season will be bikini season: You’ll look *hot* — even when it’s cold outside.

// BY WEEKEND On Google, you can solve simple arithmetic operations by typing them into the search bar. Wow! So WKND did this, and reached the following conclusions. With 51 million dollars, Yale can: — Buy every student a coffee every day for the next 27.9 years.

— Buy every student a cronut every day for the next 5.6 years.

— Send every student on a roundtrip to Moscow 16 times.

— Purchase the Crown of Thorns twice over from the French govern-

Contact CORYNA OGUNSEITAN at coryna.ogunseitan@yale.edu .

IDANCE {THEREFORE} IAM

5:00 p.m. & 7:00 p.m. // ECA DanceSpace A Different Drum’s Fall Dance Show.

WKND likes the allusion to the Cogito, but is overwhelmed by the squiggles and arbitrary punctuation.

WKND RECOMMENDS:

SATURDAY NOVEMBER

Naming the new residential colleges after a dead white man. Just kidding!

8

ONCE UPON A DREAM

8:00 p.m. // Off Broadway Theater Contemporary and classical excerpts of ballet. Judging from the title, Sleeping Beauty meets Lana Del Rey.

ment.

— Not actually purchase a Jeff Koons sculpture, because those cost 55 million dollars each.

— Hire an actual magician who will stop the rain.

— Also ask the magician to please stop the winter, if she can?

— Probably invent a machine that writes final papers.

— Definitely invent a machine that fixes all problems, like, in general.

Thanks, Yale!

WKND RECOMMENDS: Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune. The music of Pan’s hour, the faunal noon.

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND COVER

ROOM FOR TWO MORE? // BY LEAF ARBUTHNOT AND RACHEL SIEGEL

COLLEGES FROM PAGE 3 colleges.

Henry Sam Chauncey, an associate dean of Yale College at the time, argues that the two new colleges were strange places to inhabit when they first opened, because most of the volunteers were “unhappy people” — so, “for the first two or three years at least, Morse and Stiles were not the happiest of places.”

The plans for the newest residential colleges suggest that they, by contrast, will not cater largely to “loners”.

Designed by Robert A.M. Stern Architects, the mock-ups show an interlocking series of communal spaces, clearly intended to generate a bustling social hub. The firm has opted not to copy the unforgiving gray modernism of Morse and Stiles, but has reverted to the neoGothic style so ubiquitous in many of Yale’s older colleges.

Of the students interviewed, the vast majority agreed that the new colleges look promising. Maia Eliscovich Sigal ’16, YCC vice president, went so far as to call them “very pretty,” noting that she had heard from members of the Morse administration that some undergraduates felt physically oppressed by Saarinen’s design.

As professor of English and American Studies and Morse College Master Amy Hungerford conceded, “Some students come [to Yale] with a dream of gothic architecture in mind, a stereotype of what an Ivy League college should look like.” Judging by Stern’s mock-ups, the 13th and 14th colleges will certainly fit into romantic visions of Old Yale. *** But even if the colleges fulfill an aesthetic ideal, the expansion poses problems of overcrowding. Ironically, while Morse and Stiles were opened partly to alleviate the pressure on student housing, the new colleges will in fact do the opposite.

Though Eliscovich Sigal has faith that the Yale administration will maintain standards as the university bloats, she feels that overcrowding is already a significant problem. “Many econ classes don’t even have TAs,” she said.

“It’s unacceptable. You’d think that if they’re bringing in hundreds more students, they’d sort that type of problem out.”

Still, despite her reservations, Eliscovich Sigal believes that University administrators are hyperaware of the impending problem — “I feel that they genuinely want to sort it out.”

Holloway has acknowledged these challenges. “We’re considering many different aspects of more students coming into campus,” he said. “Over the next 18 months, we’ll be developing plans to address those kinds of concerns.”

Without any concrete answers, expansion naysayers are arguably right to worry about overcrowding. And yet, efforts are being made by the University administration to address the issue. In October of last year, University President Peter Salovey convened a committee to investigate out how best to balance the books, to ensure that the costs of supporting the additional students would not exceed the extra $30 million revenue.

Sections of the Expansion Committee’s report, published this summer, make for potentially worrying read-

// YDN

ing. The IM league may be split into two separate divisions, for example, to accommodate two extra college teams.

In the segment on classroom space, the review found that “the large majority of courses” could enroll 15 percent more students without changing locations.

But many undergrads — including Svetov, an econ major who has witnessed the rush to register for Intro to Microeconomics and Macroeconomics — can already attest to the difficulty of finding a seat in many courses.

Shane Kim ’17 expressed similar concerns about overcrowded classes.

“If we have the same number of courses being taught, but now with 800 more students thrown into the mix, it will be a crazy time,” he said.

The report acknowledged that in some large courses, the increase would push course enrollment over the maximum capacity of Yale’s biggest classrooms — but it suggested that individual departments tackle the problem, for instance, by making classes earlier to alleviate pressure points. This has not gone over well with students, some of whom bristle at the thought of getting up early for a class they might have enjoyed at a later time in the morning.

To Qingyang Chen ’17, earlier classes would “circumvent the problem rather than solve the problem.” While he acknowledged that hiring more faculty would be a challenge, he felt that students should not be discouraged from taking classes they want to take.

The influx of 800 more undergraduates may also force the administration to curtail shopping period, to better anticipate resource allocation needs.

Having shopped oversubscribed seminars, Kim hopes that administrators ensure that shopping period does not become more difficult following the student body’s expansion.

In addition to concerns about the increased number of students, some equally worry about the number of faculty available to teach them.

They are arguably right to do so, given that the Expansion Committee’s report advised that “some flexibility be accorded with respect to class size limits,” whilst allowing for “a small, targeted increase in funding for non-ladder instruction.” In other words, the University doesn’t plan to increase the number of tenure positions, since they have already made new hires in preparation for the expansion.

“The faculty is larger than it’s ever been,” Holloway said. “Unfortunately the growth has been separated from the arrival of the students.”

While the ratio of students to tenured faculty members will inevitably increase in 2017, Holloway said Salovey and Provost Benjamin Polak were “absolutely committed to making sure the quality of teaching doesn’t suffer as the University expands.” *** Despite these assurances, some students simply feel excluded from

the expansion process. After all, the administration never officially asked undergraduates whether they thought introducing two new residential colleges would be a good idea.

As News columnist Scott Stern ’15 puts it, “The idea that there has been any student involvement at all in the process is kind of a joke.”

And yet, as Holloway announced on Oct. 29, a new undergraduate task force is expected to convene at the end of this semester to begin advising faculty and staff on plans for the new residential colleges. Officially called the Standing Committee on Yale College Expansion, the committee will include four undergraduates who can apply for a spot through Yale College Council.

And in February this year, two forums were held with an eye to allowing students to voice their concerns.

The first, on the impact of expansion on student life, was moderately wellattended, with approximately 30 students present, alongside Polak and other members of the Faculty Expansion Committee. But only four undergrads showed up to the second forum on the effects of growth on Yale’s academic life.

So, while some undergraduates feel actively shut out of the conversation, others seem apathetic to the changes — after all, 2017 feels pretty far off; they may not be around when the colleges open.

This apparent indifference might

be due to the inefficacy of the “open forum” itself — as Hungerford points out, “There’s something about calling an open forum that is either only effective when people are highly educated about the issue or [when they] have strong feelings. They’re not always an effective way of consulting people.”

There certainly seems to be a marked schism between the noise some students make amongst themselves about expansion, and what they are actually prepared to do about it.

Perhaps what students tend to lose sight of are the exciting opportunities presented by the expansion plan. The new colleges’ names and crests have captured the imagination of almost all.

Nine out of the current 12 are named after slave owners, and every college, except the two named for towns, pays tribute to a white, Christian male.

One favorite contender is Grace Hopper GRD ’34, one of the University’s most accomplished female graduates in engineering, mathematics and technology. Another popular choice is Edward Bouchet GRD 1876, a first-generation student of color and accomplished scientist. Yung Wing 1854 has also garnered some support, as the first Chinese student to graduate from an American university.

The opportunity to name these colleges has been hugely exciting, to both students and professors. Hungerford hopes at least one of the names will be that of a person of color or a woman — “I just think it’s time. We’re living in 2014.”

As to the danger that a college named after a female or a minority graduate will be further stigmatized, Hungerford aptly remarked, “If people worry that the Yale community will ghettoize two colleges named after women and people of color, then we’re in a lot deeper trouble than people think we are.”

In addition to the opportunities offered by the naming process, the chance to create a college culture ex nihilo has enthused many. As Eliscovich Sigal put it, “There’s an opportunity to be part of something new. That’s exciting.”

Besides, no one can deny that college identities undergo radical mutations every few years. For News columnist Joshua Clapper ’16, “The most appealing part of the residential college is that it is ever-changing,” he said. “There are traditions in different colleges that stress residential college independence over a broader University identity. But the flavor of this independence varies from year to year.”

It seems that one of the most vital goals of expansion has been somewhat obscured — which is that by growing so substantially, the Yale experience will be open to more people year on year. If it feels gratifyingly cynical to roll one’s eyes at the planned growth, with its unknown impacts and costs, it takes a little more intellectual integrity to focus on the bigger picture. More people will come to Yale, which will remain the same in some ways, and different in others; more minds from all over the world will be allowed to benefit from the unique Yale experience. That is surely something to celebrate.

Contact LEAF ARBUTHNOT at eleanor. arbuthnot@yale.edu and RACHEL SIEGEL AT rachel.siegel@yale.edu .

College Expansion Timeline 2008

October 3, 2013

2008: Yale Corporation approves plan for two new colleges. The project was temporarily derailed by the 2008 financial crisis

Charles Johnson '54 gives Yale $250 million for the project

October 3, 2013 University President Peter Salovey asked provost and dean of Yale College to convene Ad Hoc Committee on Yale College Expansion

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THE YPU HOSTS: A POLITICAL PARTY

October 2014 October 2014: Standing Committee on Yale College Expansion announced

June 14, 2014 June 2014: Salovey announced the University had reached its $500 million fundraising goal for the new colleges

August 2017 Colleges slated to open

2015 Groundbreaking

WKND RECOMMENDS:

8:00 p.m // Saybrook/Branford Room The only kind of YPU-sponsored activity WKND will be attending this year.

America’s two-party system. Works like a charm.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

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WEEKEND EBOLA

THE YIN AND YANG OF FEAR // BY AISHWARYA VIJAY

On a rainy Thursday morning this October, police blockades, fire trucks and news vans lined Cedar Street outside Yale-New Haven Hospital.

A doctoral student, returning from research abroad in Liberia, had been hospitalized with a slight fever — a possible precursor to Ebola. The individual was quarantined, and the relevant authorities were informed. It was confirmed later that afternoon that there was no Ebola, just some more innocuous malady. But if the scare itself was a false alarm, the day’s events suggested something about the way people respond to Ebola and to other threats like it.

“We have extreme fear without extreme compassion,” says Kristina Talbert-Slagle, an epidemiologist and officer at the Global Health Institute, of the public reaction to Ebola.

It seems that apart from its actual, viscerally gruesome effects, the disease infects us in other ways. Fear itself becomes viral through what Talbert-Slagle calls a “withdrawal from our natural urge to be compassionate and loving to those suffering.”

Nowhere is that more apparent than on the ground in West Africa, at the epidemic’s epicenter, where the presence of the disease and of those trying to fight has strained the bonds of society.

“Conspiracy theories are everywhere,” says Jamie Childs, an Ebola expert and lecturer at the Yale School of Public Health. He adds that Ebola has undermined traditional behaviors and led to social upheaval in affected areas, making those in need suspicious of foreign aid.

Health workers trying to prevent the disease’s spread have been attacked, abducted and killed. In a UK Independent article from September, Meredith Stakem, a health and nutrition adviser for Catholic Relief Services, noted that the disease “is so new to this part of the world and so terrifyingly lethal that many people fear all outsiders associated with Ebola, even if they are coming to help.”

She added that many people in affected communities may not understand the biology of disease transmission, which makes it difficult to adapt their behavior to the circumstances.

Measures seen by public health organizations as containment of the disease — individual quarantine, bans on border crossing and public congregation — are seen by residents as an imposition. Foreign aid workers often meet resistance when they try to intervene in local burial practices, which allow the disease to spread because they involved prolonged contact with corpses.

“It’s a funny clash between cultures, value and morality,” says William Summers, a Yale virologist and history of medicine professor. “Historically,” he explains, “public health interventions have been strained because people do not trust their governments, often times justifiably. So, you need to reach out to other sources to see results.”

Those other sources, Summers thinks, are local cultural leaders — people who can convince scared locals to cooperate with foreign workers. Otherwise, the spread of fear can undermine efforts to stop the spread of the disease.

But even thousands of miles away from the regions worst hit, the fear Ebola incites can be contagious — something University President Peter Salovey acknowledged when he sent a campus-wide email the morning of the scare. Salovey concluded his email with the following: “I feel that I should directly address the question of why our Public Health students — or why anyone affiliated with Yale — would even consider traveling to these dangerous parts of the world.”

He went on to explain that Yale’s reserves of expertise and its tradition of service left the University and its students obligated to put their abili-

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ties to their “highest, best use.”

If his email is any indication, Salovey detected a sense on campus that Ebola was to be avoided at all costs. At Yale and elsewhere, such fears manifest themselves in various ways, one being the failure of incessant media coverage to turn Ebola into a social cause.

A New York Times article from Oct. 20 noted the lack of American public donations to fight Ebola as compared to other international disasters of the last decade, such as the 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean, the 2011 nuclear disaster in Japan and the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. Political attack ads have often referenced the disease as a foreign policy failure rather than a humanitarian crisis. Indeed, Ebola only entered the American consciousness once it started affecting Americans.

Despite the epidemic starting in January of 2014, and despite the humanitarian organization Doctors without Borders calling for increased aid that March, coverage of Ebola in the American media began to accelerate when an American doctor and a missionary working abroad both contracted the virus in early August.

Christopher Lockwood, a Yale World Fellow and an operations manager for Doctors Without Borders, says his organization had to set up multiple training centers last March because there were not enough doctors prepared to treat Ebola’s victims.

“We had to start turning some Ebola patients away last spring, because they weren’t sick enough, and we were already at capacity. So the worldwide response, from that perspective, was quite delayed.”

KNOWING THAT THERE IS A HIGH CHANCE OF COMING BACK AND BEING OUT OF WORK FOR ALMOST A WHOLE MONTH IS A HUGE DETERRENT. That delay might stem from the unvoiced distinction Americans make between ourselves and the foreboding “other world,” where we think deadly diseases are just a part of everyday life. But such distinctions can undermine our empathy — and as it turns out, this has appeared many times before.

“In the first epidemic of cholera in the 1800s, we had this concept of American exceptionalism — our society was different from Europe, so we couldn’t get the same disease,” says Summers. “By the time the third epidemic rolled around,” he laughs, “we changed our viewpoint, but in many ways our view of Africa is still stuck in a Joseph Conrad-esque ‘Heart of Darkness’ world.”

According to Talbert-Slagle, that distinction between “us” and “them” is part of our lack of compassion. The virus turns our natural affection for each other into fear.

“Our irrational protection against this fear,” she says, “is to put up these artificial boundaries.”

But, she continues, such boundaries are only imagined. “As a species, we are 99.9% genetically identical to each other,” laughs Talbert-Slagle, “and so this distinction between self and other, which is so often talked about in both society and in science, is only applicable to 0.01%.” But we nonetheless think of ourselves as somehow different from Ebola’s victims.

In this and other ways, American public sentiment regarding Ebola is similar to the public’s first response

IN SOLIDARITY: A BENEFIT CONCERT FOR EBOLA CRISIS RELIEF 8:00 p.m. // Battell Chapel

A cappella for a cause. Takes place literally “a cappella.”

// AMANDA MEI

to AIDS in the 1980s.

The first five cases of HIV in the United States occurred in 1981. The disease was named in 1983. But it was only in 1987 that President Reagan even mentioned the word “AIDS” in a sentence.

And many misconceptions surrounding the transmission and symptoms of HIV have now resurfaced in the public discourse about Ebola.

In the 1980s, a lack of media coverage contributed to public confusion, but today, the opposite has occurred: Since being picked up in August, Ebola has featured prominently in American media.

What makes something like Ebola or Mad Cow Disease, which caused a similar stir a few years ago, so public?

According to Summers, fear of the unknown has fueled the media frenzy.

“We have rapid tests, we know about the virus” he says, “yet we still view it as something entirely foreign.”

Julia Rozanova, a postdoctoral associate of sociology at the School of Medicine who studies media portrayals of chronic diseases, agrees.

She says the nature of the disease has encouraged the media to focus on it.

Media outlets, Rozanova says, focus on “sensational” stories likely to draw a large audience. Ebola, with its overwhelming pace of infection, “evolves so spectacularly and violently in the human body that it’s chosen as a good fit for ‘big news’ and framed as such in mass media.”

The result is coverage that, to many involved in fighting Ebola, seems more accusatory than accurate.

“The question is always, ‘What went wrong?”’ or ‘What could have gone better?’” says Summers. “In fact, healthcare and governmental organizations are doing quite a good job with the response.”

Increasingly, Summers adds, organizations like the CDC and hospitals are coming under attack for what many see as a delayed or underwhelming response to an impending threat. But Summers says this is a totally wrong way to understand the role of the CDC. “The CDC is an advisory organization, not an operational one. They do not have the right to go into states and dictate their responses — in fact, they don’t usually even give guidelines on how to respond unless specifically asked.” Citing examples like this, Summers says that the majority of media coverage cannot, in fact, be termed information. Rather, he says, the media’s repeated assumption that something is being kept from the public undermines actual experts on the subject and leads people to blame them rather than listen to them.”

The real information out there, Summers says, is quite consistent: If you don’t have symptoms, then you are not contagious.

But this hasn’t stopped people from being often unjustifiably suspicious of those around them. A cli-

nician at Yale-New Haven Hospital, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, mentioned that his AfricanAmerican colleague went home early on the day of the scare because many of his patients called to mysteriously cancel their appointments. The clinician’s colleague thought his patients might associate him, being black, with the predominantly black victims of Ebola.

There is evidence that confusion over the correct response to the outbreak exists even at the highest levels.

“There is little uniformity to countries’ responses,” says Childs, “and often, whatever decisions are made are quickly reversed.”

Rozanova says that a better way to process Ebola-related news is to understand that there is no such thing as “the right information.”

“All information is produced by somebody who has a specific intent,” she says. “It’s just that the intents of people or groups producing information can be different.”

But Rozanova’s study of media portrayal indicates that audiences can, and indeed do, identify and account for the intent behind media portrayals. In other words, it’s up to the public to resist media hysteria.

But this is difficult, because as Talbert-Slagle phrases it, Ebola brings to light the “yin and yang of fear.”

On one hand, we unite to aid those suffering: witness the public health workers, the doctors, the missionaries and Silicon Valley millionaires who have chosen to donate to the CDC’s research efforts.

On the other hand, we are scared, and this leads us to shun outsiders.

But we should not let this emotion determine our response to the disease. Indeed, says Childs, there is a chance that we are shooting ourselves in the foot by quarantining health workers, who are often volunteers, on minimal suspicion.

Referring to New York and New Jersey’s recently enacted 21-day quarantine on asymptomatic health workers returning from affected areas, Childs says. “For somebody going to volunteer in these places, knowing that there is a high chance of coming back and being out of work for almost a whole month is a huge deterrent.”

To some, the quarantines seem misinformed, like many aspects of our response to Ebola. According to Lockwood, they are “political, rather than a medical, evidence-based judgment.”

And according to Summers, the lack of an Ebola vaccine similarly results from our priorities being out of order. A prototype vaccine has existed for 15 years, he says, but we haven’t developed it because there is no money to be made. That, he says, is the lesson to be learned here: When we let self-interest dictate our response to others’ misfortune, no one benefits.

Contact AISHWARYA VIJAY at aishwarya.vijay@yale.edu .

WKND RECOMMENDS: The Pentatonix. WKND’s guilty pleasure. (One of the members is a Yale grad!)

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND COLUMNS

A SHORT STORY WRIT LONG “The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry,” by Gabrielle Zevin is a hard book to describe. It is at once heartbreakingly sad and airily light. It is simultaneously weighty and ephemeral. It is undeniably sentimental, but it also kills off important characters with a sort of blasé shrug.

It’s hardly even a novel; I would classify it, rather, as a novellength short story, or perhaps a piece of young adult fiction written solely for adults. Above all, though, it is a pleasure to read.

Set in a small town on a tiny island off the snow-strewn, foliage-rich coast of Massachusetts, “The Storied Life” stars the prematurely curmudgeonly A.J. Fikry, a 30-something widower with few friends and fewer customers at his independent bookstore. “Island Books,” the store is called, where “No Man Is an Island; Every Book is a World.”

SCOTT STERN READING BETWEEN THE LINES The reader meets A.J. while he is still mourning and deeply depressed, tearing into a young publishing rep and causing her to flee his store, crying. He then proceeds to get drunk, remove from a safe his most priceless possession — an original edition of Edgar Allen Poe’s earliest work, “Tamerlane”— and promptly pass out. When he wakes up, “Tamerlane” is gone.

One would think this would finally drive the miserable A.J. to suicide, but, instead, he inexplicably starts exercising again, going for long runs and leaving the door to his store/apart-

ment unlocked. (After all, what’s left to be stolen?) One day, A.J. returns through the open door to find a crying baby on the floor of Island Books.

When, two days later, the child’s mother washes up dead on shore — suicide — A.J. decides to keep the baby. Maya, as she is called, is a startlingly precocious child — the perfect companion, it turns out, for the misanthropic and endearingly pretentious bookseller. She grows older; he grows older. They laugh together, cry together, and all that jazz. A.J. finally starts dating again. And everyone — every single character — reads a lot.

At its core, “The Storied Life” is about books. Books and authors and reading and writing and publishing and rereading. Early in the novel, the reader is treated to the main character’s rant about his personal preferences (which is too awesome not

to reprint and follows in abridged version): “I do not like postmodernism, post-apocalyptic settings, postmortem narrators, or magic realism. I rarely respond to supposedly clever formal devices, multiple fonts, pictures where they shouldn’t be — basically gimmicks of any kind…I do not like children’s books, especially ones with orphans, and I prefer not to clutter my shelves with young adult. I do not like anything over four hundred pages or under one hundred fifty pages. I am repulsed by ghostwritten novels by reality television stars, celebrity picture books, sports memoirs, movie tie-in editions, novelty items, and — I imagine this goes without saying — vampires.”

A.J. prefers short story collections; Maya likes classic fiction.

A.J.’s police chief friend is partial to detective stories; the matronly women who give the hapless A.J.

parenting advice prefer books with the word “wife” somewhere in the title. A.J. loves J.D. Salinger and hates David Foster Wallace. He has a complicated relationship with Edgar Allen Poe. Every chapter begins with A.J.’s personal take on a famous short story (by the likes of Roald Dahl, Flannery O’Connor and Raymond Carver, to name just a few). And this gets at the heart of my one insight about “The Storied Life”: It’s not quite a novel.

It’s something, but it just doesn’t read like a novel. To me, it reads like one of the short stories that A.J. so loves and that begin each chapter. It’s lyrical, and every end is tied up a bit more neatly than it would be in a novel. The storytelling is straightforward and descriptive, yet it’s not overwhelming or daunting in the manner of the hated Wallace. It’s charming. It’s almost like something O. Henry would’ve writ-

ten, except twenty times as long.

Then again, the author, Zevin, has almost exclusively written young adult fiction in the past, which is perhaps why the sadness of her characters seems, at times, shallow and too easily resolved. As I said, “The Storied Life” seems almost like young adult fiction for an older audience — the earnest tone, the neatly solved mysteries, the coming-of-age narrative for everyone involved.

Above all, “The Storied Life” is the kind of book that makes you think about the kind of book it is. You dwell on your own literary preferences, the kind of books you would purchase for your own independent bookstore. It is, in the end, a romantic ode to the act of reading itself.

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

In Defense of Oasis // BY NOAH DAPONTE-SMITH

// ASHLYN OAKES

I remember standing at one of the high tables in my high school’s café, writing an essay with my headphones on. One of my friends came over and asked me what I was listening to. “Oasis,” I said. She screwed up her face a bit, and then laughed. “Isn’t that a bit childish, Noah?” She asked.

I’ve often found that sort of sentiment among members of my generation — my peers find Oasis loud, irritating, one-dimensional and overly masculine. And, of course, their music is fit only for 14-yearolds. This is all sorely mistaken.

Yes, the preceding complaints are valid criticisms, all of them, but they miss the point. Oasis’s music can best be thought of as a social statement against all the trends — political and social and musical— of the 1980s and early 1990s.

Twenty years after Oasis released its first two albums, “Definitely Maybe” and “(What’s the Story) Morning Glory,” the time has come to reevaluate those efforts. It seems increasingly evident that those two albums stand as monumental achievements of modern rock.

As obnoxious as they have become, the Gallagher brothers made some fine music in the mid-1990s. The songs on “Definitely Maybe” and “Morning Glory” offer a fascinating array of sonic diversity, with multilayered orchestral works coming alongside tracks full of brash gui-

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tars and defiant vocals. Go into a silent room and play “Don’t Look Back In Anger” at a volume slightly higher than comfortable; surround yourself with the music so that you can discern the finest details of its intricate composition. Concentrate on the instrumentation as much as on Noel Gallagher’s magnificent, sweeping chorus.

The song is richly textured, with layers of sound coming together into a strikingly unified whole, so that no individual part stands out too peculiarly. As you listen more closely, that texture becomes ever more apparent. The same all applies for “Champagne Supernova,” as good an album closer as any, despite the inane lyrics.

And although it appeared early on their first album, “Definitely Maybe,” Oasis’s greatest musical achievement remains “Live Forever.” Every part of the song is simply brilliant: Liam Gallagher’s relentless twisting of every lineending vowel into a driving drone; Noel Gallagher’s subtle, shifting guitar, working its magic behind his brother’s moan; the sheer triumphant arrogance that overruns the whole thing. It’s brilliant, and the Gallaghers know it, and they’re determined to make sure you know it too. Their plan works beautifully, and the song rests unequaled in their pantheon.

But music in itself was never the end-all for Oasis, an observa-

tion that becomes more evident as time passes. “Definitely Maybe” was released in 1994, only a few months after Kurt Cobain’s death.

If the end of Nirvana signaled the end of an era — the thankfully short-lived grunge period — then “Definitely Maybe” heralded the birth of a new one, in conjunction with Green Day’s “Dookie.”

Grunge was dark, plodding, the musical equivalent of an English winter; Oasis consciously strove to be the opposite. Their message was one of recalcitrant optimism and their songs four-minute bits of unbridled positivity. Green Day was its American counterpart, and together, the two bands ushered in an era of accessible rock music.

Green Day brought us Blink-182; Oasis brought us the Arctic Monkeys.

There is another consideration here, one that I have as yet neglected to mention: Thatcher.

The specter of Margaret Thatcher hangs heavy over the British consciousness. She destroyed the unions; she privatized the railroads; she made modern Britain, whether you like it or not. So the Iron Lady necessarily exerts an indirect but immense influence on Oasis’ first two albums.

A bit of geographic knowledge is required here. Thatcher’s neoliberal reforms aided London and the Home Counties at the expense of the North. It is because of her

JE SCREW

8:00 p.m. // The Grand Hall The (unpronounceable) theme this year is “Blink 18-Screw.” Turn the lights off, carry me home.

that London is now Britain’s great economic aberration, its financebased economy operating under a different model from the rest of the country. But the Gallagher brothers are from the North, from Manchester. And but three years after Thatcher’s premiership, as her successor John Major cemented her reforms, Oasis proclaimed that the North Is Not Dead. Not unlike another mop-topped band from a working-class British city, it emerged from the old industrial heartland, full of bold, intransigent arrogance, deliberately challenging the Thatcherite geographic model.

That observation, in and of itself, is not enormously interesting. So let’s take this a little further. Oasis’s lyrics, as mediocre as they are, focus on a sense of uncompromising individualism. From “Supersonic,” we have: “I need to be myself/I can’t be no one else.” The hit single “Roll With It” echoes that sentiment: “You gotta say what you say/Don’t let anybody get in your way.” Examples proliferate. Now compare this to Thatcher’s own discourse: “There is no such thing as society. There is the living tapestry of men and women and people.” If the individual dominates in Thatcher’s reckoning, then surely we find the same in Oasis, and this tells us much about the sheer impact of Thatcher, the universality of her

influence. Oasis critiqued Thatcher’s policies and its results, but it did so in the individualistic language of Thatcherism. Noel Gallagher adopts Thatcherite rhetoric and co-opts it for his own purposes, but it is Thatcherite rhetoric nonetheless. In the end, Thatcher remains inescapable, her shadow dominating the British nation even after her departure.

I hesitate to say that this social interpretation of Oasis’s music should occupy us too much. At its stripped-down essence, Oasis was primarily a group looking to bring some brightness and color into the world. The social implications of its songs, audacious cultural statements in their own right, are indeed significant, but I see little reason to get too bogged down in the grand schemes of things.

Just take ten minutes sometime and lose yourself in the captivating grooves of Noel Gallagher’s guitar on “Some Might Say,” or the swaggering power chords of “Supersonic.” Only once we’ve mastered its music does it make sense to interpret Oasis as a cultural phenomenon. But whatever the band’s cultural significance and however cocky and rude those Manc lads might seem, theirs are among the finest musical creations of their era.

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

WKND RECOMMENDS: REM. The band inferior to Blink-182. Also the phase of sleep.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

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WEEKEND THEATER

A NIGHT AT THE HOTEL NEPENTHE // BY NATALIE ROSE SCHWARTZ “The Hotel Nepenthe” was first performed in 2011, in a small abandoned thrift store in Somerville, Massachusetts.

A subsequent larger production with the Huntington Theatre Company in Boston recreated that thrift store on stage. The Yale Cabaret makes no such move. The stage is dressed with a large gray office desk at its center, a couch and coffee table sit off to its right, and two chairs to its left.

Mismatched books line the shelves along the walls, and the center of the back wall above the desk is covered in overlapping, peeling pieces of paper, each covered in type and scribbles. From the start, one can sense the stories the walls would tell if they could speak.

The cast is made up of four players — Bradley James Tejeda DRA ’16, Annelise Lawson DRA ’16, Emily Reeder DRA ’17 and Galen Kane DRA ’16. They all play at least four different roles, which they shift between with costume changes that are not deliberately concealed. The performances are all strong, and the characters distinct. Yet the reincarnation of Lawson as a mother worrying about her children, a senator’s conniving wife and the girl working the desk at a rental car company inevitably draws a connection between these characters

— especially as the audience strives to draw connections between scenes that, at first glance, are wildly disparate. One of the characters, a dispatcher at a taxi station (Kane), expresses this idea in the middle of the play. He believes that there are “parallel universes,” in which “everything is backward … where all the same people exist, only different things happen … endless possibilities.”

Following the scene with the dispatcher, two players walk on stage as a bride and groom. The groom speaks to a bellhop, asking to be shown to the honeymoon suite. Their six-line exchange is then repeated again and again, each variation separated by a shrill noise made by the fourth player, dressed as a maid. What begins as a polite, unexceptionable interaction becomes a dialogue from a noir film, a musical number, a swashbuckling fight and a passionate love scene.

By the last variation, the two players have switched positions on stage, and each takes on the other’s original role — the groom speaking the lines of the bellhop and the bellhop those of the groom. The scene explicitly lays out the endless possibility inherent in two people sharing a single moment. Though

grounded by this theme previously expressed by the dispatcher, the scene is utterly bewildering to watch. One of the exchanges takes place entirely in Italian; in another, the remaining players spray whipped cream into the speakers’ mouths. It makes no sense. It also makes complete sense.

Playwright John Kuntz called the play a “schizophrenic noir.” His plays, he said, “tend to be kind of non-linear and surreal. And kind of dreamlike — I write from dreams a lot.” Indeed, the prevailing sense in my stay at the Hotel Nepenthe was dreamlike, the sort in which people and scenes shift. They reappear at random, and something seems familiar — vaguely so, only graspable for a brief, intensely satifying moment before the next startling shift occurs. Another character voices a line that hits upon that sense: “I wish that my life mattered, somehow. That this pervading sense that this is all just a bunch of random stuff happening would dissipate.

And through all the chaos, everything would somehow make sense.”

Contact NATALIE ROSE SCHWARTZ at natalierose.schwartz@yale.edu . // WA LIU

What is “Art”?

Dancing in Fetters

// BY VINCENT OGOTI

// BY MARTHA LONGLEY

// MICHELLE CHAN

On Wednesday night I walked into the Underbrook in Saybrook College. The stage was set for a confrontation — two armchairs on the opposite side of the stage with a space in the middle. A bookcase stood on stage right. One could easily see James Joyce’s “Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man” resting conspicuously on another title: CELL. On the bottom part of the bookcase I saw Nietzsche’s collection, which seemed to suggest, “Love is blind, and friendship closes its eyes.” This was a staging of “Art,” a one-act comedy by Yasmina Reza directed by Irina Gavrilova ’17.

The play is about three friends: Serge, Marc and Yvan. Serge buys an Antrios painting, which depicts fine white lines on a white canvas. Serge is proud of his acquisition, but Marc thinks it is a piece of “shit.” Yvan neither hates nor likes the painting. But he does not want to be on Marc’s side, so he pretends that the painting is captivating to anger him. The question of whether this painting is worth the 200,000 francs Serge paid for it puts the men’s friendship to the test.

Serge (Ivan Kirwan-Taylor ’18) is smart and arrogant. His demeanor is belittling.

The painting is probably his first piece as a “collector.” Marc (Dillon Miller ’18) is no different. He is self-confident and he thinks others are wrong about the painting. He wants Yvan to feel the same way he does about the painting. Yvan (Tom Cusano ’18) is naïve.

The playwright establishes these differences about the actors around ten minutes into the play. The rest of the play presents disjointed arguments that are not based on any topic. Serge and Marc argue about what one likes and what the other dislikes. They complain about each other and reveal their hatred for one another.

One wonders how they became friends; what kind of friends invest their energies in demeaning each other? One may easily mistake Kirwan-Taylor, Miller and Cusano for professional actors, even though this is their first performance. Their voices are clear, despite going through fierce verbal exchanges.

Their characters’ lives seem to emerge straight from scripts. Serge, Marc and

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Yvan all adopt a confrontational voice. At some point they rise to an angry pitch that grows monotonous. Save for the occasions when they talk directly to the audience, a major part of “Art” is dull.

When Yvan’s speech breaks into an emotional appeal, one wonders whether he is under the influence of the wine he appears to have been drinking. He is desperate to connect with his friends and laments that he has spent most of his life “dying of loneliness.” When he asks for help, his friends advises him to leave his wife-to-be. They have no time for each other. Cusano plays the role of Yvan excellently — he knows how to be depressed and understands when to be confused. To a large extent he was the one who made the audience laugh.

Serge is clearly using “Art” to vent his anger. He confesses to the audience that he does not even like the painting. He does not even attempt to explain why he considers the painting “incredibly modern,” but he wants his friends to admire it, to embrace it. Kirwan-Taylor is a perfect match for Serge — he knows how to adopt the voice of a person who has just joined high society. Throughout the play, save for the last part when he decides to listen to Marc, he maintains his self-confidence.

The focus of “Art” is on friendship — friendship fallen apart over stupidity. The Antrios painting is just a trigger. Perhaps this explains why the characters are shallow. They do not even debate the merits of the white painting.

There is no difference between the performance and the painting. If you look at it for some time, you start imagining all sorts of shading and hidden lines. But if you take a step back and examine it, it’s just a white canvas. Though at the end of the play Serge, Marc and Yvan learn to appreciate their differences, one wonders whether they have untangled Yvan’s paradox: “If I am who I am because you’re who you are, and if you’re who you are because I am not who I am, then I am not who I am and you are not who you are.”

I was surprised when the public service announcement warned: “This play may offend white people.” It was an odd start to a play that aimed at breaking down racial barriers.

“The Dance and the Railroad & Bondage,” a back-to-back showing of two plays by David Henry Hwang, is the first Yale performance to focus on Asian-American identity, explains Assistant Director Elaine Zhang ’17.

True to their goals, the plays definitely force audience members to explore how painful and complex race and gender can be.

The production is undoubtedly provocative, and in that way could be offensive to many people, regardless of race. But crossing the line of what is socially acceptable is necessary. The plays lack adventure and plot. The conversation is sometimes dry; the characters basically discover themselves, on stage, through conversation. But the plays are redeemed because of their risqué, straightforward and honest discourse on identity.

The backdrop is a simple white sheet painted with the outline of mountains and sun. In a matter of seconds the serenity is broken by Ma, a young, naïve boy who comes up the mountain during a strike to learn opera from Lone, a recluse. In a subtle twist, Ma is played by a girl, Stefani Kuo ’17. The gender switch is an excellent move; Kuo’s high-pitched voice and youthful enthusiasm captured Ma’s boyish naïveté. Gender becomes neutral, following the production’s aims.

At first, the dynamic between Lone and Ma is a bit awkward; as the tension between the jaded and the ambitious collide, the actors almost do not know how to deal with their historic roles. I did not feel a tangible relationship between the two — it seemed like

two individuals in stilted interaction.

Perhaps it is the nature of the script, which focuses on individual identity at the expense of realistic dialogue.

Either way, with time, they warm up and begin to seem less scripted.

“Eight-hour day good for white man, also good for China man,” Kuo delivers in broken English. The meek delivery of the line poignantly captures the defeat, the exploitation, the cultural barriers and the racism that pervade the play. While the text was a bit dry, the actors brought the characters to life, making the production surprisingly captivating.

As the scene fades out, the painted sheet abruptly drops and club music comes on. All that remains is a glowin-the-dark sign that reads “BITCH.” The change of pace is a false promise, because the next hour is another round of conversation between two people. With the new set comes a new play, “Bondage,” and a completely new perspective on the racial tensions in America. The play transitions 100 years from the historical, external obstacles immigrants faced to the internal identity issues of modernday Asian-Americans.

While in many plays the setting is three-dimensional but the Asian stereotypes lamentably two-dimensional, these plays feature minimalist, two-dimensional sets to call attention to the many dimensions of the characters and their complex dialogue.

“Bondage” is not action-packed.

It is not unpredictable. The setting is provocative, but not sensual. The real strength of the one-hour play is the way it explores territory where most people will not go. Its setting is an S&M parlor. Both characters, who are regular sexual partners, hide behind black ski masks and completely black clothes.

Its characters are playing with chains, whips and collars the entire time. It’s quite novel.

The premise of the play is that racial dynamics, like sexual dynamics, can have catastrophic consequences on people’s identities. At times the sexual atmosphere seemed to be unintentionally awkward. For a few moments it was powerful and jarring, but after an hour it had lost the shock factor that brought people in, and the dialogue dragged.

Director Crystal Liu ‘16 explained that the two plays were meant to blur gender lines. In the gender flip of “The Dance and the Railroad,” the production was successful. I didn’t even realize Ma was supposed to be a certain gender until well into the play. In “Bondage”, however, the playing with sexual dynamics and gender seemed a bit coarser. Both the female and male parts were played by women, but this seemed to ignore the male-female dynamic that was meant as a metaphor for the dynamics between races in America.

While the deeply ingrained prejudices addressed can make the issue seem hopeless, Hwang leaves the audience with this thought: “The rules that govern the behavior of the old era are crumbling but the ones from the new have yet to be written.”

The play is raw. It is unfiltered. Which is important, since the play is about digging below pretenses. It exposes “political correctness” as a masquerade of true racial acceptance, which means that nobody is safe from scrutiny, not even the “liberal.” This play is worth seeing not because it is funny or particularly well-written, but simply because it offers a fresh perspective on race and identity.

Contact MARTHA LONGLEY at martha.longley@yale.edu .

Contact VINCENT OGOTI at vincent.ogoti@yale.edu .

DINNER & COOKING DEMO 6:00 p.m. // Commons

Cal Peternell of Chez Panisse comes to Yale. Chez. Panisse. WKND almost forgives Commons for discontinuing food service.

//ELENA MALLOY

WKND RECOMMENDS: Monday Night Football, beer in hand. Go team, score points!

PAGE B12

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 2014 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND BACKSTAGE

A

ri Shavit is a pretty famous journalist, and WKND was way excited (read: intimidated) to interview a professional interviewer. We tried to play it cool. But actually: Shavit is an award winning author and nonfiction writer. Born in Rehovot, Israel, he attended Hebrew University in Jerusalem and went on to write for Haaretz, the oldest Israeli daily newspaper. (He has also written for The New Yorker.) His book, “My Promised Land: The Tragedy and Triumph of Israel,” came out in 2013. WKND sat down with Shavit to talk about his profession, his convictions, and Middle Eastern politics.

UNSACRED PEOPLE DOING SACRED WORK: ARI SHAVIT // BY CORYNA OGUNSEITAN

A: I always wrote: I’m a writing person. I started writing as a journalist when I was at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. I gave up on having an academic career — I was going to be a philosophy major. The natural choice was to start writing for the student paper. I was lucky that I was accepted to a progressive, small but high quality weekly. I didn’t have any struggle. From the university paper, I just ended up in the national media in a surprisingly easy way. How long have you been doing it?

Q: About a year? (laughs) What made you want to be a journalist?

A: I was never quite like a reporter in the aggressive way, trying to get the scoop for tomorrow’s headline. I was kind of a thinker, looking at the larger picture, looking at the macro rather than the micro. I loved interviews — my passion was to get to know people, talk to them. I think there’s ambition and ideology behind being an interviewer. You respect people and you try to decipher them at the same time.

I never had an aggressive interview.

Even with people I totally disagree with, I was always trying to understand their worldview. I wanted to get their inner grammar out, the language they speak to themselves in.

Q: Do you have tips for students who want to be journalists?

A: First of all, I feel for students who want to be journalists because of the terrible state journalism is in right now. I hope we’re experiencing the worst and that it’ll get better. I feel that there is a fundamental, intellectual need for journalism. I really believe that there is no meaning to democracy if you don’t have good journalism: Without it, the fact that

we can vote is meaningless. What’s the sense in voting if you don’t know what you’re voting for, or if you don’t even have the opportunity to consider different ideas? And this isn’t because I’m a journalist and I’m biased. This isn’t a business and this isn’t even a profession. I sometimes say that journalists are unsacred people doing sacred work.

Q: What do you mean by that?

A: Democracy is so important — one thing I can’t stand is any sort of totalitarianism, even intellectual totalitarianism. The need for free discourse is oxygen for me. I feel suffocated when that’s not the case. There are many journalists who are cynical, or aggressive — they have to deal with the rough side of life as well. Behind that, we’re all competing with each other and being, well, loud. That’s unsacred. But the function of what we do is really sacred — it’s doing democracy’s work in the best sense of the word.

Q: People have been talking about your recent article, “Liberals Look at the New Middle East.” How do you respond to your critics?

A: I think it’s our responsibility as liberals to deal with things that are brutal. A moral stance that is totally detached from reality is not moral.

This is especially relevant these days in America, especially regarding the U.S. relationship with the Middle East. When you look at the world around us, there are no strong liberal forces or options in Syria, or Iraq, or even Egypt. I understand the American fatigue regarding the Middle East, because America tried to fix the Middle East using a lot of resources. People are sick and tired of the Middle East — they realize their attempts to bring benign, American ideals don’t work. There’s a tendency to run away

from the Middle East, to ignore it. But I think this is a bad idea. I think that it’s important to understand that it will probably be impossible to have peace and democracy there in the coming years. We should try to make the most of what’s there. I think there are things that will make it slightly more peaceful, but that can only be done through wise American leadership.

Q: What work are you most proud of?

A: Probably the book. I had it in me for twenty or thirty years. Writing it was very rewarding but very demanding. It’s really a personal journey, and I was alone. There was no one there to assist me. I think I took risks, both content-wise and genre-wise. There are moments when you’re full of hope and self-confidence, and others when you ask yourself, what am I doing? It was quite an adventure. I miss that now. I already feel the itch to go back to real writing.

Q: Do you have a work that you’re least proud of?

A: Most of my life, I’ve been able to avoid personal fights and campaigns.

I try not to get into pettiness and “bad blood writing.” There were two or three occasions when I found myself conducting personal campaigns. I believe that I was right in all these instances, but being more mature and calm now, I would have used softer terminology. I don’t like to be the crusader.

Q: Why not write heatedly?

A: When you fight power, power fights back. I found myself in combative situations. I don’t like that. I prefer to be contemplating, observing and seeing both sides.

Q: Can you describe a challenging

moment in writing the book?

A: I think the beginning was particularly hard. There were several things I wanted to do: have a timeline, a story, and cover different aspects of the Israeli condition. I didn’t know how to combine the three. The first year was really challenging — it took me a long time to find myself, to find my voice. Once I heard my voice, it was roaring. The second most difficult part was the ending. One review in the New York Times says that my book reads like a love story and a thriller.

The love is because I love my country with all its faults, flaws and wonders, and I love the people that I write about. The thriller is because it’s a bit like a roller coaster between pessimism and optimism. I love Israel, but I see that we are a challenged nation, that we’re living in turmoil, especially in the 21st century. Writing is hard labor, but it’s a labor of love. Honestly, I wake up in the morning and I envy

“

myself. I have friends who make much more money and are more famous, but I would never consider switching for a moment. There’s nothing better than waking up in the morning and doing what you really believe in.

Q: So how do you reconcile wanting to tell true stories with wanting to give things a happy ending?

A: Well, in this case, I didn’t have to deal with boring facts — Israel is a gold mine of stories. We are the land of the Bible, which is not only the best book ever, but contains the greatest and deepest stories. What’s so powerful about the country is that it’s charged with meaning. So there was no need to change facts to make them more dynamic or romantic.

Contact CORYNA OGUNSEITAN at coryna.ogunseitan@yale.edu .

HONESTLY, I WAKE UP IN THE MORNING AND I ENVY MYSELF. I HAVE FRIENDS WHO MAKE MUCH MORE MONEY AND ARE MORE FAMOUS, BUT I WOULD NEVER CONSIDER SWITCHING FOR A MOMENT.

“

Q: When did you start writing?