yale daily news magazine Vol. xxxix 路 Issue 5 路 February 2012 路 ydnmag.com
Studying the genocides they witnessed p. 21
Plus, Journey to the World of Lucid Dreaming on page 9.
Christopher Buckley ’75. Fareed Zakaria ’86. Samantha Power ’92. YOU? join US: MAG@YALEDAILYNEWS.com visit US: ydnmag.com
table of contents
9
shorts
Around the Colleges Q’s with Langdon Hammer Top 10 2 small talk
Flying Through the catacombs by Katie Falloon
21
The 5:48 to Fairfield A Walk in the Woods Coffeehouse with a Beat 6 personal essay
Deposition Sophia Nguyen
17
Close to home by Sarah Maslin
32
Crit
Yes, Sir? Dana Glaser
19
photo essay
High Street
Grey grissom
Kid in a candy shop by Madeline Buxton
37
Small orange circles by Carlos Gomez
30
observer
The Physical Level raisa bruner
42
poetry
Wednesday 13 Six O’Clock 40
ydnmag.com | Yale Daily News Magazine | 1
Magazine Executive Editors Eliana Dockterman Molly Hensley-Clancy Nicole Levy
shorts
AROUND THE
COLLEGES
Feeling like a late night snack? Here’s your guide to each college’s Buttery specialty.
Deputy Editors Daniel Bethencourt Madeline Buxton Edmund Downie Lauren Oyler Sophia Veltfort
Design Editors
Berkeley
Branford
Calhoun
Fruit Smoothie Orange juice, yogurt,fruit
The Muffkie Muffin meets cookie
Buffalo Chicken Wrap Standard
Davenport
Ezra Stiles
Jonathan Edwards
Raahil Kajani Lindsay Paterson
Design Assistants Michael DiScala Ryan Healey
Photography Editors Zoe Gorman Kamaria Greenfield Victor Kang Harry Simperingham
The RJR Buffalo chicken, cheese, bacon, ranch in quesadilla
The Jambler Grilled cheese with buffalo chicken
The Manwich Chicken tenders, cheese, ranch, and hot sauce
Yale Daily News Editor in Chief
Publisher
Max de La Bruyère
Preetha Nandi
Morse
Cover Illustration by David Yu
Pierson
The Jim Stanley Quesadilla with chicken nuggets
The Slammer Burger, egg, cheese, bacon
Timothy Dwight
Saybrook
Silliman
Faust Double Down Fried chicken, burger, bacon, cheese
Subscriptions: To subscribe to the Yale Daily News Magazine, please contact us by email at mag@yaledailynews.com. Subscription for 1 year (7 issues): $40.00
2 | Vol. XXXIX, No. 5 | February 2012
Leaning Tower of Pizza Pizza rolls, mini pizzas, and chicken nuggets
The Manwich Griled cheese with chicken tenders
Trumbull
Double Double Stuffed Oreo inside a chocolate chip cookie
shorts
book Areview tweet Problem from hell:
VOCab•yale•ary
america and the age of genocide by samantha power
Slump | slump | noun 1) when preceded by a class year
other than “freshman,” refers to a period of depression, lack of motivation, or disillusionment experienced by Yale students; 2) a posture in which one’s shoulders hunch forward usually assumed by students in sections and during midterm season.
ydnmag YDNMag alumna, former Balkan war correspondent asks, “why do American leaders fail to stop genocide?” glad she’s in the #whitehouse now
War and Conflict: visualizing the story, p. 21
Regions highlighted in red have suffered over 10,000 civilian deaths in wars and conflicts the last 20 years, according to Cornell University Peace Studies Program. The following is a list of the undergraduate international students enrolled at Yale in 2011 from these countries, according to Yale. a. Gautemala: 0 b. Iraq: 0 c. Afghanistan: 1 d. India: 39 e. Sri Lanka: 3
f. Cambodia: 1 g. Philippines: 3 h. Angola: 0 i. Burundi: 0 j. Nigeria: 1
k. Rwanda: 0 l. Sierra Leone: 0 m. Somalia: 0 n. Sudan: 2 o. Uganda: 2
*Students who migrated to America before enrolling at Yale are not included in these statistics.
p. Congo: 0 q. Algeria: 0 r. Serbia: 1 s. Tajikistan: 0 t. Bosnia: 0
u. Croatia: 1 v. Israel: 2 West Bank: 1 Gaza Strip: 1 w. Chechnya: unknown
ydnmag.com | Yale Daily News Magazine | 3
shorts
What is the most difficult piece you’ve ever had to write?
The first chapter of my PhD dissertation. Talk about “Slow Writing”! I kept erasing it (I was using a pencil). Every writer needs permission to write, a base of authority that you can only get — paradoxically — by writing. Or to change metaphors: it’s the problem of the train that has to lay its own track. Things got easier for me, as they do for most writers who persist. Yet you never get out of that problem altogether. You just get better at laying down track.
If you could go to college right now, what would you do differently? La
ng
Go to all the home hockey games.
do
nh am m
How do you take your coffee? er
Early and often.
What is your favorite word and why?
for Langdon Hammer ’80 GRD ’89 Langdon Hammer has reviewed poetry for the New York Times and The American Scholar, in addition to editing “Hart Crane: Complete Poetry and Selected Letters.” He earned both his B.A. and PhD in English from Yale and currently teaches the popular lecture “Daily Themes” and the seminar “The World of James Merrill.” He is now working on a biography of the poet James Merrill.
Writing today needs more ...
“Still.” Five letters you can use to speak of time, space, and intensity, to insist or to allay. Shakespeare understood its spell: “What you do still betters what is done ... Move still, still so, and own no other function.” There’s instilling and distilling. To say nothing about Grandpa’s still-out back. But ask me that tomorrow and I’ll have another answer.
Do you have a Facebook account? Why or why not?
I do, and I don’t know why.
Time. There’s a Slow Food movement. Why not a Slow Writing movement? Not that we ought to go back to typewriters and longhand. But electronic writing in its many forms is about speed — speed of composition, publication, reading, response; and writing that is worth rereading, which is also to say worth writing, takes time. “First thought, best thought.” Maybe, but not the best writing.
The most embarrassing moment of your career was ...
If you could ask President Obama one question, what would it be?
A $1 coffee from Atticus.
That’s tough, because a lot of my memories are Yale memories. But how about this: Geoffrey Hartman and Paul De Man taking turns reading “Ode on a Grecian Urn” for two hours in front of (gasping) freshmen on the first day of the spring semester, 1977.
If you could meet one character from a novel, who would it be?
Most importantly, why is Yale better than Harvard?
“What happened, man?”
The last thing you ate/drank was ...
Gregor Samsa, Kafka’s man-sized beetle.
4 | Vol. XXXIX, No. 5 | February 2012
I’m pretty sure it hasn’t happened yet. Tell me that it won’t be this interview.
What is your favorite Yale memory?
Cole Porter wrote our fight song.
shorts
TOP
Things
you hate
about your t.a.
1. Not hot Is a pretentious twit, doesn’t have James Franco’s winning smile.
2. Asks you to lead section next week Wait, isn’t that, like, your job?
3. Two words: reading responses Five words: I didn’t do the reading!
4. No laptops in section
9. Only reads paper drafts turned in two weeks in advance
But J.Crew has a 50 percent off sale — I mean, I want to take copious notes.
5. Reminds you of your depressing future postYale
And when I actually manage to send it in on time, he replies, “This looks good.”
That is, if I don’t get that consulting job.
6. Thinks the section asshole’s comments are deeply insightful
Can’t you see he’s just a slightly better bullshitter than the rest of us?
7. Terrible office hours 4:15-4:32 p.m. on Prospect Street.
8. Is hot ...
10. Calls on you when you’re not raising your hand I still didn’t do the reading.
– Magazine Staff
But refuses to take you to GPSCY. ydnmag.com | Yale Daily News Magazine | 5
Small Talk The 5:48 to Fairfield D A walk in the woods D Coffeehouse with a beat 5:40 p.m., Grand Central
It’s Friday. A whisper-thin man in a tailored suit leads the stream of New York commuters down the platform. His rolled-up shirtsleeves and the can of Stella Artois in his left hand indicate that we have the same destination in mind. The further we tread, the more I question whether it still exists. And then I see it: the small white placard with bold red lettering that reads “Bar Car.” I’ve arrived at the last bar car on any commuter line in America. 5:51, En Route Dan, the bartender, has been serving the drinks offered on the hand-scrawled menu taped above the bar for the past 10 years. “Tanqueray or Beefeater?” he yells to me over the commotion of 100-plus chattering passengers in the Metro North Railroad’s New Haven line bar car. Danny, as the loosened-tie regulars call him, passes me a clear plastic sippy cup of gin and tonic, with two red straws, a lime, and a lid. “Hey Tom.” Danny pulls a Coors from under the bar before the man behind me even places an order. “$6.75,” he says, turning back to me. Across from the bar, 42-year-old New York consultant and Westport dad Jerry Doyle leans his elbow against a side table scattered with suit coats and briefcases. Jerry is one of the regulars who receives daily text messages from Danny with information on which evening trains will have a bar car. (Today’s text, from 3:18 p.m.: “548 611 705 807 and the 531 and 614 stamford locals.” By 4:21 p.m. the Clever Commute Twitter account @cc_mnr_bar_nh tweets the same message.) In short, Jerry knows the culture of the place. “It’s mainly a Wall Street crowd during the week, but on Fridays it’s more like a rough Irish pub,” he says with a smirk. “No, no, it’s more like ‘Cheers’ around here,” a Wall Street investment banker and Fairfield husband calls out from the corner of the bar. He and three other men are playing dice. All four have been riding the bar car home together
“The car is a traveling restaurant, night club, dance floor, liquor store, and what-not, all in one.” 6 | Vol. XXXIX, No. 5 | February 2012
almost every evening for the past 20 years. “Cheers,” the late 20th century sitcom set in a neighborhood bar, seems a fitting reference. For the regular riders, the Metro North bar car recalls the title of “Cheers’” famous theme song, “Where Everybody Knows Your Name.” Or at least they know your first name and drink order. 6:32, Stamford The train makes stops, but the laughter, drinks, and dice continue to roll. Beyond the bar stands a group of six men in their mid-to-late 30s drinking from cans of Coors. One of the men, Mike, has been making business deals and friends in the bar car on his ride home to Westport since 1988. Like all of the regulars, this group is part of a tradition that began in the 1930s with what was then called the counter car. “The car is a traveling restaurant, night club, dance floor, liquor store, and what-not, all in one,” Hartford Courant reporter Jack Zaiman wrote in 1936. “Here the patrons chummed together, strangers all like old friends.” Dressed all in white, bow-tie wearing bartenders Sam and Eddy stood in stark opposition to their black-suited customers in top-hats who ordered everything from ham and eggs to whisky sours. On Sunday afternoons, weekend excursionists returning to Connecticut sang along to the well-known tunes played by Andy the accordionist. The confidence gained when drinking was the secret of the “nimble-footed” passengers who danced while the train sped on at 45 miles per hour, according to Zaiman. With the success of the original counter car, bar cars expanded to rail lines in cities like Chicago and Milwaukee. Facing concerns of intoxicated passengers, hard economic times, and demands for additional seats, all other commuter bar cars have been pulled from the tracks. Many newspaper columnists and regular commuters discuss the potential for the New Haven line bar car’s last call. Even Danny the bartender says the car’s future is uncertain. But according to Jim Cameron, chairman of the Connecticut Rail Commuter Council, the railroad has committed to maintaining the bar car. In 2012, Danny doesn’t wear a bow tie, customers cannot order breakfast from the bar car, and an accordionist no longer plays on the daily ride. Still, Mike and his friends continue the almost 80-year legacy. On their ride home, they place bets on the weekend’s basketball games,
small talk compare kids’ sports schedules, and discuss what to get their wives for upcoming anniversaries and holidays — sharing conversation as they do almost every Friday. 6:49, Westport “Happy weekend all you humps,” Danny the bartender yells as he exits the bar car. The few remaining commuters sip the ends of their drinks and slip back into their suit coats and high heels as the train rolls towards the suburbs. 6:59, Fairfield “Fairfield, transfer available to the New Haven line,” the conductor announces. It’s the first time I’ve heard him on the overhead speaker all night. The Wall Street investment banker and Fairfield husband stands alone by the empty bar, glancing over a worn New York Times. He turns to me as we step off the train into the cold night air of the Connecticut platform. “Remember kid — it’s like Vegas. What happens on the bar car, stays on the bar car,” he says to me, knowing I’d only taken the ride to write this story. – Jacqueline Sahlberg
I had been told that this area
was swampy, but somehow I hadn’t quite envisioned getting my feet wet. As I walked through the woods, the ground squelched underfoot. Leaves — some still improbably alive during this unexpectedly fair winter — rustled above me. Five Army Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) cadets and I were walking through the trees of the Stone Ranch Military Reservation. The cadets walked briskly, decked out in olive-green camouflage gear and matching boots. This was part of the cadets’ Leadership Lab — today, they were engaged in a land navigation exercise. Armed only with compasses and a map, the cadets were expected to locate five points in five hours. It was big news, last year, when Yale brought back ROTC, a program in which students can be commissioned as officers in the military after completing a four-year degree. Yale had disbanded its ROTC program in the midst of Vietnam War protests and kept it away from campus because of the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. The day after Congress repealed “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” in December 2010, University President Richard Levin called then Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to discuss bringing ROTC back to campus. In 2012, Navy and Air Force ROTC programs will finally return to Yale. Both programs expect to gain as many as 20 students next year. Yalies who sign up for Army ROTC next year will still do so through UConn, the only host program in the state. Two Yalies are currently cadets in the Army ROTC program: John Lee ’14 and James Campbell ’13. On
scott stern / contributing photographer
Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, Lee and Campbell wake up to excercise at the unimaginable hour of 5:50 a.m. There is Tuesday afternoon training and sometimes Thursday training; there is also Leadership Lab on Fridays. That Friday afternoon, at the Leadership Lab, members of my group asked me if I was the “new guy” and invited me to plot one of the points on the map. I was touched by their sense of bonhomie, but also unnerved by their assumption that I was joining ROTC. I had always been a bit of a skeptic when it came to the military; I strongly disagreed with the war in Iraq and “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” My group had no trouble locating the first three points, but the last two points were literally off the beaten track. The cadets got their bearings by repeatedly consulting their compasses and counting their paces. The strategy of counting paces would have worked better had there not been huge, moss-covered boulders and murky swamps to circumnavigate. Having completed the exercise, we halfwalked, half-ran back to the starting point. My muscles began to feel sore, but I couldn’t complain. We arrived back at our starting point at 4:58 p.m. The cadets had to be back by 5:00 (sorry, 17:00), or else they would have failed the exercise. At 5:03, our bus departed for the University of New Haven. For Andrew Hendricks ’13, Yale’s sole Air Force ROTC cadet, the commute has not been quite that simple. He cannot take any Tuesday or Thursday classes because he must drive to UConn at Storrs each Thursday — a threehour round trip. Hendricks’s Thursdays are packed with physical training, Aerospace Studies class, and “warrior knowledge quizzes.” When ROTC returns to Yale and attracts more cadets, Hendricks hopes he will not have to travel so far. “I will also be able to get more involved with the program, hopefully taking on higher leadership roles,” he says. Students will ydnmag.com | Yale Daily News Magazine | 7
small talk also be able to petition for credit for ROTC classes, and Yale might become a “partner program” for Army ROTC, as UNH is. More importantly, perhaps, Yalies will be exposed to students with a unrivaled level of dedication. Jogging through the wilderness, I came to admire the level of devotion of the ROTC cadets I met. To those who disagree, I might tell them to go take a hike. Through the woods. Through a swamp. – Scott Stern
On a Saturday night in
November, I’m sitting in a balcony that overlooks a basement-level theater. The Saybrook College Orchestra practiced here only yesterday, but now the space has been transformed. Battery-operated candles emit a soft glow from round wooden coffee tables, old rugs cover the floorboards, and rice paper dividers with cherry designs span one wall. A dusky sense of warmth welcomes the audience that has come for the Coffeehouse, a biweekly
8 | Vol. XXXIX, No. 5 | February 2012
concert in the Saybrook Underbrook featuring student artists and writers alongside Yale-based and touring bands. Minutes before the show starts, I can see from the balcony that already 50 students are clustered around the tables or sitting on the floor in front of a slightly raised platform. “You’re encouraged to sit close to the performers,” says Zoe Reich-Aviles ’15, who frequently attends performances. “It’s not separated into an experience that says, ‘This is the performer, this is the audience. Sit and watch.’ It feels much more intimate than that.” Community holds the Coffeehouse together. Around noon on the day of the show, the Coffeehouse’s founders — Nolan Green ’12, Oliver Hill ’12, and Eliza Bagg ’12 of the band Plume Giant — and volunteers start hauling amplifiers, drums, wooden canvases, and sculptures to the Underbrook. The founders leave advertising up to the performers themselves because “this is their show. We want it to seem like it’s their venue,” says Green. Before the Coffeehouse, Green co-founded the nowdefunct Yale Music Scene, which hosted student musicians every week at various off-campus venues. But long walks from campus and the Scene’s unofficial status hampered it from taking off. The organization also offered only music — no poetry or artwork. “We put a lot of time into Yale Music Scene,” Green says, “but we weren’t getting great turnouts.” Attendance at concerts was closer to 30. With an approved space on-campus, average attendance at the Coffeehouse is double that. Tonight, the show begins when student artist Will Hutchison ’12 directs the crowd’s attention toward the wall to our right, where he has arranged dozens of posters of all sizes. He explains his feelings about advertising as an art form — it can cultivate interest in something new. I had glanced at posters of Master’s Teas plastered around campus, but I hadn’t thought of them as art. Hutchison is followed by Lindsay Gellman ’12, who reads her short story aloud. “It would be difficult to get a much more supportive and interested audience than what I found at the Underbrook,” Gellman says. Two musical acts, one Yale-based and one touring, play next. Their music is folksy, indie: Laurelin Kruse ’12 croons while playing her guitar, and Boston’s The Friendly People lets out an occasional scream. When the concert is over, students linger, talk to the performers, pick up CDs, and trickle out into the cold. Before the Coffeehouse’s founders graduate, they will pass the reins to a new team of students responsible for recruiting performers. Green, Hill, and Bagg hope to move together and perform as Plume Giant in Williamsburg, NY, but they plan to continue booking outside bands for the Underbrook. “I don’t anticipate that requiring a ton of pressure or time,” says Green. Eventually they won’t be needed at all. – Jordana Cepelewicz
feature
Flying through the catacombs D by Katie falloon D
“A
dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.” — Oscar Wilde Illustrations by Madeleine Witt ydnmag.com | Yale Daily News Magazine | 9
feature
P
eter T. Morgan found himself in the basement of a church in England, surrounded by stone walls and seemingly endless catacombs, when in walked Alan Alda. Dr. Morgan, a Yale psychiatrist, was shocked and excited to see Alda, the 75-year-old American actor best known for his starring role on the television show “M*A*S*H.” Morgan used to love watching the show, which stopped running in 1983. “I did all the typical things you do when you see a celebrity you know and like,” Morgan says. He walked up to Alda and began gushing about how much he admired his work. “What
“What are you talking about?” they said. “His hair didn’t change.” Morgan became excited again as he realized the only possible explanation for this mysterious sequence of events — he was dreaming. “I thought, ‘Oh, I want to stay lucid,’” Morgan recalls, leaning forward in his chair at the Connecticut Mental Health Center. Often, as soon as people realize they are lucid, they bolt awake. But some people commit themselves to lucid dreaming, training their minds the way athletes train their muscles. Practiced lucid dreamers choose signals that help them anchor themselves in their dreams; Morgan
Often, as soon as people realize they are lucid, they bolt awake, but Dr. Morgan didn’t wake up. Instead, he was free to do whatever he wanted, even to break the laws of physics. Triumphant, he leapt off the ground and began to fly through the catacombs. was striking about him, though, was that he looked really thin, very sick and emaciated, kind of like Steve Jobs, who had recently died,” Morgan recalls. “I really wanted to ask him, ‘Gee, are you okay?’ I was thinking, ‘I’m a doctor, he’ll tell me about these things.’” But when Morgan looked away for a moment and then turned back to Alda to begin his inquiry, an alarming change had taken place: instead of having thinning gray hair combed close to his head, Alda had spiky blonde hair sticking out in several directions. “It was like a three– part mohawk,” said the psychiatrist. Morgan asked other people in the room to confirm what he had just seen, but they looked back at him blankly. 10 | Vol. XXXIX, No. 5 | February 2012
decided that his sign would be staring at his hands as he circled them, one in front of the other. In his dream about Alda, that signal worked. Morgan didn’t wake up. Instead, he was free to do whatever he wanted, even to break the laws of physics. Triumphant, he leapt off the ground and began to fly through the catacombs. Ever since he had his first lucid dream as a teenager, Morgan has been fascinated by lucid dreaming. But he brings to lucid dreaming what few other lucid dreaming enthusiasts do: an in-depth understanding of how the brain functions during sleep. Throughout most of his career, Morgan focused on treating his patients and conducting research on
what cocaine abuse does to the brain. But about four years ago, he decided to begin researching the science of lucid dreaming, too. He wanted to know what happens in the brain that allows a dreamer to know that he is dreaming. And what does that mean for our understanding of the way our brains work? While the cultural history of lucid dreaming is rich, research on lucid dreaming is sparse. Morgan currently has a $3 million grant for his cocaine research and a comparatively meager $15,000 one for his work on lucid dreaming. With limited funds, however, Morgan has already provided preliminary evidence that the brains of lucid and non-lucid dreamers work differently. He studies lucid dreams not only because they are fascinating in and of themselves, but also because he sees them as a window into the human mind, and, more specifically, a window into consciousness itself. “We want to understand ourselves,” Morgan says. “And the curious mind is going to look inside, to the brain, because that’s where the curiosity lies.”
A
ncient Egyptian hieroglyphs often depicted a person’s soul, called Ba, as a bird with a man’s head floating above a sleeping body. To lucid dreaming expert Robert Waggonner, this depiction is suggestive of a lucid dreaming state in which the dreamer is free to fly around within his dream, released from his inert physical body. However, it wasn’t until a few thousand years later — in ancient Hindu texts dated around 1000 BC — that the first documented case of lucid dreaming was recorded. Around 350 BC, Aristotle addressed the phenomenon in a treatise entitled “On Dreams”: “When one is asleep,” he writes, “there is something in consciousness which tells us that what presents itself is but a dream.” With the rise of Christianity, exploration of lucid dreaming fell
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by the wayside. Many Christian scholars, including Thomas Aquinas, argued that dreams were the work of the devil. As a result, the next major development in lucid dreaming didn’t come until 1867, when the Marquis d’Hervey de Saint-Denys published a book called “Dreams and How to Guide Them,” in which he asserted that with the right training, anyone could become a lucid dreamer. In 1913, the Dutch psychiatrist Frederik van Eeden coined the term “lucid dreaming.” These days, the Internet abounds with lucid dreaming forums where people share their experiences and help one another master the art. Even celebrities have gotten involved. The director Guillermo del Toro has spoken extensively about the ways the lucid dreams he had as a child have influenced his movies: “When I was a kid … I would go to sleep and
start dreaming I was in the exact bed I was in, in the exact room I was in, and things would come out in that room. Monsters,” del Toro says in a 2008 interview on PBS. The faun in the movie “Pan’s Labyrinth” first came to del Toro while he was asleep. Monsters also haunted Melissa Lavoie ’12, a Yale senior majoring in psychology, in her childhood lucid dreams. “Maybe I was just a weird kid, but I had a disproportionate number of pretty scary dreams,” Lavoie says. “As I grew older, the scary things happened, but there was a deepseated sense that the monsters would go away. It became a lot less scary.” When she got to Yale, Lavoie decided it was time she start exploring dreaming more closely. So she recruited her friend and fellow Yale student Kate Mayans ’12, and as many of her other friends as she could, to start actively trying to lucid dream.
The best way to have a lucid dream, any reputable lucid dreamer will tell you, is to start keeping a dream journal. Keeping a dream journal allows you to remember your dreams better, so that when they happen, you’re more likely to recognize them as dreams. Lavoie, Mayans, and the rest of the Lucid Dreaming Coalition they founded began to keep their own journals, discuss their dreams at sporadic meetings, and experiment with new techniques. While the crazier techniques the Coalition has tried haven’t worked — like drinking tea one member brought back from Canada, the taste of which Lavoie admits she couldn’t stand — both Mayans and Lavoie agree that keeping dream journals is effective. Soon after beginning her journal, Mayans had her first lucid dream. In the dream, her math teacher handed her back an exam that she knew
ydnmag.com | Yale Daily News Magazine | 11
feature
For Lavoie, lucid dreaming is a chance to escape from the logic of the everyday world. “Part of me is a little sad that we don’t live in a world with supernatural things,” Lavoie says. “Lucid dreaming is as close as it gets.” she hadn’t taken and that made her realize she wasn’t awake. As Mayans described her dream, Lavoie nodded knowingly. For Lavoie, lucid dreaming is a chance to escape from the logic of the everyday world and enter into a world governed by different, stranger rules, rules that make sense only in the way they divide the real from the fantastical. “Part of me is a little sad that we don’t live in a world with supernatural things,” Lavoie says. “Lucid dreaming is as close as it gets.”
C
ompared to lucid dreaming’s rich cultural history, its scientific history is disappointingly meager. Part of the problem is that studying lucid dreaming doesn’t have the obvious scientific value studying something like cocaine abuse does because lucid dreaming is an enjoyable pastime, not a debilitating addiction. But some scientists believe lucid dreaming is still worth studying because of its potential promise as a psychiatric treatment of disorders like post-traumatic stress, which often involve recurrent nightmares. If psychiatrists understood exactly how lucid dreaming worked, they could theoretically teach a patient how to control his dreams and turn a nightmare into a pleasant adventure. The other barrier to studying lucid dreaming is the difficulty in scientifically proving that someone is even having a lucid dream: a
12 | Vol. XXXIX, No. 5 | February 2012
patient’s word that he or she had a dream hardly meets the standard for scientific evidence. For a long time, scientists couldn’t think of any other way to determine whether or not someone was having a lucid dream. During the period of sleep when most dreaming occurs, called Rapid Eye Movement (REM), the body shuts down. Muscle tone is lost and the ability to move is impaired. “It’s a protective mechanism,” Morgan explains. “People who don’t have that do terrible things while they’re sleeping.” Take Kenneth Parks: in 1987, he got into his car, drove to his in-laws’ house, and bludgeoned his mother-in-law to death with a tire iron, all while asleep. Parks’ jury decided his actions were involuntary, and they found him not guilty. While the paralysis of muscles may be good for people, though, it’s bad for researchers because lucid dreamers can’t press buttons or do anything else to signal to researchers that they’re in a lucid dream. In the late 1970s, Stephen LaBerge, a researcher at Stanford, invented a way of bypassing this roadblock. During REM sleep, the body no longer produces a certain subset of molecules called neurotransmitters, which means that paralysis spreads through the muscles involved in movement. Other muscles — including the heart muscle and the eye muscles — remain active; REM sleep gets its name from the fact that while we’re in it, our eyes
move quickly back and forth beneath our eyelids. Electrodes placed on either side of the eyes can measure these swift movements. “In a lucid dream I can volitionally do whatever I want, [so] why not make a signal that we could agree upon in advance; a pattern of eye-movement signals that could then be used to prove that I had a lucid dream?” said LaBerge in an interview for a website devoted to issues of consciousness called “Mavericks of the Mind.” LaBerge brought participants into his lab, hooked them up to electrodes, and then waited for them to fall asleep. While they slept, he monitored the movements of their eyes, searching for that pre-determined pattern of eyemovements. Skilled lucid dreamers but never non-lucid dreamers gave the signal during REM sleep, proving that lucid dreaming does, in fact, exist. Cases of lucid dreaming have been documented for thousands of years, but it wasn’t until LaBerge published his results around three decades ago that the scientific community finally recognized lucid dreaming as a real phenomenon.
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s LaBerge was conducting his pioneering research, Peter Morgan was still a boy in Livermore, California, a town he refers to as “suburbia U.S.A.” He already knew he wanted to become a doctor. “My friends had always come to me for their medical concerns,” Morgan says. “I don’t know that I knew anything more than anyone else did, but I was sort of fitting into that role.” Even now, it’s easy to see why they came to him. He’s undeniably intelligent, but he’s also one of the few scientists at Yale who includes smiley faces in his emails. Everyone calls him Peter, not Dr. Morgan. Morgan discovered his interest in dreaming just as early as his passion for medicine. At around 16 or 17 years old — he had just started driving — he heard a program on the radio about
feature lucid dreaming that offered tips on how to do it yourself. Within a week, he had had his first lucid dream, and he was hooked. “It’s exhilarating to have done it,” Morgan says. “Sleep sometimes can be scary. It’s giving up to the darkness, to the nothingness. For a lucid dreamer, you’re not doing that. You’re just going into another state where you’re still going to be there.” Around the same time Morgan began dreaming lucidly, he was in a skiing accident. He wasn’t hurt, but for the briefest of moments he lost consciousness. “It felt like just a jump in my timeline from being upright, getting the sense that I might be falling, to being 10 or 20 feet down the hill, spinning around and going down quickly on my back and tumbling. Something about the experience didn’t accrue whatever was required to have that sort of remembered present, so it got me philosophizing about consciousness.” A couple years later, Morgan began at Yale as a traditional pre-medical student but grew frustrated with the competitive nature of his pre-med classes. In physics, however, he found a sense of camaraderie with his peers and a major that fed his ego. “[Physics] is appealing to a young person who thinks he’s smart and wants everybody to know that,” Morgan said. And so the Yale student put his fascination with the laws that govern the mind on hold to learn a bit more about the laws that govern the universe. After college, Morgan decided to enroll in a graduate program in physics back in Livermore, where, he says, “I discovered that I do really like physics, but … my heart was really still in medicine, and in neuroscience.” After one year as a graduate student in physics, Peter Morgan enrolled in the MD/PhD program at Mount Sinai School of Medicine. For his PhD work in psychiatry, he looked at how neurons, the cells that make up our brains and nervous
system, control behavior in the sea slug. Learning about how neurons control behavior in sea slugs helped Morgan better understand how neurons control our own behavior. It wasn’t long before he began to research how the neurons in the human brain controlled behavior in the context of cocaine addiction. But it was only recently that he finally returned to the interest in lucid dreaming he had developed as a teenage boy, this time as a scientist rather than a dreamer. Just a few years ago, Morgan could lucid dream proficiently, but he couldn’t understand what was happening at the level of the billions of neurons firing in his brain while he slept.
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t would take an excuse in the form of a high school student to “justify taking time away from the research that pays the bills,” as Morgan puts it, and to study lucid dreaming as he had long wanted to. Michelle Neider was interested in dreams and needed a mentor for a science competition she wanted to enter; meanwhile, if Morgan was going to begin researching lucid dreaming, he wanted his participants to be high school students because there is some anecdotal evidence that younger people have an easier time lucid dreaming. When Michelle contacted Morgan, she got her research mentor, and Morgan got ready access to a group of New York high school students who would participate in his study. For a week, Michelle’s peers at
Wednesday “Here’s something you’ve never heard before” I had So I stopped the telling, and pushed him over and caught myself. I’m telling you this now because I’m not with other people and haven’t been for quite a while. ‘Now’s our time’ There’s something you’ve heard before I get it: We’re not looking for rapture on a Thursday or existential yoga or soulcraft spin-classes or daytime television Here’s something you’ve never heard before “The grey hands are scratching round, They’re in the floorboards and around the corner, They hushed the latch and bribed the doorman” I stopped the telling, and pushed him over and caught you. You’re had.
— Alex Klein
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feature Briarcliff High School who agreed to participate in the study kept dream journals and filled out questionnaires about their dreams. Over the course of the study, students also underwent cognitive testing to see how they were using different parts of their brain. The goal was to see whether the brains of lucid dreamers functioned differently than the brains of non-lucid dreamers. Morgan hypothesized that people who have a propensity towards lucid dreaming would have different levels of brain activity than people who don’t — perhaps a region of the brain was more active in lucid dreamers. To determine whether or not that was the case, Morgan wanted to find signs of strong activity in a particular region even when a person who has a propensity towards lucid dreaming was awake. Based on previous research in the field of dreaming,
cortex turns back on. The other is the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which sits adjacent to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and is involved in emotional decision-making. These two regions were the areas Morgan would focus on. Since lucid dreaming takes place during REM sleep, Morgan hypothesized that students with a propensity towards lucid dreaming would perform better on cognitive tasks that engage the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, but would perform the same as their peers on tasks that engage the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. His hypothesis proved correct. In one task, the Wisconsin Card Sort Task, participants had to sort cards based on things like color or shape without being told how to sort them. The computer gave participants feedback to let them know whether
could. Two of the decks are high risk, high reward; two of the decks are lowrisk, low reward. This task engages the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. While the Wisconsin Card Sort Task measures activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and how good students are at remembering things in the short term, the Iowa Gambling Task measures activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and how great a role emotions are playing in influencing a participant’s decision making. Lucid and non-lucid dreamers performed exactly the same on the Wisconsin Card Sort Task, but those with a propensity for lucid dreaming performed much better on the Iowa Gambling Task than those who didn’t. These results meant that Morgan was right: lucid dreamers, even while awake, are fundamentally different from non-lucid dreamers. They also meant that Morgan got the funding he needed — $15,000 from the Mind Science Foundation — to start his current research project.
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Morgan knew that when people fall asleep two areas — those normally active when someone has conscious awareness — shut down. One is the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, a part of the prefrontal lobe located just behind the forehead and involved in working memory. During REM sleep, the ventromedial prefrontal 14 | Vol. XXXIX, No. 5 | February 2012
they were sorting the cards correctly or incorrectly. fMRI, a special machine that takes in-depth pictures of the brain, has shown that this task engages the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. In another computer-based test, the Iowa Gambling Task, participants selected cards from one of four decks in order to gain as much virtual money as they
hat project began this past summer and is spearheaded by Sofija Canavan ’12, a Yale senior majoring in the neuroscience track in psychology. “The goal of the research is to reproduce and add onto the original finding,” Morgan says. “We want to do a better job of confirming lucidity to see if that’s really what’s distinguishing people’s performance on these cognitive tasks.” He also wants to see if there are physical or anatomical differences in the brains of lucid and non-lucid dreamers. The first part of this study is a chance to prove the results of Morgan’s first experiment one more time and make sure they hold in an adult population. The second part of the study takes the research to its next logical next step — moving from studying lucid dreamers while they are awake to studying them while they are dreaming. This time, to confirm lucidity, people will come into the lab to be monitored as they
feature sleep. Sofija is often the one doing the monitoring. Tonight, she is setting up a control subject for a night in a room at the Connecticut Mental Health Center. There is a cold, sanitized feeling to everything, from the pillows wrapped in plastic beneath the pillowcases to the crisp pink blankets. The subject for this evening, whose name is being withheld due to the privacy laws governing research, has never had a lucid dream, but he is a dreamer. “I had a lot of realistic dreams. Some were weird. Don’t judge me,” he jokes to Sofija as he hands over the small green spiral notebook where all those dreams were recorded — his dream journal. The subject then sits down in a chair next to his bed. Sofija places a sheet of paper in front of him and explains the directions. He will complete a series of word puzzles involving associations between one word and another. As he works, Sofija prepares the equipment needed to monitor him while he sleeps. Out come adhesive tape, wooden Q-tips, a black pack bulging with the many multi-colored wires topped with little circular metal head called electrodes, tubes of gel, and a greasy red pencil. Once the subject finishes the task, Sofija attaches six electrodes around his head: two reference electrodes (as a basis for comparison) behind his ears, two just below his collar bone, two below his chin to measure his muscle movements, two next to his eyes to measure his eye movements,
and two on his leg. The whole process takes about an hour, and by the time it is over the subject has a whole tangle of wires hanging behind him. “You’ve got this kind of strange, Mohawk thing going on,” Sofija told him. “Take a picture,” he jokes. Those wires measure the electrical impulses emitted as neurons in the brain fire and record them as a series of lines on a graph. People trained in reading the graphs, like Sofija, are able to determine things like whether the subject is awake or asleep and whether his eyes are moving left or right. Subjects capable of lucid dreaming will be able to give the pattern of eye signals, first conceived of by LaBerge,
Dr. Morgan hopes to one day understand what it is about our brains that allows us to be conscious creatures, able to contemplate our own existence and our own mortality.
that will let researchers know when they are within a lucid dream. Using all this information, Morgan will be able to group people based on their performance on cognitive tasks and whether or not they are able to lucid dream. Hopefully, he will be able to confirm that the people doing better on the cognitive tasks are actually able to lucid dream, and that the people performing less well, like the subject in question, are not. Then Morgan will use the fMRI to show which regions of the brain are lighting up and to determine how active the ventromedial and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortexes are in any given individual. Using fMRI is more expensive and more challenging than using electrodes — the machine is high-tech and it’s hard for people to fall asleep in a giant, loud magnet — but it will allow Morgan to prove that the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is off while the ventromedial prefrontal cortex is engaged during a lucid dream. Morgan hopes to one day understand what it is about our brains that allows us to be conscious creatures, able to contemplate our
ydnmag.com | Yale Daily News Magazine | 15
feature own existence and our own mortality. When Morgan fell on that mountain so many years ago, what he lost for the briefest of moments was metaawareness — his awareness that he was aware. For much of history, metaawareness has fallen into the realm of philosophy. Philosophers ponder what it means to experience a color, or pain, or even consciousness itself. But while it’s been possible to design an experiment to determine how someone can distinguish one color from another or pain from hot or cold, there is no way to do an experiment on the experience of consciousness, or meta-awareness. As far as we know, the brain is the source of all of our thoughts and experiments, and “if you assume that everything we experience has to arise from the brain, there is the fundamental issue of using the tool itself to look at itself,” Morgan says. Moreover, if someone loses metaawareness, they’re not able to convey that they’ve lost it. Consider someone who has had so much to drink that he becomes blackout drunk. Talk to that person, and he may seem relatively normal. He may even have a reasonable working memory (he’d do okay on the Wisconsin Card Sort Task). But the next morning, he would
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not remember anything that happened to him the night before. Did he lose meta-awareness while he was drunk? Right now, “all we know for sure is that he didn’t remember it,” Morgan says. “The real-time monitoring of the presence or absence of [metaawareness] is tough.” But Morgan’s study on lucid dreaming allows for real-time monitoring. A lucid dreamer has metaawareness, while the typical sleeper doesn’t. Compare the two of them as they sleep, and it might be possible to see where in the brain meta-awareness arises. Morgan hypothesizes that at least the ventromedial prefrontal cortex will be involved. The experience of consciousness will remain elusive — it is still impossible to determine whether or not the blackout drunk lost meta-awareness, or to determine whether we are the only creatures on this planet who have consciousness at all — but the study could bring us one step closer to understanding what makes us thinking, feeling creatures, and what gives us the unflagging certainty that we have those feelings in the first place. Knowing that the ventromedial prefrontal cortex is involved in metaawareness, at the most basic level,
would indicate that our consciousness is not the result of some elusive soul separate from the physical body, like the Egyptian Ba floating above the sleeping body, but rather is intimately linked to our brains. And it could also give scientists a region to focus on in future experiments as they try to figure out how exactly metaawareness works.
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n a recurrent dream of his, Morgan comes up to plate and hits a baseball. The ball soars up into a perfect blue sky as he dashes towards first base. Under normal circumstances, the hit would definitely let him make a single or a double. But in the dream, the closer he gets to first base, the slower he runs. “The ball would always get there first,” he said. “A beautiful hit would be wasted.” Morgan knows a home run in his dream is completely out of the question, just as certain aspects of consciousness are simply unknowable. But in the world outside his dreams, he refuses to stop running just before first base. D D D
personal essay
Personal Essay
Deposition D by Sophia Nguyen D
Mona cao / contributing illustrator
H
e lost five hundred dollars; I lost two hours. It’s impossible for me, as a rational person, to feel wronged. In Perth Amboy, and probably everywhere else, you can’t charge someone with intangibles: the reading abandoned, the composure shattered, the discomfort you inflicted on strangers, or the discomfort they inflicted on you. Not even, at the end of the day, that question you were compelled to ask your mother by some twisting self-doubt that’d never been there before: “It’s not all in my head, right? I didn’t make it up?” The system took good care of me, which is more than anyone could reasonably hope of New Jersey. My home state has assembled, I’m pleased to report, a truly excellent little bureaucracy. I’ve watched enough seasons of “The Wire” to be wise in this, to know that no city court can give you catharsis. But I was offered a more than adequate substitute — efficiency. Efficiency’s powers of assimilation, of attenuation, imparted the kind
of powerful relief that I may never know again — the relief of being dispatched quickly, of knowing that the wheels continued to turn, gray, dingy, and impersonal. The machinery creaked. After I left, it would be onto the next thing: a disputed fence between neighbors, a fine for traffic violations. Before I had my day in court, the cops made sure that I understood the legal parameters of what had happened. The greener of the two detectives sitting across from me at the kitchen table said that the charge was like a speeding ticket. His partner shot him a look — she’d chew him out on the ride back to Perth Amboy — but however insensitive, the analogy was perfectly accurate. These are the laws that now govern humanity: denselylayered, perfectly-zeroed fistfuls of technicalities, rules so myriad and municipal that they shrink into exasperating insignificance. With their measure in hand, the police had determined the precise location, and thus the nature, of the infraction: ydnmag.com | Yale Daily News Magazine | 17
personal essay my inner thigh, but no genitalia; the length of his forearm, but not his hand. I was eighteen, not seventeen. The man had run my red light on the train from Penn Station to Aberdeen-Matawan, which is why I was speaking to transit police, and not the local ones. It was actually a remarkable taxonomy, calming even, under which my case was categorized as a crime of reckless disregard. Not at all dissimilar, the senior detective conceded equitably, to a speeding ticket.
The man had run my red light on the train from Penn Station to Aberdeen-Matawan, which is why I was speaking to transit police, not the local ones. Yet we operate in these dissectible localities, and they try their best to make things livable. That day, the series of adults in uniform had all hastened to reassure me of what hadn’t been taken from me: the integrity of my body; the weekend spent with friends in New Haven (“You keep thinking about that, all right sweetie?” said one, in that ineffable Jersey twang); the sense, they hoped, that there were good people in the world. The policeman who brought me to the station was especially keen on my knowing that my fellow passengers had not allowed the man to get away. While I’d fled to an adjacent train car, struggling to steady my breathing, a man and two teenagers had caught up with the perp, beating him bloody on the platform. This explained the teenagers, sweatpanted black kids around my sister’s age, who’d come and found me in my retreat — it must’ve been sometime after their vigilante heroism. “Aw, don’t cry, bitch,” one urged, not at all unkindly. Legs swinging, he fidgeted on his perch across the aisle, trying to catch a glimpse of any action out the window without appearing to be impolite. This also explained the man, who, throwing the door open, had shouted at me with the most incredible anger, “What did he do to you?”, then bolted out. Later, he’d wear his broken hand like a badge of honor. Their swift retribution didn’t comfort me, and neither did the middle-aged woman who drifted to a nearby seat, lingering until the authorities came. Nor did the peppy, ludicrously unnecessary paramedic whom they’d 18 | Vol. XXXIX, No. 5 | February 2012
been obligated to call. Checking my pulse, she squeezed my forearm earnestly. “You’re a hero,” she told me confidentially. “Really.” Such reactions felt oppressive in themselves, dizzyingly embarrassing, imploding any sense of self-containment. They were more humiliating than the advances of some sick guy who’d gotten off on my fear — despite the best of intentions, the interventions of strangers had wrested away the last of my self-control. Suddenly, I became this lost girl in a short dress; I couldn’t speak up for myself; I needed to be sheltered. I had caused trains to get backed up past the Hudson. It didn’t seem fair that I didn’t have a third choice, some slender option lying between action and inaction that would allow me to escape home on schedule, no one ever having to know my name or remember my face. Only much later could I appreciate these gestures, each in its own way reaching out to tell me that people were not indifferent. Now my desire to control the narrative strikes me as funny, in its total impossibility. At the police station, I wanted to call home using my cell. I planned to tell my father that transit was delayed, and that I didn’t know why. Then I tried to get the cops to give me a ride home, so that my parents wouldn’t have to fetch me from the station — I’d figure out what to tell them on the drive there. But the system loosened my grip, gently but firmly. If he was my dad, the lieutenant told me, he’d want to know the truth. He handed me his desk phone, dialing when it became clear that I’d have a hard time doing it myself. My fingers twisted in the cord. Afterwards, I was relieved by the geographical unreachability of those friends I could think to tell, scattered as they were across Latin America and Europe; I thought about those back in New Haven, and knew there would never be a right time, or a right way. In my secrecy, conspicuous to only myself, I have regained my poise retroactively. I have erased from the record that unrecognizable girl in her summer clothes, too frightened to do anything but shake in her seat, her voice made high and vulnerable by some much-scorned evolutionary instinct. These became my small, daily defiances, though now they strike me as somewhat pitiful. These everyday rituals and decisions became invested with meanings that they’d never been built to bear: I can look strange men in the eye without flinching; on hot days, I put on that short, star-spangled dress. I was — before this — proudly, tightly wrapped in my inuring silence. DDD
Crit
yes, sir? D by dana Glaser D
tao tao holmes / staff illustrator
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may have been the first one to notice him in the doorway. I had just stopped by for a quick drink; I only knew one other person in the room; I still had on the requisite plaid button-down I had worn in the A&A library. These things made it feel inappropriate to point out that there was a cop in the room, or anyway halfway in the room. During the awkward moment between his arrival and the hush of realization, I watched him poised there like a bemused newcomer scanning the room for the friend of a friend who had texted “yeah, its not so bad, come. you can have a beer.” The officer asked whose room it was, and the calledfor individual stepped forward. The rest of us assumed the silence of school children in penance. Is this your room? he asked the host again. Yes, sir. Is this your alcohol? Yes, sir. How old are you? Twenty, sir. No, sir, not everyone, sir. Sorry, sir. Yes, sir, we will sir, we’ll do it right away sir. I marveled at his deference. Was it real? There was
not the tiniest trace of irony in those “sirs.” He didn’t say them the way they say “sir” in the military; he said them passively, quietly. Another officer proceeded with the business of teaching us a lesson, collecting IDs and calling us forward one by one to take down information. A few weeks later my friend told me she hadn’t really given the officer her ID. She had just shuffled around and acted like she had already done it. She felt terrible. Some of the other people at the party had had to speak with the dean, and she was debating turning herself in. “Are you insane?” I asked her. “I know. That’s what my parents said.” Which drink, I wondered, would she report? The half bottle of Mike’s Hard at the party? The bottle of red wine we’d shared the Friday after? Could she report herself for the contingent crime of being in this suite instead of that one? This was when I realized that the quotidian animosity between underage co-ed and lightly chastising ydnmag.com | Yale Daily News Magazine | 19
crit
The police report would say that “all units left the scene without incident,” and I remember wondering if he was trying to provoke one, if he was preaching to us because he knew it was making our blood boil. authority figure is actually an issue fraught with moral complexity. As the police took out their notepads, I stood with my arms crossed and tried to look neutral. One girl by the window covered her mouth, as if she could press the tears back that way. Later, the others wondered in whispers if “they” would tell her coach, if “they” would report it to ExComm. “Dana?” asked the note-taking officer. “Yes.” “Your phone number?” I gave it to him slowly and distinctly. After a moment I asked, “Can I ask why you are taking my information?” I tried to sound very, very reasonable. “You don’t know why I’m taking your information?” “No.” “You don’t know what you did wrong?” “I don’t,” I said. I tried to sound dispassionate, even though I could tell he thought I was being contrary. I was pissing him off. He raised his head from his clipboard, his voice rising just a little. “How old are you?” “Twenty-one.” I tried not to sound triumphant because around me everyone else was having his and her name taken down with no weapon to brandish. The note-taking officer fumbled. He almost said “Oh—”, and he put down his pencil. The officer standing in the the doorway interrupted him. He smiled and informed us that “this” would be happening a lot more often now — what with the HarvardYale game incident “due to alcohol” and all the sexual misconduct on campus. He reminded us that he had been twenty once. Later the police report would say that “all units left the scene without incident,” and I remember wondering as I stood there if he was trying to provoke one, if he was preaching because he knew it was making our blood boil. I wanted to say that the Harvard-Yale incident was not 20 | Vol. XXXIX, No. 5 | February 2012
alcohol-related, as far as investigations have shown. I was insulted by his invocation of sexual misconduct, as if it were something people accidentally slipped into when there was too much drinking in the air. I wanted to ask if he had looked in on any of the other hundred or so parties I knew to be taking place at that very moment. I wanted desperately to correct the officer, but next to me my friend squeezed my arm, telling me to leave it be. And I did, because it was not my party, because I was twenty-one and not everyone else was, and because I knew if you don’t say “sir” you can end up somewhere you don’t want to be. When they left we were not sure what to do. We milled about and debated whether the door had been open, whether this mattered. Someone wondered if it was true that they would be doing “this” more often. The Yale Police have neither confirmed nor denied the “crack down” on underage drinking. But there was that crew party two weeks ago, and that birthday party in Saybrook. And Feb Club — don’t the cops keep shutting down Feb Club? It felt like we should go to sleep, but it was only 10:30. As I walked home and thought about how I should have reacted, I confronted the fact that it’s an utterly intractable problem. There are immutable facts. Underage drinking is against the law. The Yale Police uphold the law. Therefore the Yale Police will forever break up parties where 18-year-olds drink Dubra from red solo cups. And God knows in the interest of safety we could not wish it any other way. On the other hand, Yale students will never stop drinking — it is too tightly woven into the social fabric of the campus. The whole premise of a “crackdown” seems tragically ill-fated, like trying to fill a bath tub that drains faster than the water runs. In short we are forever destined to circle around one another, students and police, in an untenable opposition that luckily is not an issue 95 percent of the time. Until the one night when it is an issue, and the justification “everybody does it” seems right but sounds childish, and you have to decide whether or not to swallow self-righteousness, keep your head down, and take Yale’s slap on the wrist. Most people do, only you cannot think too much if you decide that. You cannot wonder if there’s another reason they are there, if maybe they think we are entitled, and if maybe we are entitled. You shouldn’t think about whether it is wrong to pander to authority you disagree with just to stay out of trouble. You shouldn’t ask what it means that the officer was twenty once. You shouldn’t wonder what it is exactly you are supposed to learn, or what it is you are going to do differently. D D D
Close to
Home
By Sarah Maslin
Photos by Tory Burnside Clapp & Travis Pantin ydnmag.com | Yale Daily News Magazine |  21
cover
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fghanistan doesn’t deserve to be in the U.N.,” he said on the third day of class. “It’s too primitive.” All the heads in the room turned to look at the girl in the hijab. She had her head down, scribbling notes, but she felt their eyes watching her, waiting for her to blow up or burst into tears. Wazhma Sadat said nothing. Though her classmates didn’t know it, a battle was unfolding inside her head. Should she say something, or remain silent? She knew she couldn’t stop herself from getting upset: “When somebody says something about Afghanistan not knowing enough about it, I know that by not saying anything, I’m not doing it justice,” she said later. Sadat is the
memories. Sadat spent much of her childhood hiding: in basements during rocket blasts, in an unfamiliar country to escape the Taliban, in a U.S. high school where she was ashamed of being from Afghanistan. Sadat is one of a tiny group of Yale students — the admissions office will not release exact figures, citing student confidentiality — for whom war and genocide is not just the stuff of political science classes or video games. It is the stuff of their lives. When she came to Yale in 2010, Sadat joined an even smaller group: students who, after living through war and genocide, have decided to study it. Research on genocide survivors in the classroom is scarce, and most
“I was really ashamed of who I was. I was embarrassed to tell people that I had to weave carpets to make money for my family.” It didn’t help that her fellow high school students in Florida were unwelcoming and even racist. only Afghan student at Yale. “But,” she added, “I can’t say things without hiding my emotions.” During class that day, as she struggled to control her anger, Sadat remembered her childhood in Kabul. While her classmates argued about nuclear warfare, she remembers thinking to herself, “Do people know what they mean when they talk about people dying? Or is it just numbers for them, is it just video games?” When Sadat first saw video games where the goal was to “Kill Talibs,” she was horrified. “Maybe they haven’t seen people dying,” Sadat thought. She has. The struggle to hide her emotions, Sadat says, evoked powerful 22 | Vol. XXXIX, No. 5 | February 2012
models of healing from the last 50 years focus on psychological treatment. But the more recent research stresses the need to move beyond the “limitations of western constructs,” as the Chicago School of Professional Psychology asserts in a study of Rwandan trauma survivors. The School’s March 2011 article advises professionals working with genocide survivors to look for other ways of promoting healing: through education, community discussion, art, and literature. The ways in which genocide survivors at Yale have chosen to approach their past experiences are drastically different from one another. One student has elected an intellectual pursuit of policy. Another prefers
an emotional approach through literature. For Sadat, a “continuous process” of struggling to learn about her country has enabled her to begin to understand the conflict in which she grew up and make sense of her own identity. Five years ago, she didn’t even want to admit she was from Afghanistan.
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adat, a sophomore, was five years old when the Taliban came to power in Afghanistan. Like many others in the war-torn country, her bewildered family had no idea what was happening, or why. The same was true throughout the six years of the Islamic fundamentalist regime for many Afghan citizens, most of whom didn’t have television or Internet and paid little attention to newspapers and politics. There is such a lack of awareness, Sadat says, that even today “people don’t know how old they are.” For Sadat, being able to learn about the Taliban from a safe distance allows her to finally confront a regime that thrived on misinformation and fear. “Now when I study the Taliban at Yale I understand that the entire world knew what was going on except the Afghan civilians,” she says. “All we knew was that every night we had to wake up at three in the morning and go into the basement because there were rockets.” The first time Sadat heard the word “Taliban” was in a cartoon. The image showed a Pakistani leader, Benazir Bhutto, feeding a little baby with a long beard. A caption identified the infant as the Taliban. Five-year-old Sadat, entranced with the picture of the bearded baby, asked her father what the cartoon meant, but he wouldn’t tell her. To escape the conflict and the Taliban, her family moved temporarily to Pakistan in 1998, where she lived in a two-room apartment with her parents and six siblings. The family wove and sold carpets to make a
cover living; in Kabul, her father had been an architect. When they returned to Afghanistan after the Taliban’s fall in 2001, she attended high school in the brutal regime’s former headquarters. “I could see blood stains on [the walls of ] our classroom,” she recalls. When Sadat came to Florida for her senior year of high school, as a part of the U.S. State Department’s Youth Exchange and Studies (YES) program, she avoided courses that might touch on her country’s complicated history. For the first six months she rarely talked about home, and for a school project on the Middle East, she did what all the other students did — she read about it on Wikipedia. “I was really ashamed of who I was,” Sadat says. “I was embarrassed to tell people that I had to weave carpets to make money for my family.” It didn’t help that her fellow high school students in Florida were unwelcoming and even racist. “They would block my way, call me names,” she says. It was only after returning to Afghanistan to recruit other young women for the YES program that Sadat realized that her experiences under the Taliban had not been isolated — before that, she thought “they had just happened to me.” Visiting villages in the remote parts of the country, she met others forced to leave their homes when the Taliban came to power, and she saw people living in far worse poverty than her own. She recalls one tiny town with “no clocks or watches” that subsisted on a single sheep killed every week. For once, she says, “I felt lucky.” She was stunned to learn things about Afghan history and culture that she’d never been taught as a child: “It was as if I was visiting a foreign country.” Driven by her growing desire to learn more about her country and the rest of the world, Sadat took a bold step: while on a high school trip with an American aid organization to sell handmade gifts in New York, she called Yale on a whim. When she arrived ydnmag.com | Yale Daily News Magazine | 23
cover at the admissions office and saw the other applicants with their cell phones and computers, she recalls, she almost chickened out. Sadat didn’t own a cell phone. “I’m in the wrong place,” she told her admissions interviewer. The interviewer assured her that was not the case, she recalls. He offered her some water, and, six months later, a spot in the class of 2014. Last semester, Sadat was a student in Trumbull Dean Jasmina Besirevic’s class “Genocide and Ethnic Conflict,” a small seminar that tracks conflicts from the Holocaust to present-day Afghanistan. Besirevic uses videos, presentations, and testimonies of survivors alongside academic texts to weave together a powerful account of genocide. Instead of being trapped on the inside looking out, Sadat says, the class gave her the ability “to look at [conflicts like the one she grew up in] from the outside.” Besirevic, who left Bosnia on a student visa in 1992 — five months after conflict broke out there —
PTSD symptoms among those she knew back home. “It’s why they are pessimistic, why they’re not doing anything ... They’re extremely tired of war. But they don’t realize it. Nobody realizes it.” Now she suspects that the silence that affects so many from her country is another sign of PTSD, a collective reaction to so many years of violence. To this day, she says, members of her family “haven’t had a single conversation about anything that has happened.” Conversations about Afghanistan can be challenging, as Sadat learned in her political science section. Until that third class, she had kept quiet when they talked about her home country, striving to appear objective and not wanting to get upset. But the more her classmate talked about how “primitive” the country was, the more Sadat began to feel she had to speak up. And when another classmate said, “Palestine should just keep bombing Israel, because they have higher birthrates, so eventually
While watching videos of Bosnian rape survivors from Prijedor, the site of a massacre, a few girls in the class started crying. Porca’s aunt is from that same region. “Every morning she would roll around in mud so she’d smell disgusting,” Porca recalls, in order to protect herself from being raped. describes watching students like Wazhma learn about other genocides and realize the parallels to their own life experiences: “You can see the light bulb go on,” she says. After learning about post-traumatic stress disorder in class, Sadat began to recognize 24 | Vol. XXXIX, No. 5 | February 2012
they’ll take over all the Jews,” Sadat had had enough. Though the rest of the class was stunned to silence, Sadat raised her hand. Glancing down at her notebook, she rattled off a list of objections to his statement, trying to stay calm but feeling herself getting
angrier as she spoke. When she finished, she couldn’t help scolding him for his ignorance: “I’ve always wanted to meet someone like you,” she said, shaking her head. Such comments no longer silence Sadat — they make her more determined to speak out. But occasionally, rather than deal with ignorant and insensitive classmates, she chooses simply to avoid them. On the day that they were discussing terrorism, she emailed her T.A. and told him she was sick. “I knew that I was going to get really mad,” she explains. “My semester was already really stressful. I didn’t want to deal with that.” Going home can also be difficult. Sadat is amazed by her American classmates’ knowledge of U.S. politics and respect for their country. “That sense has vanished from Afghanistan,” she says. “Everyone who can leaves,” she explains, “and you’re only left with people who are less capable, less educated, and hopeless.” During Sadat’s trip back home over winter break, she recalls being struck by hearing her six-year-old niece ask, “You know how guys should always sit in front, and women in the back?” Still, Sadat plans to go back. She hopes that what she has learned about international relations at Yale, along with her growing understanding of Afghanistan’s history, will help her work toward making it a better place for others growing up there. She wants to increase awareness of what is happening in the country, and to improve educational and economic opportunities for young people and for women. She has already begun to do this with Kamyab Afghanistan, an organization she founded to help small businesses owned by women in rural parts of the country. And for the first time, after she told her parents about Besirevic’s class and the genocides she was studying, Sadat’s family acknowledged the hardships they themselves had endured during
cover the war. Although she is a Global Affairs major, Sadat doesn’t see herself working to improve the situation in Afghanistan by becoming a minister or a political figure. Instead, she says, “it will be through interacting with the actual people.” Just like her own journey to learn and understand her country’s history, it will be “a continuous process,” she says. However, she adds, “being at Yale helps.”
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adat can’t see herself becoming a diplomat or a policy analyst, but Ajla Porca ‘14 can. Long before she understood what had happened in Bosnia, Porca felt guilty about it. She was only four when her family left the war-torn former Yugoslavia, but she remembers promising herself and her family that one day she would “repay them and do my part” in the world. On trips to the library with her mother in Dallas, where her family eventually settled, four-year-old Porca buried herself in books, teaching herself how to read and speak English. “I wanted to be a part of something good,” she says. “I didn’t want to be associated with something so dark and depressing.” The Bosnia she remembers is not all dark and depressing, though. She can vaguely recall the sounds of sniper fire, but far more powerful are her recollections of her mom serving dinner to their hungry Serbian neighbors, a mother and her two small children. “It wasn’t all blood, guts, and gore,” she insists. The Bosnian Serb army was laying brutal siege to civilians in Sarajevo just 54 miles away, but in Zenica, an industrial town surrounded by mountains in central Bosnia, it didn’t matter whether your neighbor was Bosnian, Croatian, or Serbian, Porca says. The kids in her neighborhood played together, their parents got along, and mixed marriages were as common as Turkish coffee. ydnmag.com | Yale Daily News Magazine | 25
cover Zenica was lucky during the war. Elsewhere in Bosnia, entire communities were forced out of their homes. Thousands were killed in the “ethnic cleansing” of Bosnian Muslims — now an internationally recognized genocide — carried out by the Bosnian Serb army. But Zenica saw very little fighting (in part because it was so diverse, Porca believes) and Porca’s family stayed there during the war. But not long after the war ended in 1995, Porca’s older sister came home from school and reported that her teacher had brought up religion in class. The very next day Porca’s father got their passports ready to move to the United States. “He didn’t want us indoctrinated,” she says. When her family arrived in Dallas in 1996, the neighborhood they lived in was filled with other immigrants from all over the Balkans, and, united by their homesickness, Porca says, they all “clung together.” To some, the idea of Bosnians, Serbs, and Croats living together and getting along may seem remarkable considering the atrocities their armies committed against each other during the war. Throughout much of the former Yugoslavia, bitter rivalries exist between the groups: in many parts of Bosnia today, schoolchildren are separated by their religion (Muslim children on one floor, Catholic or Orthodox on another) and taught entirely different versions of history. But Zenica was never like this, and, upon moving to Dallas, Porca’s parents refused to segregate themselves based on their ethnicity. They taught their daughters to do the same. As she thinks about her future as a diplomat, Porca says, she envisions a world in which
tensions between ethnic groups are resolved through communication and connection. “I never liked group associations,” Porca says. Growing up, Porca remembers her parents talking freely about the war and encouraging their three daughters to read newspaper articles and books for other perspectives. But it wasn’t until taking a class on the Balkans with Robert Greenberg, “Language, Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict in the Balkans,” that she had a chance to “test” her understanding of the war. Porca, a Global Affairs and Political Science double major who speaks five languages, says she dreams of being a diplomat one day but worries that her own intense experiences might taint her ability to make the tough calls that the job requires. Greenberg’s class forced her to “take a cold approach to policy on genocide after seeing genocide,” she says, and was a way to to “harden” herself. She needed to affirm the dream she had settled on since childhood by asking herself, “Am I cut out for this kind of career? Can I be really cold and detached from situations that tug at your heartstrings?” She thinks she can, but it’s tough. As a student in Besirevic’s genocide seminar last semester, Porca’s guilt struck again. Besirevic says that when planning the seminar, she tries to strike a balance between theoretical texts on genocide and personal testimonies from survivors. While others in the seminar saw Porca as one of those survivors, Porca says she felt like a “fraud.” A petite blonde with a wide smile, Porca wears no hijab. Unlike her classmate Sadat, Porca had no stories of blood on the walls of her
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classroom. Her suffering, she felt, didn’t compare to what others had endured. While watching videos of Bosnian rape survivors from Prijedor, the site of a massacre, a few girls in the class started crying. Porca’s aunt is from that same region. “Every morning she would roll around in mud so she’d smell disgusting,” Porca recalls, in order to protect herself from being raped. But watching that movie, Porca felt such a terrible urge to laugh that “my hands started shaking.” It is how she reacts to extreme emotions like sadness, joy, and pain, she says. And in Professor Greenberg’s class, when classmates decided that the situation in Bosnia was hopeless, she took it personally. “It’s not that anything they said was a surprise,” she recalls, “or that they were particularly harsh. I know the situation is hopeless, but having it reaffirmed by 20 people weekly doesn’t make it any easier.” Because the class knew she was from Bosnia, Porca was “very cognizant of not appearing emotionally involved,” she says. “I wanted to be taken seriously.” But there were some things Porca couldn’t be neutral on. When they discussed the problems with the Bosnian education system, she couldn’t believe her classmates’ negativity. Porca raised her hand and mentioned Zenica as an example of a town where education is not ethnically segregated and never has been. Throughout the semester, Porca continued to bring “a positive perspective” to the class while trying to stay objective. She also tried to get her fellow students to come up with solutions to problems before deciding they were “hopeless.” Sometimes, this ended in frustration: “The difficulty of engaging in academic conversation[s] is that they focus on what is wrong and not necessarily on, how do we fix it?” Porca says her education at Yale is only making her more convinced that
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she can accomplish her childhood dream of being a diplomat or a policy expert. Preventing genocide, she says, starts with bridging the gaps between people, and working toward a world in which we can all relate. “I want to connect with people,” she says. “If people can relate to the suffering war causes at a basic human level, they’ll be more likely to try to stop it.”
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lemantine Wamariya ‘13 has never taken Besirevic’s genocide class, nor does she plan to do so. “I can’t watch the videos,” she says. “I can’t really be a part of that whole pain.” Though seventeen years have passed since the Rwandan genocide, she remembers everything as if she were still there. Wamariya was six years old when the genocide started in Rwanda in 1994. After years of violence and civil war between rival ethnic groups, the mass killing of minority Tutsi by the Hutu majority wiped out 20 percent
of the country’s population. Wamariya and her 16-year-old sister, Claire, escaped the slaughter by crossing the border to Burundi, but in the process they were separated from their parents and the rest of
the family. For the next six years, the two girls fled from one dusty refugee camp to another. By the time the U.S. finally granted them asylum in 2000, Wamariya had lived in eight different countries in Africa.
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cover Sometimes, in the camps, she imagined that she could take all the old junk and furniture people had in their tents and pile them up into a staircase that would reach heaven, she says. She missed her parents and the family she had left in Rwanda. The other refugees kept telling her, “they’re in heaven, they’re in heaven,” but sixyear-old Wamariya didn’t understand. “Heaven was so far, for me. Heaven was beyond the clouds,” she says. Memories of her six years as a refugee haunt her still, especially at night, when her busy life at Yale pauses. Then two very different worlds come together in an unsettling way. “The war might be 17 years away,” she explains, “but the experiences [are just] one dose of sleep away. Sometimes I dream about Yale campus being a refugee camp.” After coming to the U.S. as a refugee in 2000, Wamariya lived in
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Chicago, alternating between her sister’s house in the city and that of her “American family” in the suburbs where she attended school. In eighth grade, her class studied genocide, and she decided it was time to try to understand what had happened in Rwanda. She picked up Elie Wiesel’s “Night,” the chilling account of the author’s time in Nazi concentration camps. It made an immediate impact. “It’s when I realized, I’m absolutely not the only one,” she recalls. Reading “Night” was the first time Wamariya had learned about other genocides, and she was deeply affected by it. “I wanted to walk in the concentration camp with Elie Wiesel, from the first page to the last page,” she recalls. “I wanted to feel what it must feel to be freezing.” Wamariya savored the intense experience of finally being able to relate to what she was learning, and she remembers
crying while she read a section where Wiesel wrote about how his feet were numb. She says she remembered walking for days with her sister as they fled from refugee camp to refugee camp, and could identify with “the sensation that your whole foot is actually blisters.” Seeing “Night”’s impact on her and her fellow eighth-graders helped Wamariya realize the potential impact her story could have on others, too. “[Studying the Holocaust and other genocides] made me realize, Oh my goodness. I cannot be afraid to talk about it. I cannot be afraid to view it,” she says. Before then, she hadn’t told anyone in the U.S. what she had lived through in Rwanda. She did not want to cheapen it or trivialize it. “There’s a fear that when you talk about it, you’re [no longer] afraid of it,” she explains. “There’s also this other fear that, if you talk about it, people feel
cover sad for you.” But as she got older, Wamariya began to speak openly about Rwanda. She also began to write about it. In 2006, Wamariya appeared on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” after winning Winfrey’s National High School Essay Contest with an essay in which she incorporated her memories from Rwanda to respond to the question, “Why is Elie Wiesel’s book ‘Night’ relevant today?” Wamariya was reunited with her parents on the show, an experience she says she has “no words to describe.” She urges people who ask her about it to watch the video: the three-minute clip captures Wamariya in a moment of shock and pure joy, one arm embracing her mother, the other following her tearful gaze — raised to the sky. At Yale, although Wamariya has resisted taking classes about genocide, she has had other opportunities to bring her personal experiences into the classroom. The first class she remembers speaking up in was an anthropology class she took her freshman year called “The State in Africa.” “I was that dumb girl who raises her hand and just says whatever she thinks,” she says, laughing. One time, they discussed foreign food donations, a topic she was familiar with from her six years as a refugee. “Let me tell you about the food aid,” she remembers shouting, “This stuff, they give you all this corn, but this corn is impossible to eat!” Wamariya says she prefers classes in which she can relate personally to the subject matter and to her fellow classmates. She says she loves being a Literature major because it allows her to take these kinds of courses. “Having experienced such an intense life as a child,” she explains, “education that captures true emotions on a personal level is more valuable for me.” Even in classes where discussion is intended to focus only on the reading, Wamariya says she has not been able to refrain from sharing her experiences. “I want
“The war may be 17 years away, but the experiences [are just] one dose of sleep away. Sometimes I dream about Yale campus being a refugee camp.” to bring it back home,” she says. “If I don’t ... I’m lost.” Wamariya admits that sometimes she gets frustrated at her inability to keep her emotions out of her learning. Some professors have scolded her for making her assignments too personal, she says, and she has been trying, unsuccessfully, to write a “purely academic” paper since she first came to Yale. For the most part, though, Wamariya sees her emotions not as a handicap but as her greatest strength. “I learn best from my emotions. It’s a tool that I had to create in order to understand the reality of my past and I cannot put it down.” Wamariya says she has nothing against “purely academic” classes, and she admires people who have what she calls “buckets of knowledge” about theory or math or ancient history. Wamariya has her emotions and her own experiences — she wonders, “What’s the point of our humanity, in terms of trying not to repeat the mistakes and the wrongdoing of others, if we only study numbers?” When Wamariya talks about what happened to her in Rwanda, she uses images and metaphors to bridge the gap between the world of her childhood and the ivory tower she finds herself in at Yale: the furniture pile reaching from the refugee camp all the way up to heaven; the bucket of knowledge, one for each person, nobody’s bucket better than the rest. She is a translator of sorts. “I try to be very poetic about things,” she says.
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uring the war in Congo in 1996, there was so much shooting, and there were so
many bombs, that now, if I remember it, it sounds like — “ Wamariya leans forward, tucking a small braid that has fallen out of her thick ponytail behind her ear. She clasps her hands. “Have you ever been in an orchestra?” Imagine you are in Woolsey Hall, she says. The YSO Halloween Concert. But when Wamariya hears the orchestra playing, she doesn’t hear the sounds of music. She hears the sounds of war. “You have no idea when it’s gonna be over,” she says, “and the past two days it has been like that. And you’re hiding in a space under the bed, where the mattress springs are poking you constantly.” All around the world, she says, there are other children hiding and other orchestras of war playing: Wamariya and her sister, huddled under a bed frame, too scared to make a sound; Porca, hunched over library books filled with battle scenes, hungry to learn and understand; five-year-old Sadat, crouched in her basement as rockets erupt overhead. “But our focus is to be students,” Wamariya says, “to not even know that the orchestra’s happening.” She is trying to change that. “I can’t tell you everything, but if I relate something you already know, you might see yourself,” she explains. “Now when you go back to a concert at Woolsey, it will never be the same. It’s not to rob you of your experience, but to help you understand what it must have been like for me.” D D D
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HIgh Street by Grey De Grissom
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selen uman / staff photographer
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id in a Candy Shop
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By Madeline Buxton
All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages. — “As You Like It,” Act II, Scene VII enderings of the Globe Theater — the polygonal playhouse built at the end of the 16th century for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men — depict a stage that projects into the “yard,” the space where commoners, or groundlings, paid a mere penny to watch a play. Surrounding the open-air pit and forming the backbone of the structure, are three tiers of galleries, over which a thatched roof protects the seating arrangement and the stage from the elements. Behind the stage is the “tiring house,” the space where actors prepare to perform roles ranging from Julius Caesar to Juliet. Linsly-Chittenden 101 doesn’t have a thatched roof or a concealed “tiring house” where professors can practice their lines before lectures. There is no open-air seating or painted “heavens” or trapdoor from the stage into “hell.” But there is a stage — though it isn’t elevated — and there are tiered rows of seats. If the front of the room with its podium and projector is the area in front of the curtain, then Professor David Scott
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Victor Kang / Photography Editor
Kastan is the performer. Not an actor, perhaps, but at the very least a narrator relaying Shakespeare’s intentions to the class — whether he’s reciting a soliloquy from “Richard III,” playfully throwing chalk at students, or lamenting his hatred of PowerPoint. It was here in LC 101 that Kastan taught his popular course “Histories and Tragedies” last semester. Outside of this condensed Globe he was in the midst of putting the finishing touches on Shakespeare at Yale (SaY), a program that he has spearheaded and that offers daily Shakespeare events and highlights the University’s multiplicity of Bard-related resources. Kastan describes his experiences discovering such resources as those of a “kid in a candy shop.” After just four years at Yale he has become a main player, looking to highlight the resources on campus and bring together departments that might otherwise rarely cross paths. And while he may teach Shakespeare’s tragedies, Kastan’s creation of SaY has given the University a light-hearted break from its recent less-
than-appealing press. ong before Kastan first traveled to London’s reconstructed Globe — where he served on the Academic Advisory Council until the theater reopened in 1997 — he was a boy in Tucson with little interest in Shakespeare. The elder of two brothers, he was raised by his mother and step-father — his biological father, an English professor at the University of Arizona, died when he was just five. Though he grew up out west, Kastan always felt more of an affinity for the kaleidoscope of signs, smells, tastes, languages, and colors that he found once his family moved east to New York City. “My mother likes to joke that in Tucson I’d sit in the playground dressed all in black and talk about noir fiction,” he laughs. When it came time to choose a college, his affection for city life, with its walking culture and chances for spontaneous encounters, led him to Princeton, a school close enough by train but one that also epitomized the “quintessential
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college atmosphere.” While there, he engaged in “a whole series of sports I wasn’t good enough to play on the varsity level.” Although he took a Shakespeare class as an undergraduate, Kastan didn’t feel any pull towards the material. His professor’s theatricality (“He was a frustrated actor, I think”) proved entertaining, but not intellectually stimulating. “I didn’t know I was a good student,” he says. “I did well, but didn’t take it all that seriously. But other people took me seriously and made me take myself more seriously.” It wasn’t until he became friendly with a young professor as a sophomore in college that Kastan first considered graduate school as a possibility. And it wasn’t until he arrived at the University of Chicago two years later that he first took an interest in the material that would become his sole passion — entirely by accident. little over three months ago on November 23, 2011, Kastan appeared on “Charlie Rose” as part of Rose’s “Why Shakespeare” series, a look at the Bard’s relevance in contemporary affairs. He was joined by former Columbia student and current ABC News reporter Nick Schifrin. (Schifrin was the first reporter to broadcast from Bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan after his death.) A little over
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ten years ago, Schifrin sat in Kastan’s Shakespeare lecture on the same day that the 9/11 attacks took place. Rose opens the segment with a clip from director Julie Taymor’s “Titus,” a 1999 adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Titus Andronicus.” It was the same play that Kastan taught his class at Columbia the Thursday after the planes hit the World Trade Center Towers. Columbia gave its professors the freedom to teach material that they deemed appropriate. “I was so conscious of how much had changed in the world my students were living in and I was living in, and also very conscious that some things hadn’t changed and some things still mattered,” Kastan tells Rose. “It seemed to me Shakespeare did.” The play, a kind of “Elizabethan Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” seemed appropriate in a shattered world. “I hope the people making decisions on how to respond to the attacks read this play,” Kastan told his students, before launching into a discussion on the destructive cycle of revenge. By the end of the Thursday class, Kastan had received a standing ovation. The decision to turn to Shakespeare was not always an obvious one. At the end of an uninspiring first semester of graduate school at UChicago, which he entered with the intention of studying modern poetry, Kastan considered switching to another university or
following his peers’ oft-traveled path to law school. “I had various imaginations,” he muses. “Secretly I would have loved to be a painter.” Yet on the bus to the airport, he struck up conversation with a fellow student whom he recognized but didn’t personally know. The student raved about a course he had taken with David Bevington, the well-known Shakespearean scholar and editor of such books as the “Norton Anthology of Renaissance Drama” and “The Complete Works of Shakespeare.” Kastan took a gamble and returned to UChicago that spring to enroll in Bevington’s class. “I think it was more erotic than ethical,” he says of the class. “It felt good rather than it felt like some vocation — that came later.” Shortly after becoming immersed in Shakespearean content for the first time in his academic career, Kastan chose to take a break from graduate school. The year was 1969 and regulations for military service in the Vietnam War had just changed. As the need for troops increased, deferments for graduate school were eliminated. “They had a lottery system,” explains Kastan. “It wasn’t clear whether or not I’d get drafted.” He opted for a teaching position in the Bronx — one that wasn’t without its own challenges. “It was arguably just as complicated
profile as going off to war,” Kastan attests. n the years before Sesame Street started, “Mr. Kastan” taught the alphabet to a classroom of 40 kids in the south Bronx, all of whom were minority students and none of whom were raised by both parents. As “a lunatic trying to get them to read,” he became a performer, engaging students by juggling atop desks and exposing them to the city he knew and loved: “B” meant a trip to the Bronx Zoo where they met “Y,” the yak. “M” meant a venture to the market for milk and mallomars. During one trip to the market, Kastan asked the class what else they could buy beginning with the letter “m.” Perhaps muffins, macaroni, or marshmallows? His students had a different “m” in mind. “Marijuana!” one boy quickly chimed in. Kastan blanched. “I don’t think they sell that here,” he answered, hoping to move quickly past the issue. But the boy was prepared with an answer of his own. Pointing to a man nearby, he asserted, “Yes they do. He sells it!” “I thought, oh dear, they know the neighborhood better than I do,” Kastan jokes. After a year of teaching first grade, Kastan switched to teaching senior English and coaching basketball. While both experiences were satisfying and no doubt entertaining, he found himself returning home every afternoon to read Shakespeare and Chaucer. His love of scholarship sent him back to the University of Chicago, where he finished his degree in just two and a half years, as opposed to the typical five. “It was a mercurial passing through,” he says of the experience.
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hen Jim Shapiro, a fellow Shakespeare scholar and the Larry Miller Professor of English at Columbia, first started teaching his Shakespeare lecture at the university in 1985, he turned to his close friend Kastan for advice. “He gave me a joke or a line for ‘The Tempest’ to get the class going,” Shapiro says.
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“He’d give me his best stuff and it would always work, even if I was skeptical.” At the time, Kastan was still a professor at Dartmouth, where he taught from 1973 to 1987. On October 8, 1985, Kastan remembers reading the New York Times obituary for Bernard Beckerman, a Professor of Dramatic Literature at Columbia who specialized in Shakespeare. “I repressed a slight sense of hope that maybe I’d have a job [at Columbia],” he says. During his last year at Dartmouth, he took a position as a visiting professor at Columbia, a job that soon after resulted in an offer for a permanent position. He thought for a mere 10 seconds before taking the opportunity to return to his beloved New York City. By the time Kastan began offering his own Shakespeare lecture at the university, Shapiro had been teaching his course for two years. “Students would go in to him and say, ‘We love your class Professor Kastan, but why are you retelling Professor Shapiro’s jokes?’” Shapiro says, laughing. The collaboration between the two professors led to morning coffee discussions, secondhand book shopping, and a team-taught undergraduate seminar, among other joint projects. “He’s one of the few people who sees around the corner, so to speak,” Shapiro says. “He’s probably the most
bound editions of Shakespeare plays, Renaissance textbooks, and other fading editions that spill onto the floor where they rest in thick piles. The shelves also house old newspaper clippings, caricaturist Shakespeare figurines, and the 2004 Time magazine cover chronicling the Red Sox’s underdog victory, one which Kastan had feared he’d never live to see. Centered on the room’s back wall is a framed painting of a slightly lopsided Shakespeare that Kastan’s daughter, Marina, created when she was six. Now 26, she is finishing her master’s in library science and is looking to work as an archivist in a rare book room, no doubt a desire that arose from her father’s deep-seated interest in the history of the book. To the left of the painting is another photograph of the Sox’s win, this one signed by David Ortiz. It was a gift from Kastan’s stepson, a student at Northwestern who is pursuing a career in reality television production. Kastan’s wife of seven years, Jane, the Special Advisor to the Dean of Yale Law School, is featured in various photographs that are scattered along the bookshelves. It’s partially due to her that Kastan ended up in this LC office four years ago. “I career counseled him,” she says of the decision to leave Columbia, where he had chaired the Department of English
“He shares ideas, gives ideas away. Academics for the most part tend to be hoarders rather than sharers.” generous scholar to younger scholars in the business. He shares ideas, gives ideas away. Academics for the most part tend to be hoarders rather than sharers.” nside Kastan’s office is a mix of the playful and the scholarly. Each wall is lined with bookshelves, the contents of which are crowded with gold
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and Comparative Literature since 2004. The position didn’t come without its difficulties in a department that was often divided, and the choice to step down was in many ways just as difficult as the job itself had proven. “We don’t treat former chairs very well — people who have a lot of power and then don’t,” Shapiro explains. “We tend to kick around a little bit in a rough and tumble
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profile department like Columbia.” When the time came for Kastan to again embark on an alternative path, he responded to Yale, a school that had been wooing him with a position and its vast collection of Shakespearean resources since 2005. Kastan’s first unsupervised visit to Yale — one without the lunches, lectures, and dinners arranged for prospective faculty — came on a fortunate day. “It was a slightly cold evening, kind of misty, and all these people were running around in weird costumes,” he says. “It was like being in a Fellini movie. I thought, this is either the most creative place or there is something just utterly bizarre about the water supply.” The chilly evening was Tap Night. It also proved to be a tap night of sorts for Kastan — he took his chances and officially began at the university at the start of the following academic year. n a Wednesday night in a seminar room located a few floors above LC 101, thirteen English graduate students are seated around a long table. With a few exceptions they are clothed in what might be deemed traditional hipster garb — plaid button-downs, worn jeans, Oxford lace-ups. On an adjacent table is a loaf of bread and cheese. Once six o’clock hits they decide to dig in rather than wait for “David,” who’s bringing the wine. Kastan arrives slightly late dressed in his usual attire: jeans, a polo, and a suit jacket. He hurriedly rushes in sans liquor, then dashes upstairs to his office and returns a few minutes later with two plastic bags filled with $10 bottles of wine. The class isn’t one that can be found in the Bluebook. In fact, it’s not really a class at all. If it were, it might be called a dissertation workshop. In reality, it’s an informal conversation between the students and Kastan, who doesn’t sit at the head of the table, but instead along the side. Students are there to offer critiques of each other’s dissertations. There is no credit involved and no minced words. “I think this is a brilliant paper … but not a very good one,” opens one student in
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response to his peer’s work. The informal gathering is something that Kastan has long encouraged in his relationships with students. Just like those early field trips in the Bronx, education isn’t limited to the classroom, and Kastan’s position is more that of the wise older friend than the distant professor. “He doesn’t think here’s your academic work and then here’s private life, perfectly segregated,” says Jesse Lander, the current Director of Graduate Studies at the University of Notre Dame and a former student of Kastan’s from Columbia. “In fact, there’s a kind of continuum and people can go out and have drinks together … it’s a conversation that flows across those [academic] boundaries.” few minutes before he’s called to the podium to give the opening lecture for the “Remembering Shakespeare” exhibit, Kastan paces, head down, behind the stage. The talk is being held in the Beinecke, in a second-floor space that is even darker than usual as fading afternoon light seeps dimly through the translucent marble. The center of the floor is interrupted by a rectangular glass column that rises, filled with aged stacks of books, from the bottom floor of the library. To the left of the column, row after row of seats are filled with students and visitors — there aren’t enough chairs and eager guests wind around the staircase to listen. “I’m thrilled, honored, and a little terrified,” Kastan remarks, referring to the crowd, after his cocurator, Kathryn James, introduces him. The same three words could describe the scope of the project he dreamed up at 3 a.m. in the spring of 2010, when he sent an e-mail to University President Richard Levin with a rough sketch of his idea: a program that would envelop every part of the campus in some aspect of Shakespeare in the Spring 2012 semester. By six o’clock that morning he had received a response: Levin enthusiastically gave him the green light. For Kastan, coordinating the Festival
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is a way to avoid his most distressing concern about himself. “I think my great fear is that fundamentally I’m lazy,” he says. “To prevent that from being realized I overcommit to things so that I can avoid that terrible self-knowledge.” It’s this same fear that drives him to embark on multiple editing and writing projects at the same time, from editions of “Paradise Lost” that eager Directed Studies students place before him, requesting his signature, to the “Barnes and Noble Shakespeare,” for which he is the series editor. These editing projects, which Kastan acknowledges could easily be perceived by some as fussy and tedious endeavors, provide an unexpected pleasure. It’s one that carries over into classroom lectures and seminar discussions about the meaning of a section of dialogue in “Hamlet” or a single line in “Macbeth” or even a single word in a sonnet. “It’s sometimes a fantasy,” he admits of understanding Shakespeare’s intended meaning. “But it’s an enabling fantasy. It’s the thought that you might be able to get it right.” The performance in the Beinecke is one of the rare moments when Kastan seems less than self-assured as a public speaker, losing his place in his speech and stumbling over a few words. While he’s used to giving public lectures for students, scholars, and the general public, this late Wednesday afternoon in the Beinecke is different: the large crowd is an acknowledgment of Shakespeare at Yale’s success, and, in turn, Kastan’s efforts to showcase the Bard’s applicability within and beyond the classroom. Although his students might attribute this ability to enliven the material to his talents as an entertainer, Kastan doesn’t consider himself a performer in the traditional sense of the word. “To the degree that I perform, what I perform is my own delight in studying Shakespeare,” he asserts. “But that’s a different kind of performance.” DDD
Small Orange Circles
By Carlos Gomez Illustrations by Maria Haras
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fiction
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t was Anthony who first told me the Sun would explode. He said he’d seen it in a magazine. (Or a book, he couldn’t remember. Didn’t I read?) He was kicking a pebble, or a soda can — or maybe he wasn’t kicking anything at all — it doesn’t matter. What does matter is that Anthony had the air of someone who would be kicking a pebble or a soda can or stepping on every line in the sidewalk as he tossed aside this remark, accompanied by a smug glance and the crack of a smirk that would inevitably fissure up to his remarkably small ears. I said uuf-did you hear the Sun’s g-onna explode? Anthony paused, waiting for a reaction he knew would never come, as he kicked or stomped and I walked down Laurelwood on the way to the house. I couldn’t call him a liar because if he was telling the truth I would look stupid; and if I said I had heard this before he would question me until I looked like a stupid liar. Anthony let the silence collect before he continued, breathily stressing the syllables that fell with the irregular rhythm of his sneakered feet. It’s tr-ue I even — heard Mr. Sand-er-son say so in the t-eacher’s lounge. Mr. Sanderson spent a majority of his day in the teacher’s lounge, so this I found easier to believe. I used to watch him nibble the leftover danishes on the conference table as Anthony took soda from the faculty drink machine. Mr. Sanderson had shiny eyes and kept a checkered handkerchief in his back pocket, and nine-year-old Anthony knew he wouldn’t look up from his paper except to move on to the coffee cake or mop his infinite forehead. Anthony would stroll by as easily as one could with bulging pockets and sagging shorts and return to our cafeteria table to hand out his spoils — slowly, deliberately — ensuring we never forgot who was giving them. We didn’t. Danny, Harrison, and I — none
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of us had the balls to be Anthony, so we gratefully accepted our gifts and passed them around, holding them nervously and checking for someone watching until Anthony brought his to his lips, rolled his eyes and said, Haven’t you seen a cigarette before? Put it in your mouth. He lit his quickly, cupping the flame and bringing it to the end until a tiny orange circle hissed into life. I was sure he’d been practicing. He leaned back against the tree, exhaling with a sigh as if to suggest he’d been smoking all of his fifteen-year-old life. The cigarette was wedged uncomfortably between his index and middle fingers. He exhaled and moved his arm with spindly bravado, smoke curling out of his thin smile and up past his miniature ears into the autumn air. Anthony stood up and extended the flame to Danny and Harrison. They craned their necks forward and up, cigarettes poking out from the center of their clamped lips. I hesitated — a quiet and unnoticed rebellion — before taking the lighter and doing it myself. Anthony sat back down and began thumbing the lighter, the flame blinking on his brown eyes as they darted from face to face to see who was watching. But then the orange spark seemed to recede into his pupils and he went silent, going someplace we weren’t welcome. The rest of us were quiet too, busy contorting our mouths to exhale like the guy in the flannel jacket who sat behind the football field at lunch. Danny asked Anthony where he’d gotten them. My nana. He paused and stared skeptically at the end of his cigarette, like he was expecting something different. He continued the scrape and snap of the lighter.
fiction I’m doing her a favor. She’s old. Shouldn’t be smoking anyway. Harrison chuckled, the dark scab on his chin stretching and shaking, and Danny began talking about how his cousin used to smoke, or something, I don’t know. Danny talked a lot. He was small and eager, with a flop of blonde hair that flipped up and back down when he blew it out of his eyes. Harrison was quieter, taller — rarely speaking unless Anthony was being especially cruel to Danny. Anthony, still puffing away at his grandmother’s Virginia Slim, peered over at Harrison, looking decidedly pleased that he seemed to be forgiven. We could’ve used my ID, I said suddenly, remembering. I pulled out my brother’s old license from my jeans pocket. It was a gift he had given me before leaving for college a year before. In eleven months I would be twenty-one. I carried it with me everywhere, just in case we were ever in sudden need of porn or a millionto-one chance at ten million dollars. It had become a secret source of pride, and I had told Anthony the week before we should go to the Pik‘n’Pak and try it on something. It looked more like him anyway. He snatched it up and laughed. No one’s gonna believe you’re twenty. Looks more like me anyway. I tried to grab it back, but Anthony pulled away, howling, and turned around to look closer at it. Every muscle in my body contracted as the fingernails I’d chewed into flaky ridges dug into my palm. This is when I hated Anthony, when my eyes would close and his sneering voice would become increasingly shrill, his face growing lines beside his mouth saying looks more like me anywaylooksmorelikmanywayloksmorlkmenyway until the edges would blur and he’d start chugging out smoke and why were we forgetting that he shoved Harrison last weekend and made him bleed and just when I was sure that yes I really did hate him he would grab me around the neck in a headlocked hug and whisper excitedly. Let’s go get the beer from the house. Just you and me. He reeked of his cigarette and I realized I probably did too. I reminded myself to air off or rub a dryer sheet on my clothes before I got back home. My knees cracked as I stood up, pushing Anthony’s arms off before walking up the hill. The house was two stories of rotten wood and memories. It had probably been standing since the 1800s and looked like it couldn’t have been abandoned much later. We found it in third grade in the patch of trees behind Mechum’s Creek, back when it still had most its windows and all of its staircase, which crumbled the first time Anthony tried to race up to the second floor. There
The sun wouldn’t explode like Anthony had told me the day before, but it would burn out more than a billion years earlier than predicted. was no door, so I walked right in as carelessly as I would my own home. I could barely see anything, but the floor felt dusty and I knew it hadn’t been swept since that day we decided to fix it up and sell it for money, before property and trespass were on our vocabulary lists. We didn’t really spend much time here after middle school, but we still practiced the same finders-keepers ethos we had in the beginning; it was where we invariably went when we had nowhere to go and where, on the second floor next to the hole that used to connect to the staircase, we kept the beer Danny’s cousin would sometimes buy us. Anthony climbed up and grabbed the ten remaining cans, loading them one by one into the hammock of his shirt. I held the stepladder. Anthony hopped back down and sat on the stoop outside, expecting me to do the same, and slowly rolled the cans into the dirt with a metallic thud. He grabbed two and opened one, passing the other to me, and then lit two cigarettes. I sat down on the step next to him, took a sip and grimaced. They didn’t taste like they had three weeks ago. Suck it up. There are orphans in Africa who don’t even have beer. Anthony grinned and cocked his head towards the sky, black dotted with orange, the harvest moon still rising. He was looking nowhere in particular but sank back into the same faraway look he’d had by the tree. Three billion years, he’d said. Three billion years until the sun would no longer illuminate the moon. Three billion years, Mr. Sanderson had repeated, eyes wide, clearly underwhelmed by the lack of reaction he’d gotten from his nine-year-old audience. The class was silent. I could see the white spot of fluorescent light slide over Mr. Sanderson’s polished forehead from my seat in the back row, behind Anthony. The sun wouldn’t explode like Anthony had told me the day before, but it would burn out more than a billion years earlier than predicted. Scientists had announced it. I imagined men in white coats squinting through telescopes and jotting things down on clipboards with low mutterings and solemn nods ydnmag.com | Yale Daily News Magazine | 39
fiction as the class went still, except for Anthony, who turned to me and smirked, proven right. A billion seconds is thirty-one years, Mr. Sanderson said, trying to help us process a change of information we never had in the first place. A billion was a lot, but there were still three of them between now and then and it was hard to think of the end of the world when the house was about to catch fire. It was small at first — a tiny, indistinct orange blur — and I kept peeing, thinking it was the butt of his cigarette through the trees. But it grew and then hissed and then I ran back hollering to find him just standing there while a small brush fire was eating away at the bank of leaves against the house. It was spreading quickly, a black hole of burnt brush spreading outwards from beneath the flames, but it hadn’t caught on the house yet even though it was licking the dry wooden base. I didn’t have time to consider Anthony as I ran and tried to stamp it out, leaning back so my face wasn’t over the fire, looking like an anxious swimmer obsessively toeing the water. The leaves gave and spread, compressing then rising back up before catching and floating and then disintegrating into the orange mass. It
must’ve been the cigarettes but I was pretty sure I’d put mine out so it must’ve been his though it didn’t matter now because I’d put out the right side but the left had grown and crept another two feet up the wooden siding. I yelled at him and my voice was unusually clear and enunciated with panic but he just stood there, not looking sad or scared or even guilty but excited. His face was still and his eyes were dark except the bright flames that played across their surface, the flames that were now spitting as I tried to step on the left side, turning my foot into the pile to scoop out the leafy embers. The leaves spread out on the dirt next to the beer and died out but the others hadn’t and the right was burning again and he still wasn’t doing anything and was he smiling while I ran back over and toed and stamped and scooped. Harrison and Danny ran up from the creek and looked confused and startled and tried to help, poking the fire with their shoes. We should get water from the creek! But we had nothing to put it in except empty beer cans and by then it’d be too late and Harrison and Danny slowed down and backed up, seeing before I did that it already was. I stopped finally, my face and clothes soaked with
SIX O’CLOCK My father parks what he calls his blonde truck a little too close to other cars on the block, to conserve space. He yells “Hark” when he comes home, and “Hark,” my mother responds quietly. She’s reading the paper.
Afterward, the scent of burnt garlic wafts from the kitchen. My father’s cooking dinner. He’s arranged bell peppers over a pile of ground meat, a pinwheel he’s proud of, and which he photographs.
“What is a kiss?” my father asks the dog, who licks his face. “You don’t know what a kiss is.” He stretches out on the floor in front of our television set, grinding his lower back onto the coffee table, waiting for a pop.
“White Sox are on now,” he says, and the jocular timbre of the announcer fills the room like a familiar friend. He calls a fly ball a “can of corn.”
At the end of the news hour, the crew of a space shuttle comes on for an interview. They try to stay in some approximation of a seated position, but they float upwards. One man has all but given up — you can see him giggling as his head bumps the ceiling.
For the first time we’re curious. “Easy to reach,” my father says. He plays with the chocolate ice cream on his spoon, creating a creamy sculpture.
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“Can of corn,” he says in twenty different voices. He likes it.
– Casey Blue James
fiction smoke and sweat. I wanted to throw up. What if the trees caught? What if it spread? (It’s not windy, dirt doesn’t burn, we’ll stay and watch, relax.) I couldn’t just do nothing but there was nothing to do so I ran around once, frantically and uselessly clearing away the leaves I could with my hands then my feet and hoping it stayed contained. The fire was now seeping into the second floor without the staircase or stepladder. It hadn’t spread everywhere yet but it was rising steadily over the right of the doorway and was about to turn the corner of the small house. I was panting. My voice warbled. We needed to call the firemen or police or something but we’d get caught and get in trouble, yes, but still, but fine, but he promised we would call if it got out of control. He held the same expression as before, indifference glazed with mirth, absorbing the momentary thrill. He caught me around the neck in the crook of his elbow and choked me a little as he pulled me in to watch. We were getting too old for this anyway. If we’re not using it no one should. Did you — No. Sirens echoed up by Laurelwood, about to turn right on Grady and down to the fence and the field
where the house was ablaze and we’d be arrested but we were already across Mechum’s, sprinting the other way. Anthony, the fastest, was in front, jacket flapping behind him with the rest of us. My ears were numb as the air cut across them and I could only focus on the sounds of my own breathing and the light crunch of wild grass beneath my feet which didn’t even stay long enough on the ground to make much sound. And then Anthony was laughing, bent over with his hands on his knees and catching his breath as my stomach dropped like I’d just missed a step. We all stopped and Danny and Harrison sat down, chuckling, and I — finally — did too, from relief then disbelief then exhaustion. And then I stopped and my grin died and I checked and, no, I didn’t, but did he? I looked up and he looked back and I knew and for the second time I was going to be sick and I sped through scenarios of what I’d say when they asked Why was your brother’s license found by the fire? They were holding the ID he’d taken from me and not given back. It seemed disproportionately small. I could lie but they’d seen the beer and they had the ID and they weren’t stupid; and if I told them everything Anthony would come in and I didn’t care if he got in trouble but he’d bring in Danny and Harrison and I would still be in trouble regardless. I was trapped. It didn’t matter what actually happened. It only mattered what I told them and what they believed. I would say it was an accident. They’d said only half of it burned — I imagined the right half black, charred and crumbling, the left perfectly preserved. They’d said it would probably be torn down. If only it mattered that it looked more like him anyway. I looked out my kitchen window onto Knox, which met Laurelwood in another half mile. I didn’t know where Anthony was. I didn’t know if he did it on purpose, any of it, but I knew he’d again go free. I was silent, mentally preparing my admission of guilt, editing and omitting anything I could to minimize blame and simultaneously take it all. In a brief moment of perverse pleasure I imagined Anthony, somewhere close, sweating over what I’d say. But nothing had changed for him. There was no way he’d seen them come or knew what was happening — him and his tiny ears. The orphans in Africa didn’t even have beer. Millions of miles away the sun was burning at the same rate it always had. D D D
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Observer
The Physical level D by raisa bruner D
photos by raisa bruner / contributing photographer
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t the bottom of Stair 96, in the steamy, labyrinthine bowels of Payne Whitney Gymnasium, there’s a sign scotch-taped to the wall: “SPINNING CLASS THIS WAY” it instructs cheerily, and a scribbled red arrow points down the hallway. In the opposite direction, the loud thumping bass of techno music reverberates throughout the heavyweight crew team’s training room. The basement smells of chlorine and sweat, and my footsteps echo off the tiled floors and the brick-lined walls. I pass the swim team locker rooms, loud with the spray of shower water, and shuffle by a wall lined with hundreds of framed plaques, a display of All-American Swimming and Diving awards. Six more “SPINNING CLASS THIS WAY” signs direct me at corners to go right, left, right, down endless hallways. It would be easy, I think, to get lost down here, in this foreign land of athleticism: I’m no local, and I have no map. Payne Whitney Gymnasium is, in a measure of cubic 42 | Vol. XXXIX, No. 5 | February 2012
feet, the second-largest gym in the world. Nine and a half stories. Three wings. A grand and imposing Gothic stone structure shrouded in the blue-net scaffolding of a nearly $100 million restoration project spanning more than a decade. It is the home of 17 varsity athletics teams, and the regular haunt of 2,500 students and gym members on a daily basis. If Sterling Memorial Library is a cathedral of knowledge, Payne Whitney might be considered a Vatican State of athleticism, a self-sustaining, independent universe of fitness with its own unspoken laws and order. As a non-athlete undergraduate without great enthusiasm for athletic endeavors, I’m no citizen of this state. I am an outsider, not even a frequent visitor: at the start of this semester, I could count on one hand the number of times I had ventured down its hallways, and that included my forays during Bulldog Days at the Activities Bazaars. My experience is not unique, either: most “normies” avoid the grand entrance hall of Payne Whitney and
observer instead get their fitness fix burrowed deep beneath their residential colleges in smaller, less intimidating gyms. But for me, and for many other Yale women, that hesitation to make the trek to Tower Parkway might be changing. After all, one does not go to Payne Whitney only to worship at the altar of varsity athletics; one can also go to dabble in fitness at one’s leisure. In fact, on average over 1,000 Yale students and community members now participate each semester in the gym’s physical education program, which offers an array of over 70 different classes. Participation in classes is up about 10 percent this year, according to Director of Physical Education Duke Diaz. And much of that increase can be attributed to the recent addition of spinning to the program’s class offerings. D When New Year’s rolled around this year, I didn’t bother to make a resolution. But a friend of mine did, and she insisted that we sign up for a class at Payne Whitney. I agreed to the plan, partly to placate her and partly because the prospect of a sedentary winter left me concerned about the state my muscle mass might be in for spring break. “We’re going to do spinning!” she said, and although I had never heard of the exercise, I woke up early to blearily register for my session on the Payne Whitney website. Classes at the gym tend to sell out, and fast: last semester, when spinning was first introduced to the program, 300 people attempted to register in the space of three hours. With 10 sessions offered, each meeting twice weekly and costing $120 for the semester, the decision to sign up for a spinning class is no small commitment. It is, however, becoming a very popular one. “Spinning has energized the program,” Diaz explains to me. Sitting behind his broad desk in his fifthfloor office in Payne Whitney, the mustachioed Diaz expresses a great deal of satisfaction with the state of the physical education program and the opportunities that he has been able to usher in over the past three years. Along with other energetic, cardio-based classes like salsa, cardio-kickboxing, and Zumba, spinning has helped bring greater numbers of students to Payne Whitney in a more recreational context and has reflected a movement amongst students towards engaging in athletics. “I think the interest in wellness and fitness is higher than it’s ever been,” he added. Participation in Payne Whitney classes is also higher than it’s ever been, with the majority of participants — around 80 percent, according to Diaz — coming from Yale College, a majority of them women. Spinning is
In a windowless room on an upper floor, white-clothed men would instruct you to strip down, attach metal pins to your spine, and then photograph your nude profile. Was your body good enough? the nameless, silent photographers asked. the most-subscribed class offered this semester; Payne Whitney has even hired a seventh instructor and added more sessions in order to satisfy demand. D At 7:00 a.m. on a Tuesday, I don’t want to be awake. But my suitemate and I are already making the brisk trek in the biting cold from our suite on Old Campus, down Elm Street, up Broadway, between Morse and Stiles, and across Tower Parkway. Eleven minutes later, we enter the entrance hall of Payne Whitney, and I yawn. Down Stair 96 we stumble, through the basement halls, and finally, into the spinning room itself. The lighting is dim. Strewn artlessly around the room, ropes of white Christmas lights are a festive, if odd, wall decoration. A few fake trees fill the corners, while large, industrial-sized fans prepare to keep the space ventilated. Twelve stationary bikes stand facing a mirrored wall; one other bike, the instructor’s, is positioned facing the pack near the stereo. As we adjust the height and positioning of our bike seats and handlebars, our peppy young instructor begins to pump beat-heavy pop music. We are a fleet of seven young women this morning, in various states of fitness, in various states of consciousness. And we are about to get a very good workout. The point of spinning is simple: to give you a fast-paced, high-energy, efficient workout in a stimulating environment. You thrive on the energy of your fellow riders, on the enthusiasm and intensity of your instructor, and on the thrill of the disco-like environment with its blasting pop music and clublike atmosphere. Instructors take you through interval and endurance training, simulate the experience of ydnmag.com | Yale Daily News Magazine | 43
observer “rough terrain” and “long-distance” rides, dish out encouragement, and focus on intensity. Your heart rate goes up, you sweat, you spin, and when you’re done, you feel like you’ve accomplished something. No wonder spinning morphed quickly into an enduring exercise fad. Developed in 1989, early addicts flocked to Johnny G’s Spin Studio in Santa Monica, California to burn 600 calories in an hour-long workout. Now spinning is a global fitness phenomenon, and Yalies this year have proved themselves to be no exception among its obsessive ranks. D If you were a Yale student in the 1950s, your freshman orientation program involved a visit to Payne Whitney — but not to work out. Instead, in a windowless room on an upper floor, white-clothed men would instruct you to strip down, attach metal pins to your spine, and then photograph your nude profile. This was a posture test, to confirm that your back was as straight as it ought to be. If not, rumor was, you were required to attend remedial posture classes. This disturbing practice — which was widespread across the Ivy League before co-education — was abandoned in the 1970s and most of the images it produced have been destroyed. But what has remained is the idea of the gym as a place of judgment, as a place of being put on display and analyzed on a critical, physical level. Was your body good enough? the nameless, silent photographers
asked. And in the intervening half-century, that attitude about the gym hasn’t really changed. Of course, now both men and women venture to the machines to tone their arms, dissolve their cellulite, and flatten their abs. And now they are doing it for the objective gaze of the mirror — and for the subjective gaze of each other. But the question remains: is my body good enough? And then: how can I make it better? Yalies like me are commonly characterized as being obsessed with achievement, driven by perfectionism, and motivated by goals. It makes sense that we tend to get serious about fitness. We’re also, it has been said, intensely insecure, in constant need of positive reinforcement, and self-conscious to an extreme. Finding some modicum of reassurance through success and positive feedback is critical, I’ll admit. In Sterling and in Bass, bastions of the brainy, we bury ourselves in books and hunch over our laptops, seeking — and generally achieving — academic success. But in Payne Whitney, a monumental structure dedicated to the shaping of the physical self, those of us who are less than fit shrink back from the mirror and even from the intimidating entrance hall. Our athletic peers stride around us, confident, at home. I scurry to Stair 96. Still, it’s a start that I’m here at all. D On Mondays, Flavia, a student at the medical school, teaches my evening spinning class. She is svelte, tanskinned, and Jamaican. Her lilting voice rises over the beats of her dubstep remixes and club music to remind us to push harder, think of our goals, remember why we signed up for this class in the first place. “You should be at 90 percent maximum heart rate!” she calls out, and I can tell in the mirror — even in the dim lighting — that my face is bright red from exertion. My thighs are burning. In Position 3 (hands way up on the handlebars, butt up off the saddle), we ratchet up the resistance level of our bikes until each downward pedal stroke feels like we’re pushing through sand. “Ten more seconds!” As we finish our stretches at the end of class to Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep,” I’m overheated, sweaty, sore — but invigorated. Back in the entrance hall, I’m not so timid anymore; I belong in this building now, I remind myself, all nine and a half impressive stories of it, right along with the heavyweight rowers and gymnasts and divers who populate its hallways and locker rooms. And as I cool off on the walk back to my suite, I can say that in my own way, I’m now an athlete too. DDD
44 | Vol. XXXIX, No. 5 | February 2012
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