Yale Herald Literary Issue Spring 2016

FROM THE STAFF “The ability to read awoke inside of me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.” – Malcolm X This week Lemonade came out, the names of two new colleges were announced, the title of master was abolished, and Calhoun was allowed to remain. Words and art have not been at a premium this high since the courageous spirit of the fall sliced through the core of the Yale campus. Now, more than ever, we need the truth. Now, more than ever, we need the force of art to transform elemental truth into great power.

This week the Herald is different. This week the Herald is a little bit of a character.

This week the Herald is eccentric and fun and sad and romantic etc., etc. Read essays that make you question your ideas about pain and sex. Stories that haunt or make you laugh out loud. Poems to keep you warm on days that are full of loneliness and cold weather. Photographs to transport you. A scene that will acquaint you with loss like you have never seen it.

I ask you to use this issue as a restorative thing. Not a means of escape, but a different avenue by which to reflect. Allow the art to heal you and inspire thought and thoughtfulness. Read it wherever you like, with whomever you like. Make it into a picketing sign. Use it as the paper on which you dash out a protest poem. Hold it over your head if it rains at the Janelle Monáe concert. It doesn’t matter what it does for you, so long as it is dynamic. Let this issue force you down a path of action no matter where it may lead.

Though this issue is formally themeless, some may be disappointed that it doesn’t have more to do with SUMMER or SPRING FLING or something of a nature more respecting of the joy found at the end of a school year. However, it is important to acknowledge that art is not intended to be easy, nor is it meant to circumvent discomfort. The priority of this issue is to make art central to the discussions on campus and, in whatever way it can, to provide an outlet to those struggling to reconcile the events of the past week.

Also Lemonade. Lemonade is dope.

Love, Olivia Klevorn Special Issues Editor

The Yale Herald Volume LIX, Number 12 New Haven, Conn.

Friday, April 29, 2016 EDITORIAL STAFF: Special Issue Editor: Olivia Klevorn Editor-in-chief: Sarah Holder Managing Editors: Brady Currey, Tom Cusano, Rachel Strodel Executive Editors: Kohler Bruno, Austin Bryniarski, Sophie Haigney, David Rossler, Alessandra Roubini, Lily SawyerKaplan, Lara Sokoloff, Charlotte Weiner Senior Editors: Libbie Katsev, Carly Lovejoy, Kendrick McDonald, Anna Meixler, Jake Orbison, Jake Stein Culture Editor: Lora Kelley Features Editors: Emma Chanen, Calvin Harrison Opinion Editors: Charlotte Ferenbach, Lea Rice Reviews Editors: Luke Chang, Joe Kuperschmidt Voices Editor: Olivia Klevorn Insert Editor: Elias Bartholomew Audio Editors: Phoebe Petrovic, Korinayo Thompson Copy Editors: Genevieve Abele, Alexander Mutuc, Allison Primak ONLINE STAFF: Online Editor: Zoe Dobuler Bullblog Editors: Jeremy Hoffman, Caleb Moran DESIGN STAFF: Graphics Editors: Haewon Ma, Claire Sheen Executive Design Editors: Ben McCoubrey, Kai Takahashi BUSINESS STAFF: Publishers: Olivia Briffault, Russell Heller, Ellen Kim, Jocelyn Lehman The Yale Herald is a not-for-profit, non-partisan, incorporated student publication registered with the Yale College Dean’s Office.

If you wish to subscribe to the Herald, please send a check payable to The Yale Herald to the address below. Receive the Herald for one semester for 40 dollars, or for the 2015-2016 academic year for 65 dollars.

Please address correspondence to: The Yale Herald P.O. Box 201653 Yale Station New Haven, CT 06520-1653 sarah.holder@yale.edu www.yaleherald.com The Yale Herald is published by Yale College students, and Yale University is not responsible for its contents. All opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the views of The Yale Herald, Inc. or Yale University.

Copyright 2016, The Yale Herald, Inc. Have a nice day.

Cover by Ben McCoubrey YH Staff

2 – The Yale Herald

THIS WEEK

Incoming Claudia Rankine Honestly, word. She’s great. But good luck trying to fit in her seminar room on the first day of classes.

Outgoing All hope concerning Yale’s naming decisions

In this issue 6 – Photography by Alex Zhang, CC ’18.

7 – Essay by Olivia Klevorn, SM ’17.

Friday The Good Show Davenport Theater 8:00 p.m.

Friday ¡Oyé!’s (almost) 10th Anniversary Block Party La Casa 8:30 p.m.

Saturday Spring Fling Old Campus 3 p.m.

Sunday

8 – Poetry by Claire Grishaw-Jones, MC ’17, Hayley Kolding, SY ’17, and Kathryn Kaelin, SY ’16.

9 – Fiction by Ivy Nyayieka, BR ’17.

10 – Non-fiction by Rachel Calnek-Sugin, SM ’19.

12 – Scenes by Stefani Kuo, PC ’16.

16 – Fiction by Devon Geyelin, TC ’16.

18 – Non-fiction by Yi-Ling Liu, SM ’17, and David Rossler, SM ’17.

20 – Poetry by Max Weinreich, BR ’19.

21 – Book reviews by Ivan Kirwan-Taylor, JE ’18, and Olivia Valdes, JE ’16, along with an Instagram review by Lora Kelley DC ’17.

The Letter Project Sterling Memorial Library 2 p.m.

April 29, 2016 – 3

CREDIT D FAIL

THE NUMBERS

Junie B. Jones Is A Party Animal Junie B. might be working hard in kindergarten, but that doesn’t mean that she can’t play even harder.

It’s no surprise that a kindergartner needs to cut loose. Frequently subjected to interminable Reading Rainbow marathons and instructed to stack ill-shaped blocks that will inevitably fall down— serving as a metaphor for the children’s fragile psyches—any kid would be full of rage towards the LeVar Burton educational complex.

So maybe Junie B.’s had enough. Maybe she just needs to go to Lucille’s nana’s house for that sleepover. And maybe, just maybe, Junie B. huffs some craft glue from the Creativity Corner, steals her mom’s wallet, and goes on a strung out binge through town before waking up in Lucille’s nana’s basement, covered in Oreo crumbs, crayon shavings, and just a little bit of cocaine. That’s just Junie B. She is a party animal.

Foster Wallace’s magnum opus, Infinite Jest.

555 – the number of pages that I have read of Infinite Jest thus far.

118 – the number of days since the 28th of December, a.k.a. the fateful date I purchased this earth-shattering work.

.19597 – the average number of

pages I have read per hour since purchasing said pièce de résistance.

7.125 billion – the number of people I’ve told that I’m reading Infinite Jest.

Junie B. Jones Smells Something Fishy

Sources: 1) the well-thumbed tome in my hands 2) the position of the falafel-takeout menu I use as a bookmark 3) https://days.to 4) TI-84 Plus Silver Edition 5) internal reflection 6) resulting collective groans

Conspiracies: we all believe them, but only the brave among us will stand on street corners and hand out fliers explaining the government’s role in the creation of the word “whom.”

This important novel, reminiscent of Pat Robertson’s The New World Order in both its complexity of prose and the unapologetic spotlight it places on fishy business, is a classic example of Junie B. keeping her eyes wide open. Unfortunately, the consequences are overwhelming paranoia and estrangement from her friends and family—standard themes of the Junie B. series. I identify with J.B. here because I, too, am the victim of several conspiracies. Are we really expected to believe that we switch from velcro shoes to laces at a certain age because it makes more sense?

Wake up, sheeple. If staying alert means never trusting anyone again, sign me up. I’ve only ever trusted Junie anyways.

-Marc Shkurovich

Top five Best ways to end your novel.

Junie B. Jones and the Yucky Blucky Fruitcake As a lifelong fan of both fruit and cake, I can’t help but feel that Junie B. has made a terrible misstep here. The fruitcake is not boastful. The fruitcake is not sexy. But the noble fruitcake is predicated on the simple, American ideal that we will not eat fruit unless it is added to a pastry, booze or, in the fruitcake’s case, both. It’s why Wildilicious Frosted Wild! Berry Pop-Tart has captivated the nation since its introduction in 2002, and why there are literally hundreds of YouTube videos that demonstrate how to give a watermelon a makeover by infusing it with the nuanced flavors of cheap vodka. If you add enough whiskey to a fruitcake, it can have a centuries-long shelf life. And to the future people who will feast upon the many fruitcakes I will bury in my yard: no, it is not “yucky blucky.” It’s simply misunderstood.

–Lea Rice YH Staff 4 – The Yale Herald

Index 1079 – the number of pages in David

5 – This is the end of the novel, please clap.

4 –¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 3 – And in this moment, I swear, we were moist.

2 – Franklin, the Novel was made possible by the generosity of Charles B. Johnson ’54 B.A., who considers Franklin a personal role model 1 – Never end your novel, because if you keep typing forever and ever, you’ll eventually write the sequel to Hamlet.

–Alex Saiontz

Take Yale with you this summer.

With Yale Summer Online courses, leaving campus doesn’t mean leaving Yale behind. Through our live video seminars, students discuss the coursework in real time, with direct access to top professors. So go. We’ll be right there with you.

Yale College Credit | 5 New Courses | Select Evening Courses

Summer Online APPLICATIONS NOW OPEN. For information and enrollment: summer.yale.edu/online Yale Summer Online | Same Veritas. More Links. ©Yale Summer Online 2016

sarah.holder@yale.edu

PHOTO ESSAY

Exerpt from “Love, Miami”

by Alex Zhang

6 – The Yale Herald

PERSONAL ESSAY

Tired but trying

by Olivia Klevorn YH Staff

“For black people, being around white people is sometimes like taking care of babies you don’t like, babies who throw up on you again and again, but whom you cannot punish, because they’re babies.”

“I’m just tired.”

This piece is hard to write. Fatigue. Exhaustion.

Defeat. Got me down.

Here I am, trying to explain again. Explain. Explain. Explain. Explaining is not what I want to do.

Explaining why keeping the name Calhoun College is a decision that reflects an institutional desire to uphold the legacy of WHITE SUPREMACY at the expense of students of color, is not what I want to do. Explaining why choosing Benjamin Franklin as the namesake for a new college—a betrayal of students’ trust in favor of capitalist gain—is not what I want to do. Explaining how allowing racist nomenclature to prevail over parts of this campus undermines Pauli Murray’s legacy and work and pain and love, is not what I want to do. But the question has never been what I want to do. The question Yale has posed to me is how much must I labor & ache & toil & sacrifice & cry & exploit my own pain to get you to understand. How much?

This is unfair. That this burden is placed heavy on my shoulders and those of the people I love.

Tell me why, in the past week, I have had to write an essay informing freshman that when walking onto this campus they are risk of falling victim to emotional policing that is racialized and gendered.

Tell me why, one day after writing that essay, I sat in the Silliman common room and had experience after experience invalidated in the name of rational discourse, intellectual freedom, and debate. Tell my why I cannot fathom myself as a freshman counselor because I do not know how to tell students of color that this institution can possibly be home.

Tell me why I am being made to believe that the institution took the steps it did to preserve something… what? I don’t even know.

Do not be mistaken. This is not a letter of defeat.

I am looking for and finding hope. I am looking for and finding resilience. It exists. Any estimation

of the power of students of color on this campus is an underestimation. We fight. Retaliate. Heal ourselves. Spread our spirits, fire, passion, clapbacks across campus. Look at the posters. Look at the men and women and trans-identifying people sitting in the front row with tape over their mouths.

We are a brave people. But understand that we are doing labor. That labor is exhausting. That unless you are carrying the legacies of those that have been whipped, beaten, abused, forgotten, chained, hosed, robbed, colonized, raped, broken. Unless you are trying to imbue the memories of those who have suffered with pride. Unless you are trying to accomplish enough that you can one day gift $250 million to rename a college with a face that looks like your mother’s. Then you do not understand.

Then you cannot understand. Then you must let us speak for that pain. Decenter yourselves.

Someone asked me last night if I would rather the college not have taken the money. I said fuck arguments about morality. It’s not humane for an institution to sacrifice the interests of those they claim to protect to the motives of capitalism. Fuck the idea that Yale could not be a college that pushed for the representation of people of color. Don’t tell me I am supposed to be a leader that seeks to improve the communal lot and then define leadership as the trickle down decisions of a board of white millionaires. Last night I had a certain head of college walk out of the room in the middle of a discussion as though the students he is charged with protecting were no more than minor disturbances to the trajectory of his night.

This is the reality I deal with. Administrators that cannot look me in the face. That cannot be honest.

That tells us they will alleviate our pain again and again and again and do anything but. Yes it is the corporation. Yes. But administrators are not beyond reproach. They have a responsibility to represent us.

They have failed. Defend Peter Salovey or Johnathan Holloway to me one more time.

Today I have been sitting in my room feeling sick.

Today I have been embraced for speaking my truth by students that witnessed administrators blatantly ignore it. Today I have watched Peter Salovey say,

“I agree” in the face of students of color as though anything has changed, as though the claims we make, our experiences, the pain we are in, are as simple as yes or no questions. You need to listen.

You need to respect. You need to learn to love.

Do not ask me anymore to do the labor of reeducation. Do not ask me to advocate for the fact of my existence on this campus. Let me shed some light and truth: I deserve to have an education that is not predicated on the invalidation of my selfhood.

I deserve to not have to walk down the street every day and see honorifics dedicated men who believed I was not a human but a tool for profit. I am tired.

I am exhausted. Fatigued. Broken but healing.

Please respect this. Please understand that writing this is labor. Please, please, please do not make me write it again.

Apr. 29, 2016 – 7

POETRY Elegy I once fell in love with a man who I later found was himself in love with a man and if I could give him anything, I would give him beautiful dreams in which the sky is the wrong color turn it lilac or gold or green, with clouds a violent crimson, say look, I still love you. It doesn’t matter if I am all wrong because of the way this happened or if you can never look at me again because you know how this is killing me. In this dream, I would take the face of the man I loved in my hands, knowing that I would never have him in the way that I wanted, saying look, it’s okay. This isn’t about what I want, this is about you disintegrating.

Love doesn’t end when we reach the point at which there is no longer hope. It changes.

It’s malleable. Compressible, like a piece of paper scratched over with truth crushed into the crumple of anxious hands.

The man I was in love with was in love with a man and he did not know how to speak to me, because he knew. I did not know how to tell him that it would kill me more to think that I lost him because of my own foolish affection than to think that I lost him because of wrong chromosomes, wrong time.

In that way, at least. I was afraid it was too late already, to say it doesn’t matter if I can’t have you.

There are things you need to hear, like everything you are is beautiful, regardless of what you or anyone believes, the patterns your breath crystallizes into winter air down to the way you smile like you mean it, I want you to know that. And I want you to know that it doesn’t matter that I am in love with you. If he is what you need, let yourself need him. It will be all right.

It feels like the end of the world, I know.

Keep going. We’re dying, we’re dying, the sky is burning, whatever, I want this world to be the place for you.

Stay here. You do not need to stay here with me, just stay here. Forgive yourself for this and for everything, know that I already have and if we have nothing left to say to each other, fine, but remember me in the crimson clouds, the golden sky, know that there were beings with heartbeats who loved you and I was one of them, because you were worth it. You still are and you have been and you will be. No amount of pain on my end will change my mind about that. ­—Claire Grishaw Jones

radiance Grandpa’s Letters I am just a golden brick of a child when Grandpa begins to send letters.

He writes as, towns away, I sleep, gingham-wrapped, little loaf in the basket my parents swing on their arms going everywhere. Nov. 27, 2000, scratches Grandpa’s pen, one he got for free at the doctor’s. 12:45 a.m.

Dear Hayley. Across the kitchen, quiet earthenware children form a line along the hearth, jug mouths open, maybe snoring.

The woodstove coughs, some pocket of moisture bursting from hickory lungs before the logs settle and its breathing evens.

Grandpa calls this stove the “Little Wonder.”

Like my hero, the Tin Woodman of Oz, he chops the wood for it himself.

It is as the Woodman that he writes, tonight, bridge of his glasses glinting in the kitchen bulb’s emerald glow.

A rainy day amongst the Munchkins, Hayley. The whole land was afloat.

I am poppy-sweet in sleep at this point.

Outside at Grandpa’s, the gutter drips.

If you want to know more, he writes, I’ve told your grandfather all about it.

Ask him to tell you what happened when the Witch got caught in the rain.

By now, little cyclones of steam are rising listlessly from the night’s last embers. He signs: The Tin Man. He sets down his pen. Rises, shuts off the light.

“Dousing the glim,” he calls this.

The next day, when I visit, he will walk me down to the garden.

We will find a dinged-up tin funnel like a calling card left in the grass.

—Hayley Kolding

there was honey in the carcass I cradled my head in the hollow of the ribs and I swallowed not the marrow but the fractaled golden stillness bees swarmed and stung empires rose and fell and I sucked and sucked until my limbs turned soft and my hair grew hard set still in the blood and the wax

—Kathryn Kaelin

8 – The Yale Herald

FICTION

Sharon and her paintings

by Ivy Nyayieka

W

e were all possessed, but Dad tried to get rid of his demons. It didn’t go well for him. When they found out, they decided to open the door, to stop waiting at the vestibule in the apartment of his brain and let themselves into the bedroom. Now they sit with him all day and all night and they demand all of his attention. It is very selfish the way they do it, too. They want him to either be quiet or be talking to them only. When he tries to speak to us, when his eyes look up and connect with our own, it is only for a second, and then the jealous brats interrupt, reminding him of something or telling him something untrue, shouting louder than we ever can because they are seated inside the bedroom inside his brain, and can we beat that?

So now we all walk around with our demons, afraid that keeping them where they are is the best we can ever do, that if we try to do anything about them they will only get bolder. We talk to them everyday.

Rather they talk to us. We reply. Mum when she is buying groceries.

Sharon when she is painting. TJ when he is in the middle of his math.

For all this trouble, negotiating conversations with demons, learning their language when they don’t bother with learning mine, making me learn myself, the places where the thread goes in and out at my every seam, the places where there are gaping holes and the places where I am full of vanilla ice cream, making me learn myself like I am my own foreign language. For all this trouble, I wish we had done something big in the world. I wish we had painted something or developed a model or something, something, anything that would alleviate human suffering. Something that would govern all oppression, so that nobody could do anything for themselves at the expense of another even if they wanted to. But all these demons have done so far is shout at their own will and go quiet, really quiet, at their own will too. There was a time when they were so quiet in Sharon, and she did not paint, and all of us were looking at her jealously, and she did not know what to do with her newfound freedom.

She went and got herself a beautiful girlfriend. Dad and Mum thought the girlfriend was “just a friend.” She was so happy, but she wore it funny, the happiness. Her smile always seemed crooked, like how makeup looks on someone who is just learning how to use it, like she could do better, like that smile did not belong on her face, like it was an impostor.

She looked at us funny, too. People look at us, and they treat us as if we are like them, like we could go to work in the morning and return in the evening and get coffee with friends and go swimming on Sunday afternoons. But Sharon knew that we were hiding something, and I think she wanted to save us. There was no way she was going to succeed. Between all our demon interaction and everything, she would have to come back to herself either because her demons would be cruel, or because some of our demons would go to her if she ever tried to pull us out.

So now, we are all of us living here, like this. And Sharon is painting again, and TJ is still doing his math, and Mum used to do something—must have done something even though I don’t remember what—but now she just looks at Dad and listens to his conversations with the demons, tries to participate when she can, but the demons won’t let her talk to the love of her life, and the way she insists on talking nevertheless. We can’t tell if her demons are in the vestibule or in the bedroom anymore.

Sometimes, when I look at Sharon’s paintings, they make my demons play music, and I smile. I imagine myself holding the canvas and raising it and bringing it down hard against the wall until it breaks into really tiny pieces of glass, and we have to remove glass from our hair and our eyes and the space between our toes and everywhere.

And then, I imagine, the demons take all their stuff and leave, and we never paint or make music or do math or anything. The demons take their stuff and then we laugh and we cry and we are anxious but only as much as we want to be. And I never have to worry about TJ laughing himself to death and killing all the rest of us just because he is laughing and laughing and laughing and laughing and finishing all the air on this earth and we can’t breathe anymore. Or worry about Mum being angry and turning red red red even though she is so dark skinned, making everything hot and melting Sharon’s paintings and us. And all of us in the world joining together as liquids and flowing towards the manhole to drain. But the manhole has also melted, and we are all together, and nobody can take anything away from anybody. We are like that experiment in Class 5 when we mixed water and milk and then Teacher Paulette said we can never separate it again. I imagine the demons take all their stuff and leave and we never paint or make music or do math or anything, but the demons take their stuff and then we laugh and we cry and we are anxious but only as much as we want to be.

April 29, 2016– 9

NON-FICTION

Unwriting

by Rachel Calnek-Sugin

I

will write myself for you the way I used to on nights when I was particularly lonely. There were many of these; I was a well-developed character. I will write my own red-hair and all the freckles on my nose. You will be gullible and lonely like I am, and these will be the reasons why you’ll believe me. You’ll believe the most ridiculous things: that I’m a drug-dealing dark wizard from Bulgaria, or a 19-year-old philosophy major at NYU, even after we go to lunch in Chinatown and you see a middleschooler slurping soup dumplings across from you.

As for me, I will believe, for the longest time, that I can be separated: that I can leave one self at home while another reinvents herself on the Internet. I will fail to understand the way my body keeps me whole. I will pretend that this is an experiment with writing when really I am just a compulsive liar. I will I will convince myself that this is the Truth, that I am being Honest in the only way I know how.

FOR OUR PURPOSES, YOU BEGIN IN SEPTEMBER 2005, when you get sick of your top bunk and move into the playroom. Your bed is nestled right up against your Windows XP, a huge black desktop equipped with pinball and solitaire, and, although you don’t know it yet, the vast majority of your sex education.

We can blame the beginning on Leo Golub. You are in math class when he tells you about a cool new website. A cool new website? Porner.com.

It is the lies you are ashamed of now, but it was the bodies you were ashamed of then. As your babysitter does homework in the living room, you kneel on your chair so that your skinny, four-foot frame will block the screen from view, where two young women are tangled in desperate kisses. It is as if all the convexities of the blonde girl fit into all the concavities of the brunette. Neither of them is beautiful on her own, and this eludes you, the way that their bodies together are such an entirely new thing.

You tell Abby, a girl on the school bus, about the cool new website. Abby tells her mother and her mother calls your mother, and your mother confronts you.

“It was an accident,” you say. You’re forgiven easily.

This is the first time that I remember getting caught. It is the beginning of two fascinations: one with the human body, and the other with having a private life, hidden from my parents, my friends, and the better part of my nineyear-old self.

2006 WE CAN BLAME ON ALEX HAYES. YOUR MOTHER does not think that she is a good influence, which already, at age 10, seems like a good reason to spend a lot of time with her.

Alex is allowed to do everything that you’re not. She can walk home from school by herself, and order pizza, and lock her bedroom door. Her parents hate each other.

All the food in her refrigerator is diet (her mom’s house) or rotting (her dad’s) and everything is matted with cat hair, and her sister leaves her lacy pink thongs all over the place, and nobody really gives a shit that Alex spends

10 – The Yale Herald

every waking moment on her computer. Nobody has any idea that the two of you are playing Sim Dating Games all those sunny afternoons in her apartment.

Hina Sim Date lets you get with all eight girls in a virtual hotel. You play it over and over—seduce the crazy blonde with gifts of watermelons, spear-fight with Makoto, drink sake with Mutisu until the screen blacks out and you get a screenshot of her passed-out naked body. Paco Sim Date is the romantic quest of a redhead to save his longtime girlfriend from a rapist. In Sim Girl, you build a time machine and bid the most in an auction for the prettiest girl’s underpants.

And then, there are the evenings of sleeping over at her house, the part about Alex Hayes that hits like hot breath.

You are on the floor of her room wrapped in blankets and each other. You have taken off your shirts: you don’t remember when or how or who first. You are rubbing your chests together and not talking and her hot breath is so loud, and you are sure you will pee your pants, that is how badly you have to go, but you don’t say anything, and she reaches her hands down to the elastic part of your underwear, and you can smell her, and she doesn’t smell good, she smells like something you are ashamed of but you don’t know why.

You don’t talk about it in the morning, or at school that week, or as you take the virtual Ariane to a virtual nightclub and writhe around on Alex’s bedroom floor the following weekend. You never tell anybody.

The friendship is short-lived. A few months later it’s over, something about which I have few regrets. I refuse to tell my mother what happened between us because I do not want to prove her right. Still, I hate Alex Hayes. I can’t help it.

THOSE PLAY-DATES WITH ALEX HAD BEEN A DIRTY addiction, so in 2007, Star Fever Agency becomes a nicotine patch. It’s like a breakup: you want to simultaneously be reminded and not be reminded of her. Strictly speaking, Star Fever Agency has nothing to do with Alex, and nothing to do with sex. You create an agent, you manage actors and actresses, try to land them roles, get them in the tabloids. You go to one of the chic virtual restaurants downtown and seat your agent at a four-person table and chat with the other players online.

One day, you sit down with two enticingly vulgar agents. They tell you to leave but you pretend you’re not at your computer, and they decide to ignore you.

They’re telling each other what they would do to each other. They’re imagining a scene in which they meet, in one of their bedrooms, maybe, and suddenly they’re ripping off each other’s shirts and they’re calling each other’s privates “dick” and “pussy,” typing things like “mmm” and “oh shit.”

You eventually move to another table where a lanky, purple-haired agent is sipping his virtual coke. His name is Luke67. You ask him how old he is and he says he’s seventeen; he asks you how old you are and you say you’re sixteen. He sends you a winky face. You’re eleven.

You talk for a while. You flirt the way people flirt in chapter books for teenage girls. This is your first courtship and he is very charming.

You feel the way you will feel years later on a date with a beautiful boy who is a good kisser but not a good person. You feel this way with Luke67 without knowing what way you feel, which makes it all the more exciting. He seduces you; this is your first seduction. He tells you what he would do to you. You tell him what you would do to him. He asks you if you’re touching yourself. You say you aren’t.

You have never touched yourself before. He tells you what to do.

You do it.

HERE IS THE YEAR 2008: THE RECESSION STARTED; I FIRST got my period; Obama was elected; I wrote a novel; Fidel Castro stepped down; I saw a boy jump out a window; Flo Rida came out with “Low”; I fell in love for the first time. Jason Blint was half man, half figment of my imagination. He was, momentarily, an island, a rock, a something to be moored to. I never kissed him: he was 28 and my sixth grade English teacher. But Jason Blint was the first man I did not want to lie to. I loved him, something that I did not understand until I turned 16 and fell in love again, this time with a boy, this time doing all the regular things like holding hands and waking up together and breaking up. But I am getting ahead of myself.

2009 COMES IN JANUARY, THE WAY YOU EXPECT IT TO. YOU switch schools in September to somewhere where boys notice you for the first time. You start wearing liquid eyeliner and vintage vests and patterned tights and staring down unsuspecting men across coffee shops. You begin to hate your mother—I mean, a small part of you begins to hate your mother. I cannot explain this. You love your mother and your mother loves you. But you are 13 and hormonal and lonely and a part of you hates her: perhaps because she sees you, or perhaps because she will always forgive you, or perhaps because you cannot see that she is suffering. You are ashamed of this now, but you were 13, and that is an almost-goodenough excuse.

2009 is also the year that you join a Harry Potter role-playing forum. You’re a Harry Potter nerd who can imagine nothing better than frolicking around the grounds of Hogwarts with your marauding friends. You’re a little late to the party, so all the good characters are taken. You settle for Gellert Grindelwald, fallen dark wizard of the former generation. You fly broomsticks in the Quidditch pitch and watch the giant squid in the lake and practice spells in the transfiguration classroom. But wands don’t stay wands for long.

Soon you are naked with Regulus Black on the floor of the Slytherin Common Room. The forum—like the bar tables in Star Fever Agency, or like the one train at rush hour—is just another excuse for people to touch each other.

Grindelwald’s relationship with Regulus Black is just the beginning. Gellert is a hot commodity, and you revel in his popularity. In a nutshell, your Grindelwald is a gay, abusive, drug-dealing young man, four concepts about which you know next to nothing. You get away with it, somehow. You Google narcotics. You read the scenes written by wizards before you. You acquire forum-wide fame as a master of this art form, terrific at everything from making drama to giving head.

Most surprisingly, though, you make friends. In a comment thread called “Real Life” you follow suit of the college-aged commenters before you and say you’re 19 years old. You’re 13. You join the Skype chat, which is pretty much always active. You talk to them. These people are not like your people. They’re from the middle of the country; they have babies at 20; they’re not going to college. They make you laugh; you make them laugh. You are ultracool. You are a philosophy student at NYU. You read up on this too: Descartes and Camus. You are a redhead. Everyone around you is talking about how they can finally be who they really are in this chat, on this forum, with these people. You convince yourself that you feel the same way. You let Prabha, the girl who plays Regulus, introduce you to Nine Inch Nails, agreeing with her that their lead singer is the sexiest-man-on-earth. You tell them stories about your love affair with your English teacher, Jason. You tell yourself that this self you are creating is only an experiment as a writer.

The trouble comes when Prabha says she wants to meet up.

This is not a viable option for obvious reasons. She lives in New Jersey and she wants to come into the city this weekend. Busy.

Next weekend? Busy. I’m busy every day of my whole life, you want to say, but this is implausible, so you agree to two weekends from now. I don’t know what convinces you to do it. It’s either a plea to get caught or you’re just being stupid. You are nothing like who you say you are, down to your tan, unfreckled complexion. Your story will never hold together—except, somehow, it does. You meet Prabha at Penn Station, and then the two of you head down to Chinatown for lunch.

“I know, I look so young,” you say, laughing in self-defense.

“You don’t look that young,” Prabha says. “You look, like, sixteen.”

I have no explanation for how she believed you except that people see what they want to see. You spend another afternoon with Prabha, maybe a month later, except this time you take the New Jersey Transit to meet her, and she picks you up, with her baby daughter Freya in the backseat.

You are overtaken by panic on the drive back to the station. You are speeding past strip malls and oil refineries and fast food restaurants and you are sure, all of a sudden, that you will get into a car crash. I don’t know what happens to the three of you, but imagine, so you can leave your body, that you’re dying. You are dreaming in daylight; it is a dream about your mother. Your father picks up the phone, and it’s the police, and your father yells to your mother, whose face turns chalk white, and you see her running down a flight of stairs that you don’t have in your apartment. She runs down the stairs again and again and again. Your mother is sure she does not know anyone in this car crash: not Prabha, your virtual lover, not her baby girl Freya, and not this 19-year-old Rachel, this compulsive liar, this philosophy student at NYU. But your mother knows you.

Your mother learns you. You see your mother on the staircase. You cannot bear what you have done to her.

IMAGINE THIS: YOU AND THE BOY YOU LOVE ARE IN YOUR kitchen, eating banana bread in your pajamas. You aren’t dying after all. You have told him all of these things that I have just told you. This should be excruciating but it isn’t. The radio is on. Outside it is snowing but inside it is so soft and yellow you don’t even need to think about warmth. He doesn’t make you want to be mysterious, this boy. I love you, he is saying. You think your heart is pumping blood for the first time and your fingers are freezing cold and your stomach is full of guilt, and you do not know what to do because you are afraid you will lie to him, you are afraid that you will write him the way you wrote Jason Blint and the way you used to write yourself, and he is looking at you very anxiously, like a child looks at his mother when he is asking permission to do something he isn’t allowed to do, and you tell him you love him, and he relaxes, and he smiles at you, and I lied again. You love him, but you don’t know how to tell him you love him. You don’t have words for this.

And now, it is not the boy but your mother, and you are in a terrible fight, because you are sixteen years old and it is two years after you have stopped lying but you have told your mother a stupid lie.

You deny it, the way you denied watching porn as a nine year old, but now with seven years of history between you. And your mother is grabbing you from behind and hitting you four times across the face and at this moment, your mother knows you; your mother learns you. And now she is padding into your bedroom at 2am (and she is saying), I don’t want to fight (and you are saying), I don’t want to fight either, (and), I love you, (and she is saying) I love you too, (and you are saying), No matter what, (and she is almost laughing because this is so obvious, and she is saying), Of course no matter what, and you know that somehow, your mother forgives you.

YOU ARE SITTING AT THE KITCHEN COUNTER WITH THAT computer that used to be your secret life. You are unwriting yourself: it is like getting undressed in broad daylight.

I’m lying again. It is me at the kitchen counter, and unwriting myself is like peeling off bandages. I am being honest in the only way I know how.

April 29, 2016 – 11

THE LITERARY ISSUE

12 – The Yale Herald

SCENE

Architecture of rain

Excerpt of a one-act play by Stefani Kuo

DROWNING/DROUGHT (Lights on the glass castle plastered with photographs, newspaper clippings of the accident, random articles of writing and scraps from ALL-GROWN-UP’s room.)

(SOL is at the dinner table with an empty water glass. SCY is lying alone on the bed. SILINA is in the bathtub, soaking.)

SOL: Don’t go out. Don’t go out at night, in Paris, in Barcelona, in New York.

I don’t care. Lightning doesn’t strike twice, I know. I know what I told you when we were sitting on that Malaysian Airlines flight ordering our fifth round of chicken satays four days after the airplane from Beijing to Malaysia went missing. But daughters don’t come back twice. They come back the first time you lose them and they are eight years old in the middle of the Japan World Expo with a sticker on their chest saying, “my name is Silina and my mother’s number is 91023838, please call her for me if I am lost.” They come back the first time you cook instant noodles at disneyland and they tell their entire class you are the best chef in the world. They stay crying in your bed for hours asking not to leave for the next two weeks, but then they will decide to leave. There is a word for a mother who has lost a child, but there is no language for the emptying of emptiness. The insurance company compensated us with twenty thousand dollars. We gave it all away to children in Nepal and built them a school.

We visited, and rode elephants, and gave ourselves a thick, blubbery layer of saviour in place of sadness. Three months later their faces were the ones under earthquake- collapsed debris. There is no compensation for compensation.

SCY & ALL-GROWN-UP: To my mother, I am not a body.

(SCY is fingering the space between her two hipbones.)

SILINA: Living with a dead person means you cannot think about their dead face or their dead body. That is not them. When you think about someone who has already reached the full stop in their sentence, you have to think about a specific word, phrase in the middle, an image of what they are to you.

SCY & SILINA: She is six-years-old, before glasses, before pre-pubescent lankiness, before.

(It is raining outside.)

ALL-GROWN-UP: In every person rests a little girl or boy in a puffy red jacket in the snow.

(Flash. SILINA, SCY, and ALL-GROWN-UP are standing in a line on the side of the road.)

SCY: There comes a certain age when you decide that child no longer has a place in your body, so she sits in the crook of your elbow where you can’t quite feel your skin when you pinch it, or the curve of your clavicle where you used to rest your eraser in class just for fun.

(Flash.)

SILINA: That little girl will be the same child who used to walk to school in the morning and stop at every tree along the road to turn around and wave goodbye to her mother standing at the crosswalk, waiting to see her disappear through the school gates.

(Flash.)

(Flash.)

ALL-GROWN-UP: You splice your body so you think you will forget. But sometimes you feel itches you can’t quite scratch at the right place, or sharp pains you can’t heal.

(Flash. Headlights. Flash. Stillness.)

You do not say goodbye to childhood, You inherit them while growing up.

(It rains so hard the photos, clippings, everything starts falling through. It collapses. Glass shatters. Darkness.)

(SCY has a blue rain jacket on.) (SILINA has a yellow rain jacket on.)

(ALL-GROWN-UP wears a red poncho and holds a rainbow umbrella.)

(It rains of gravity pulling on red balloons full of insatiable helium.)

(Blackout.)

SCY: Fuck.

(Accident. They are in separate rooms. Thunder strikes. SOL is holding a photograph. They are all thinking of ALL-GROWN-UP and themselves. ALLGROWN-UP is holding a walkie-talkie) ALL-GROWN-UP: Over.

Over.

Goodnight, over.

I love you, over.

Simon says over.

Turn off the radio, over.

Can you sing to me, please?

(Thunder. Lightning. Immense downpour.)

(Flash. The house is dismembering itself.)

GLASS CASTLE (Lights. The glass castle is gone. Stillness. Emptiness.)

(Enter SILINA. SILINA hauls in a miniature model of a new house.)

SOL: Don’t go out.

(The lights go out.)

SOL: Please, don’t go.

(All lights go out, and we are left with a singular candle.)

April 29, 2016 – 13

SCENE

DOCTOR: /Puncturing.

SILINA: When she died, we dismembered her.

SCY: What?

SCY: Extracted her soul and put it on a pedestal SILINA: What/ did you say?

SILINA: Looked into her cracked skull and expected to hear her voice DOCTOR: We did all that we could.

SCY: Held her cooling hand and wanted blood to be proof of violent life SCY: What was that?

SILINA: Our dad wears grey polos with khaki pants.

The one with the hole in the chest he wears to sleep.

And the one with the loose stitches on the sleeve he wears to the gym.

He asks us why we did not remember him. His name. His body. His face.

His bloody grey shirt and bloody khaki pants after the lap dance of a car accident.

Waking up to a bloody tongue and a missing tooth.

Ambulance bumping up the hill.

In this play we are choosing the memory of the mother who was not there to cradle her daughter. In this rendition we are giving her the chance to hold her daughter to sleep one last time. In this one, he is not heartbroken for the luggage that fell or the ambulance ride only the older sister got to sit in on. In these few moments of stillness, we are telling the same bedtime story of death brought back to life, and all the colours start blending in until even darkness looks like the rainbow. There is no gravity to remembering pain, forgetting is the harder one.

In this one he is not running into a hospital room saying,

SILINA: Want to see/ my model?

DOCTOR: The body.

SCY: Maybe later.

SILINA: No, no, I want you to see it. It’s super cool.

SCY: OK. Fine. Explain it to me.

SILINA: It’s kind of falling apart, but I/ spent three days doing this.

DOCTOR: We tried CPR for an hour.

ALL-GROWN-UP: Is she gone yet?

SILINA: You see these different wall heights? I had to cut these heights individually, which/ took forever to measure and actually slice into.

(ALL-GROWN-UP lies down on the medical table.)

DOCTOR: We tried suturing the wound, but it was too big.

SILINA: And she is not curled up on the ground whispering

SILINA: Here are the slits in the wall where light would come through and cast a shadow through the windows and into the building and create natural lighting.

SCY: Please, please, please, please DOCTOR: You can see here where the blood coagulated where the skull cracked through.

(SCY stands up from the ground and sits at the dining table) SCY: Can I see?

SILINA: And she is not about to board the flight to SILINA: Wait. Wait./ Here.

SOL: Hawaii, for a cruise under the beachy sun DOCTOR: Are you sure?

(SOL puts on a medical jacket and a face mask. She sanitizes her hands.)

SCY: Yes. Yes, I want to see it.

SILINA: And I do not wake up to the sound of SILINA: /Can you see it?

SCY: Try again! Another hour, try again!

DOCTOR: Can you see it?

(Flatline. SILINA moves into the other room with her architecture tools.)

SCY: I can’t.

SILINA: Now here is the pencil you use for/ outlining.

SILINA: /Look closer.

DOCTOR: Suturing.

DOCTOR: It’s OK. SILINA: And the one you would use for/ sketching.

SILINA: I’m going to build this.

DOCTOR: Incising.

DOCTOR: It’s OK. SILINA: And this one would be for/ marking.

SILINA: I’m going to build us this house, and we’re both going to get bathrooms en suite.

DOCTOR: Slicing.

(SILINA grabs her cutting knife and a new cutting board.)

SILINA: Oh, and of course this one is my favorite, and it’s for/ measuring.

14 – The Yale Herald

SCENE DOCTOR: We’re going to need to do a CT. A scan. Sort of like an X-ray.

SILINA: Do you want to live on the second or the third floor?

SCY: Can I have a towel?

(SILINA starts creating.)

SCY: We stopped eating meat for forty-nine days. The amount of time it takes for the soul to reincarnate from one body through the skies to another. They say she has taken shape in the body of a boy this time. They say she has been sending signs from above through the shapes of a red balloon and singular red roses. In waking moments, I believe them.

(The door to their new home opens, and in the rain, a beam of sunlight shines in.)

(SILINA grabs a ladder and begins to hang paintings from the ceilings, not to cover up holes, but to make it seem like home again.)

(SCY enters the bedroom.)

DOCTOR: Are you sure?

(SILINA is building the house. SOL is staring up at the light.)

(DOCTOR is holding out a towel. SCY takes it.)

Goodnight room Goodnight moon Goodnight cow jumping over the moon Goodnight light And the red balloon Goodnight nobody Goodnight mush And goodnight to the old lady whispering “hush” Goodnight stars Goodnight air Goodnight noises everywhere.

SCY: Yes. (SCY unveils ALL-GROWN-UP’s face, neck, and shoulders, and begins to wipe away stains from her body. With each slow movement, the sun shines brighter, and brighter.)

(SCY starts singing her lullaby) (With each motion and line, ALL-GROWN-UP starts to move little by little. BY the end of the song, ALL-GROWN- UP has left the room, and SCY is wiping an empty memorial.)

(The sound of knocking.)

(Spotlight. Meditation.)

SOL: Hello?

SILINA: People always clap for the wrong reasons. - J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye. My favourite line in The Catcher in the Rye has always been about the ducks. Scy hated that book so much she dug out all the pages on in the inside and glued them together to make it a secret hiding box for her diary. I only think of her when it snows recently. Lampposts at 8 pm in quiet snowfall.

Bathtubs being drained. Poems my sister still writes about her. Slowly, little fragments being flattened and carved so they fit. So where do they go, the ducks? Where do they go in the wintertime when it snows and gets all icy and frozen over? I don’t think there’s a guy who comes and takes them away in a truck or anything. But sometimes I wonder if they just know how to fly away.

(More knocking.)

SCY: Come in.

(ALL-GROWN-UP comes in. She is beautiful.)

ALL-GROWN-UP: Someone called about a construction job, a paid job.

SILINA: Come in. We’ve been waiting for you.

(Blackout.)

ALL-GROWN-UP: Every time she thinks of me, she is remembering me, she is piecing my voice, my grasp, my knobby knees, my low tied-back ponytail, my flat chest, my non-existent body back into a person. Every time I am leaving the body, pressing into her chest.

(The play has ended.)

SOL: A dead person is not the same as a dead body. The morning after she died we all piled into a car to leave her. Her body was sitting in a dark, sterile freezer, while we were trying to step foot in a vehicle that wouldn’t crash again.

I was not afraid of driving. There is nothing to be afraid of when you have the wheel in your hand.

Graphics by Haewon Ma YH Staff

April 29, 2016 – 15

FICTION

Alligators are great

by Devon Geyelin YH Staff

J

oshua was happy to be picking up his nephew. His nephew was lively. His nephew knew how to make an entrance.

His nephew had many great qualities, and now his nephew had a girlfriend.

“What do you think she’s like?” asked Cheryl, mother of Henry, in the car. Cheryl was an editor at Real Simple magazine. She had recently been working on a feature for their issue on balance.

“Probably balanced,” said Joshua.

“I hope so,” said Cheryl. “Do you think Henry knows to look for that in someone?”

“We’ll find out!” said Joshua.

JINNA WAS TRYING TO LOOK NICE. SHE had put on a white dress with strawberries on it. After she put it on she texted two of her best friends.

Guys do you think dress with strawberries is good for meeting Henry’s mom Her friend Roxie said Ya for sure good luck!!!!, but then her name was Roxie.

Shannon said Lol why not.

So Jinna took out her cartilage piercing and left her dorm, rolling her red suitcase behind her, and walked to where she was meeting Henry.

CHERYL WAS HOPING SHE’D LIKE JINNA more than she’d liked the other ones. Some of the other ones were nice, but some of them were complicated and Cheryl had, for the past five years, been on a mission to simplify her life and surround herself with positivity. Because you choose your own environment.

Which is part of why they were going to Costa Rica. Costa Rica was warm and sunny, and the resort they were going to stay at apparently had fun bars connected to the pool where you could swim up and get a margarita without even getting out of the water. Not that Cheryl would be having too many—balance— but still, nice to have the option.

And she was glad Joshua was coming, too. They could relax for a minute and have a laugh over the pineapple chicken skewers Cheryl had found on the resort’s online menu, in the Fresh ‘n Light section. And he could get some sun and maybe get over whatever his problem was.

16 – The Yale Herald

JOSHUA WAS THE FIRST OUT OF THE car when they pulled up to Henry’s fraternity’s house. “Hold on,” said Cheryl, “Let me call him,” and then five minutes later Henry opened the door and yelled down the stairs and into the daylight, “Hey, guys! Come up.”

Joshua went up the stairs a step ahead of Cheryl, so was the first of them to feel that warm hug of air laced with burrito and weed and Axe. This was not where he had chosen to spend his time in college. He felt like the smell was getting into his sweater—nice, navy, J. Crew, slim—and was glad that he had worn his canvas tennis shoes because the floor was sticky and they felt appropriate.

“I’m just up here,” said Henry, slipping by him sideways on the stairs. “How’s it going, Uncle Josh?” At the landing he turned around and smiled the question, then turned back and said, “Yeah, I’m just over here,” and maneuvered the way around a sofa-coffee table union that logistically, to Joshua, did not make sense.

“Where are all your friends, honey?” asked Cheryl, from behind.

“Probably asleep,” said Henry, still walking ahead of them. “Okay, it’s kind of messy, but I’m basically packed, just one sec.”

The room was dark. Joshua was at first most struck by the way the light was held back by a purple sheet duct taped to the window, but after that his eyes adjusted.

“You know, honey,” said Cheryl, “we could buy you some curtains. I would really be okay with spending money on that.”

“Thanks, Mom, but it’s totally fine. This works great.”

Joshua noticed something.

“What the fuck are these?” asked Joshua.

“Wall decals.”

“This is not a wall decal.”

“Yeah it is.”

“This is a piece of cardboard that says Chipotle on it.”

“Yeah, but I have ten of them so I made a pattern on the wall and made them into wall decals.”

“All right.”

“Hi, guys!”

Joshua turned around and saw Jinna. Then the earth moved.

“WHAT THE FUCK!” SAID JOSHUA. “THE earth is moving!”

“Just hold on, Joshua,” said Cheryl. “It’ll pass.” She had braced herself against a wall.

“Yeah, this happens all the time. Just give it a minute,” said Henry.

“Yeah, the last time it happened my mom and I were on the highway and it was like, whoa! Not the best timing! But then it stopped and we were like, all right, guess we’ll keep going.” Jinna was saying this from where she had sat herself down cross-legged on the floor, even though she knew the floor was not the best place to be in these situations when they happened. The best place to be was not in buildings.

Honestly, Jinna was not feeling the most relaxed about the earth moving, but then she had not felt very relaxed all morning because she had never met Henry’s mom or his uncle and now they were going to Costa Rica and sometimes Jinna got nervous when she had to make a good impression. So in this situation she was really trying to seem like a stable presence so Henry’s mom would definitely think that she was a positive force in his life, which she knew one hundred percent that she was but still she wanted to make sure she came off as grounded and responsible as well as approachable and nice.

SOON THE EARTH STOPPED MOVING. Jinna got up off the floor.

“Okay!” said Cheryl. She clapped her hands together. “Let’s get this show on the road! Jinna, it’s so nice to meet you.”

“You too, Ms. Hadlon!” Cheryl gave her a quick hug instead of shaking her hand, and Jinna worried she’d held it too long or kind of awkwardly, but then she decided not to worry about it and turned to Joshua. “Hi, I’m Jinna,” she said.

“Joshua,” said Joshua.

“All right,” said Cheryl. “Are we ready? Looks like we’re ready! Henry, where’s your stuff?”

“Yeah, Ma, I’m ready. It’s here.”

“Okay. Great. Let’s go to Costa Rica!”

AS SOON AS JOSHUA GOT TO COSTA RICA, he knew it wasn’t for him. The air was warm in the way that made his collar feel tight, even after he took after his sweater, and after he’d

walked from the runway across the pavement and into the airport (because the plane didn’t even go up to one of those terminal connector hallways) there was a woman standing there with a tray of yellow drinks with pineapple in them and it was like, all right.

He felt better, though, when he was sitting in the shuttle next to Jinna. It was bumpy, and hot, and everyone started feeling nauseous forty minutes in, but Joshua, though his belt was thin and his glasses had character, was not immune to the way she smelled fruity (she got it at Gap Body—it was called Harmony and was supposed to be layers of orange blossom and watermelon and sugarcane) and the way she had a thin gold chain around her delicate ankle with a charm on it that was pressing into the space between his tennis shoes and the few inches above, where his jeans (slim) were cuffed.

“So, Henry said you’re from New York,” she said, smilingly.

“This is true,” said Joshua.

“Do you like it there?”

“Oh, yeah. I mean, couldn’t live anywhere else. I don’t know if “like” is, you know, the word to use”— he chuckled twice, but Jinna’s face stayed blank, so he regrouped—“but, I mean, yes. Yes, of course.”

“Why wouldn’t “like” be the right word to use?”

“No, I mean—I mean of course I do like it. It’s just such a complicated place, and I’ve had so many different relationships to it, that “like” isn’t really the sort of terms I normally think of it in.”

“Oh,” said Jinna. When she furrowed her brow he noticed the freckles on her forehead. “Okay.”

“Yo!” said Henry. “Alligators!”

HENRY WAS RIGHT. THERE WERE ALLIGATORS in the river. The whole van pulled over and everyone piled out in a parade of sweaty moisturewicking fabrics in khaki, the sort that Cheryl had in her suitcase.

Cheryl was more than happy to see the alligators. There are other things Cheryl would also have been happy to be doing, at that moment—for example, getting closer to the resort, or changing into something more appropriate for the humidity level (closer to one hundred percent than ninety, she’d checked), but if she had had to make a list of all the things that she could be doing at that moment and then decided which end “seeing alligators” fell on, it landed on the side she felt positively about, for sure. Alligators are great.

Cheryl felt even more positively by the time the van pulled up to the resort and there were golf carts waiting to take them and their luggage to the cabana. She felt great that there were three bedrooms, like she’d asked, and she loved the view out her window.

Henry was feeling good. His girlfriend was on the balcony, in the hammock, and he could see the top of her head from where he was leaning against the wall of their room, brushing his teeth. After they’d changed they were going to go to the beach and maybe when they were in the water he’d pick her up in the air like in the movie they’d watched the other night, because she seemed to like that part and it could be fun.

And then they were going to have dinner, and maybe there’d be a show like that time they’d gone to Hawaii when he was eight and he and all his

sisters had to go up and learn how to dance the hula. Except it would be the Costa Rican version, or whatever.

THAT NIGHT AT DINNER THERE WAS NO HULA performance, but there was a tropical-themed drinks menu and Cheryl was going to indulge. Of course Joshua ordered a glass of wine—of course he would, in Costa Rica—but Cheryl didn’t care, she was there to enjoy herself, and if he wanted to drink wine in Costa Rica, then by all means, Joshua. He was wearing a green v-neck t-shirt and those tennis shoes and cargo shorts and his professor glasses. Where had he gotten cargo shorts?

“SO,” JOSHUA PUT DOWN HIS MENU. “WHAT ARE you studying, Jinna?” Fuck. Ask a more Dad question.

“Well, I’m pre-med, but I’m an anthropology major. So kind of diverse.” She giggled.

“Oh, I see. So cultures, huh?”

The fuck, Joshua.

“Yeah, I’m really interested in the similarities and differences between how people relate to each other across different times and geographical situations— basically I’m curious to see what the common denominators are, especially in terms of medicine and healing. The idea is to apply it to my practice in some way, at some point, I guess.”

“So do you mean you’d be interested in working internationally?” asked Cheryl.

“Yeah, for sure—at this point I’m really open. And that could mean working in policy, too. We’ll see.”

“Wow,” said Joshua. “Very impressive.”

“What about you? What did you study?”

“German Studies. I was a German Studies major.”

“Oh cool! I have a friend who’s a German Studies major. Are you German?”

“Oh, no. No, I’m not.”

“Oh, okay. Cool.”

THE NEXT DAY THEY SIGNED UP FOR A SURFING lesson in the afternoon. Cheryl personally could have spent the afternoon by the pool, or on one of the lounge chairs set up under umbrellas on the beach, or in the yoga class free on the Sky Terrace from four to five, but learning to surf also sounded great and trying new things was one of her New Year’s Resolutions.

The guy told them all to put on wetsuits that he had in a pile in a wooden shed. He handed her a medium without asking, and she wondered for a second whether that was offensive, then decided it wasn’t.

“All right, everyone!” said the teacher. It was just the four of them and him. “Are you ready for the best afternoon of your lives?”

Cheryl looked over at Joshua, but Joshua was apparently too concerned with Jinna to be condescending. He wasn’t wearing his glasses and he looked like a seal, with his shaved head.

“Ready!” said Cheryl.

“Come on, Mom!” said the guy. He’d started calling her Mom at the beginning.

“Not that foot! The other one!”

“Okay,” she said. “Okay.”

“Okay, Mom! From the top! Everyone, cheer for Mom while she tries it out.”

“You guys really don’t have to do that.”

“Let’s go, Mom!” said Henry. “Land surfing! Who needs water? I don’t!”

“Come on, Cheryl,” said Joshua. “Remember the three steps.”

“Thanks, Joshua.” Joshua put his hands out in front of him.

Cheryl did it. She was standing on the surfboard on the sand with her arms out.

“Good, Cheryl!” said Joshua.

“Joshua,” said Cheryl, “shut the fuck up.”

“GO MOMMMMMMM,” said Henry.

HE MADE HER DO THE SEQUENCE A FEW MORE times before he took them out to the water. Jinna had tried to get Henry to shut up by pinching his hip, but he wasn’t really getting the message and kept on yelling “YEAH MOM” and laughing. And then there was Joshua, who kept on sneaking looks at her in her wetsuit, which was whatever. Jinna was glad to get to the water.

She was also glad that she was a strong swimmer, and could paddle out faster than Joshua and Cheryl could behind her. And she was glad for her natural agility and balance, because it didn’t take her that long to stand up for the first time, and then she could spend her time between slowly riding a wave out to shore and turning and paddling back while Cheryl kept on falling and choking on saltwater and getting frustrated.

“MOM,” SAID THE GUY, “LOOK AT ME. WE’RE going to do this just how we did on the shore. I’m going to tell you when, and you’re going to stand up.

Exactly the same. No problem. Okay, Mom?” “You know,” said Cheryl. She spit hair out of her mouth. “You know, I’m going to float here for a little bit. You go help Henry. Okay?”

“You sure, Mom?” “Yeah, I’m sure.”

“All right, Mom.” JOSHUA DECIDED HE WAS GOING TO FLOAT FOR a minute, too. He paddled next to Cheryl.

“Hey, Cheryl,” said Joshua, “Thanks again for asking me to come on this trip.”

“Oh,” she said. “You’re welcome.”

The earth started moving again.

“JESUS FUCKING CHRIST,” SAID JOSHUA. “WHAT the fuck is this again?”

“Oh,” said Cheryl. “The earth moving? I don’t know. Fuck it.”

THIS SURFING INSTRUCTOR GUY WAS AWESOME. Henry forgot his name but he kept on making jokes about his mom, which was just getting funnier and funnier. Henry almost couldn’t handle it. He kept on poking Jinna on her back and then doubling over, giggling, while the guy kept on making his mom go through the standing-up sequence over and over with her surfboard on the sand. She was getting flustered. He wished he had a camera.

April 29, 2016 – 17

NON-FICTION

Brueghel Blues

by Yi-Ling Liu YH Staff

…the expensive delicate ship that must have seen Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on - W.H Auden, “Musée des Beaux Arts”

W

hen my sister Meiz cries, she doesn’t just cry; she weeps, she howls, she hollers. When she loses a game of Pokémon Monopoly or falls on the skating rink and scrapes her knee on the ice, her pain is an event—a Niagara of tears, a Yangtze flash-flood, a cataclysmically parted Red Sea. I awoke once from a nap to a wail so shrill that it could have come only from a woman in labor or a soldier undergoing emergency amputation sans anesthesia, and stumbled into Meiz’s bedroom to find my mother perched by her shoulder trying to pop a pimple on her upper lip.

The tears, however, never last long. My sister is the third and youngest child, eleven years younger than I am, twelve years younger than our brother. Our mother conceived her in the period of early fortydom when a healthy embryo is worth its weight in pink diamonds. Her cries summon us all to easily to her rescue. Minutes later, she’ll be chuckling again, puffy-eyed but otherwise unscathed. We wipe her tears and help her onto her feet. The pimple is popped and life rolls on. For Meiz, catharsis works fast.

Although destined to be the family crybaby, Meiz was also,as a result of the age gap, destined to be precocious. My brother and I treat her as a kind of miniGalatea, an ubermensch-in-making into whose brain we attempt to cram the entire world. Thanks to our tutelage, she cracks Schrödinger’s Cat jokes, sings songs about financial dividends, and identifies the etymological roots of Harry Potter spells.

At the dinner table, she is forced to adapt to adult conversation. Mom will be talking about the day’s headlines—a stock market crash or an influenza epidemic—and Meiz will suddenly announce, “I don’t get it!” Someone will sigh and restate everything that has been said in vocabulary accessible to a ten-year-old.

I accomplish this rephrasing via “Jenny Analogies”—the world’s problems boiled down to the life and times of Jenny, her best friend next door. For example: When Jenny (Iran) does something wrong (build a nuclear reactor,) what does her Mom (hegemonic U.S.A) do? She takes away her candy (imposes economic sanctions).

Some things, however, are difficult to explain, even with the aid of analogy and euphemism. We’ll talk about it when you’re older, Meiz. She rolls her eyes and grumbles into her rice, but does not protest. She is aware, in the back of her mind, that there are things that she would rather not hear. She is aware that yes, big, painful things can happen, but that they happen in far-flung places, outside her immediate orbit, and that we are there to shield her from them.

We do not talk, for example, about long-term illness or death in front of her.

When my grandmother was dying, we created a family group chat called “The Four Adults,” as an alternative to “The Five of Us,” which we typically use, to keep Meiz out of our discussions of Grandma’s condition.

At Grandma’s funeral, Mom stood up to deliver a speech. Meiz did not know Grandma well, but as mom spoke, eyes wet, voice wavering, Meiz stood by her side, sobbing. On the car ride home, Meiz was silent. She could sense that Mom was sad, but that her sadness was different from the kind of sadness that she

18 –­ The Yale Herald

knew about—it was deep-rooted and permanent and unfixable. She was terrified.

“Ma?” she looked at my mother, clutching her wrist. “Promise me you won’t bring me to something like that again.”

AFTER FAMILY DINNERS, EVERYONE GOES OFF TO SEPARATE PARTS OF THE house to do his or her own thing: Mom to her bedroom, Yi-Wei to his, Dad to the study, me to the living room couch. Meiz, too young to have claimed a space of her own, tags along with one of us. When she curls up on the couch with me, we’ve gotten into the habit of flipping through glossy coffee table books together.

Our favorite is 1001 Paintings You Must See Before You Die. We pick apart each painting and I ask her what she thinks.

Once, we came across a 17th century Dutch painting—Breughel’s The Landscape with The Fall of Icarus. “Looks kinda peaceful,” she said, as she ran her finger across the image, from the foreground of lush pastureland and to the backdrop of the turquoise sea. We found a farmer with a plough, a donkey, and a shepherd tending to his goats. She pointed out the sun, a canary yellow semicircle setting on the horizon; I spotted a delicate sailing ship, cruising across the light-flecked waters.

“What’s that?” she said suddenly, pointing to the bottom right corner of the painting. A small, indistinct splash. Two pale, white legs, flailing upside down. A body disappearing into the sea.

That’s Icarus, I explained, from ancient Greek mythology. He was a boy who flew too close to the sun, fell into the sea because his wings melted, and drowned.

“But he’s so small,” she said.

I nod. Icarus takes up a fraction of the painting. Nobody notices him. The farmer ploughs the field, the donkey languishes, the ship sails calmly on. Meiz is perplexed. “Why?” I explained that there are times when somebody gets hurt and nobody pays attention. Maybe they looked away or maybe they simply did not see him at all.

People are in pain everywhere and all the time, but it mostly goes unnoticed. It’s like when one of your classmates is upset at school and nobody helps him out because they’re too busy. Or like that girl Little Yue Yue, we read about in the news, I continued, who was hit by a car and four different people walked past her before someone called an ambulance. Or when we turn on the TV and see that people are fighting each other and then we turn it off again, or like when— “But, why?”

I did not know what to do with this why.

“I don’t know Meiz.”

I turned to face her and saw that her brows were furrowed and that her eyes were damp. I realized that she was crying, crying for the little winged boy who thought he was the center of the world, and yet whose suffering stirred up nothing but a small splash. Her tears unnerved me. I did not know what to do with them— small, dense pearls, barely perceptible, heavy with the weight of all the pain that she still had yet to know, that I had yet to teach, yet to understand.

“I’m sorry, Meiz.” I said. “Let’s look at something else.”

I wiped her eyes, turned the page and let the ship sail on.

NON-FICTION

No-crying streak

by David Rossler YH Staff

M

y last cry was sometime around 2006. I didn’t realize it was a milestone, so I don’t know the exact date the way I know the date of my bar mitzvah (April 26, 2008) or the first full night I spent in a boy’s bed (February 13 to 14, 2015). That last cry happened when my mother Marie accidentally washed the navy blue Brooks Brothers sweater my father had given me. I was home alone when I found it in the steel drum of the dryer, twisted among t-shirts and socks.

When I tried to put it on, the neck hole sat stubbornly on top of my head like an inverse yarmulke, the smell of clean wool surrounding me in the darkness, taunting me. By the time my two mothers returned home, I had lathered my frustration into rage.

As Marie walked in the door, sighing contentedly after a neighborhood stroll, I confronted her with the shrunken thing. Look what you have done, I told her, although I could not deliver the words. Probably she apologized and I thought it wasn’t good enough. Donna, my other mother, remained silent. Eventually Marie cried, You don’t do shit around here. She never cursed. I stormed upstairs. Marie and I didn’t speak for three days, the longest I’ve ever suspended relations with anyone. On the last of those days, in the car with Donna, my eyes welled up and a single tear rolled down one cheek or the other.

The tear was annoying. I’ve always been great at not crying, and this might have been the first lapse in two years or more. My tearful memories are finite, though there must be other instances I’ve forgotten, at least from infancy and toddlerhood. I do remember the living room blurring over on one trip to the Timeout Chair (an armchair in need of reupholstery but often used non-punitively), the lights streaking and swirling like the Evil Queen’s transformation in Snow White (a scene I always fast-forwarded through out of fear). Another time, after a nightmare, I tiptoed down the hall and called out to Marie from the top of the stairs. She was sitting among piles of printer paper at the kitchen table, working against a hard deadline. She snapped loudly. I retreated, weeping. (She came and held me a minute later.)

But that wasn’t an all-out sob. The last time I really went for it was in the preschool playground. The splintering wood chips, hard as teeth, meant to cushion a fall. I see myself on the ground at the mouth of the tubular slide, my face contorted. I wonder if this happened at all or if I created it, because remembering a last time is knowing for certain that there were no more. Donna says I called her crying (and drunk) when a friend was hospitalized for alcohol poisoning, but I was just hyperventilating. No tears, so it doesn’t count.

MY NO-CRYING STREAK ISN’T AN OBVIOUS RESULT OF NATURE OR nurture. Everyone in my immediate family cries, with varying frequency.

Donna’s eyes get red during movies at BAM Rose Cinemas about genocide or mass incarceration. When my father touches my knee during a play about a filial bond, I see the bags under his eyes shine. Marie occasionally blows her nose and weeps in the bathroom if we seem not to like dinner (she says there’s always a better reason, but I’m not sure). My sister, four years my junior, has a private Instagram account dedicated largely to crying selfies with captions like Does anyone know where the town view/map in sims 4 is. My sim can’t leave her house. Her distorted mouth loses the distinction between internal and external lip. Her eyes are gooey and whiteless. She posts something like this most days. My labradoodle, Simon, cries whenever Donna closes the bathroom door.

In high school, one of my closest friends would regularly go the whole nine yards: snot running down her chin, lips webbed with thick saliva. She’d usually

drag me to the windowless, fireproof shaft of the B Stairs, or I’d follow her there with a sense of obligation. When fourth graders and administrators heard her sobs cracking and shaking up and down the building, or when they had to slide past us, heads downturned in the narrow gray passage, I felt lucky to be me with all my bodily fluids contained. I even felt lucky on those occasions when I was not her confidant, but the enemy, when she gasped over and over, How do you not get it? How could you do this to me?

SOMETIMES I THINK SOMETHING MIGHT BE WRONG WITH MY BODY— cysts on my tear ducts, if those exist—but then I remember that I produce tears all the time. Years ago I yawned a particularly deep yawn in artsy day camp, and afterward some snarky aspiring filmmaker said, Are you crying? and I said, No, because I wasn’t. I often still appear bereft after a sizable yawn, just as I might after a hearty laugh. Most mornings when I wake up and blink a few times, tears track down the sides of my face and pool around my earlobes before spotting the pillow. That definitely doesn’t count.

Occasionally, even after all these years, I recognize the hot lurch before tears when music swells, and it scares me. I like that I don’t cry.

It’s one of my favorite things about myself, although I’ll rarely admit it.

It makes me feel strong. Not crying is for me what basketball was for my gay father through middle school and high school: a quantifiable indicator of masculinity. He got fairly good at his sport, but I’m great at mine. He dropped basketball and took up theater when he went away for college, but I’m still not crying. I get sad like anyone else, I assure people when it occasionally comes up. People are always impressed. I haven’t heard of anyone with a longer streak. Not crying might be the thing I’m best at.

I might be the best in the world. I broke my left wrist, heard my father’s mother howl over her daughter’s coffin, and embraced sobbing friends at high school graduation, all without shedding a single tear. I am Usain Bolt, Michael Phelps, Muhammad Ali. I WONDER WHAT BLOW MIGHT END THIS ROUND. I’VE ALWAYS thought the death of my grandmother, whose face and whose stubbornness I inherited, might do it. When Donna called me in New Haven with the news from Brooklyn, I said, Oh. How? She asked, sniffling, if I had people I could be with that day. I said yes, I had a meeting in a few hours.

I did not cry. At this point I don’t know how surrender would feel. I don’t know if it’s even really possible.

I wore sunglasses to my grandmother’s overcast funeral, in case I faltered then and wanted to lie about it later. A man asked Donna to identify her mother in the back of the hearse, and when she said, I can’t, I came close. When Donna read her eulogy, she wanted my hand, but I couldn’t risk touching her, letting her emotions flow into me. After we had all thumped earth onto the pine coffin at the bottom of the grave, Marie choked, I know they said she was a tough cookie, but she was always so good to me, and I came even closer. I wrote something short about how Grandma would entertain me as a child by dropping toys down her housedress, about how in those two weeks she spent with us after Hurricane Sandy, she became the razor wit and deep laugh my mother always told us about. Before I read it, my heart pounded in my ears, and when I finished without incident, I almost smiled. A streak’s a streak. I can’t break it now.

Apr. 29, 2016 – 19

POETRY

Mountaintop Removal

by Max Weinreich

20 – The Yale Herald

REVIEWS

Book: Taipei

by Ivan Kirwan-Taylor

By now, “drugs are bad” is an overdone line. In Tao Lin’s most recent novel, Taipei, we encounter a world in which the anti-drug hegemony we have grown up under (and is run by those who grew up under free-lovefree-drug baby boomers) is ignored, if not mocked, in a unique and alarming way.

For in Lin’s provocative novel, there is not a passage more than a few pages long in which the characters don’t take psilocybin, MDMA, ecstasy, cocaine, Klonopin, Xanax, Adderall, or weed (interestingly, Lin stays largely away from episodes with heroin).

And they’re fine. They write, they read, they eat, they fuck, and they get married.

In Taipei, drugs are not modern life’s obstacles; rather, they are precarious solutions––precarious because the radical experiential joy the drugs provide is so easily corrupted into habitual addiction. Not to mention the hedonic treadmill of a chemical high: more always needed to recreate it, and more never quite enough. That’s why heroin (and to a lesser degree oxycodone) use is so infrequent in the novel: even Lin recognizes their lethally addictive properties. But neither the protagonist of Taipei, Paul, nor his friends and lovers ever quite succumb to anything more than a habitual desire to be on drugs or off reality. They are middle-class New Yorkers who know better than to risk the needle, but who would prefer to go see X-Men on MDMA because their live-tweeting will be more inspired.

Not merely the drugs, but the whole novel (if drugs are not indeed the whole novel) feels like a taunt at our assumptions. Paul

and his new wife Erin (married in Vegas, of course) go back to Taipei to visit his parents. Here we might expect, from a young progressive novelist, the socially important moment about Paul’s coming to terms with his family, his past, and his Asian personhood. Nope: more drugs, a few trips to McDonalds, and the near-dissolution of the marriage. Even the novel’s linguistic tone throughout resists attachment to either its readers or characters. As has been remarked of Lin’s prose, it comes off as halfcoroner’s-report/half-boring-newspaper column, in which things are seen and felt with depth and high language but never a grain of sentimentality.

The question one might ask, then, is why exactly to turn the next page. On one level, it’s exciting to see what someone on two prescription drugs and a bunch of shrooms is going to do next. On another level, Lin knows exactly what a drug feels like, and with immense beauty he spares us the task of taking them: “his brain and heart and the rest of him were contained within the same songlike beating––of another, larger, protective heart––inside of which, temporarily safe from the outside world, he would shrink into the lunar city of himself and feel and remember strange and forgotten things.” Taipei makes you intuitively desperate to know if this drug-addled—yet clinical—odyssey of a narrative will have final, tragic consequences. The answer, like the cost-benefit analysis any drug user has over High vs. Comedown, is ambiguous at best.

Instagram: @LegoKarlOve

Book: The Dud Avocado

by Olivia Valdes

There’s nothing groundbreaking about the premise of Elaine Dundy’s 1958 novel The Dud Avocado. American girl Sally Jay Gorce graduates from college and, sponsored by a rich uncle, moves to Paris, where she drifts around cafés, picking up occasional acting jobs and trying to avoid looking like a tourist. This barely-there plot moves haltingly, but really, it’s an afterthought. The real draw is Sally Jay, whose wry narration, skewering the young-woman-abroad trope, ties together the loose narrative threads.

Sally Jay passes through various ex-pat circles of aimless Fulbright scholars and trust-fund artists. She’s searching for community, but she can’t buy into self-conscious bohemia (“so violently individualistic as to be practically interchangeable”).

So she confides in the reader instead. She often seems to be whispering her narration under her breath, pulling the reader aside at a party to make snide observations about Ivy League grads (that “lazy, devastatingly handsome Princeton boy who said mostly nothing but ‘zop zop’”) and worry about whether she remembered to take her laundry out of the dryer.

One romantic entanglement ends brutally when the man, much older and married, slaps Sally Jay across the face. “I reflected wearily that it was not easy to be a Woman in these stirring times. I said it then and I say it now: it just isn’t our century,” she tells us, trudging out of the man’s apart-

ment. She acknowledges her own suffering through a lens of self-protective irony, as though too much a woman of the world to do anything but play violence for laughs.

The humor (and the pain it masks) seems remarkably modern. With an absurd enough set-up, any of these quotes could be a Sarah Silverman punchline.

Sally Jay is sometimes an unsympathetic heroine. She lusts after unkind men and expensive parties, only to condemn them moments later. She is prematurely cynical and prone to excessive self-analysis. And yet The Dud Avocado has become a cult classic, beloved for the way Sally Jay seems be reaching out from 1958 into the future. It’s an eyebrows-raised assessment of bougie tourism, a self-satirizing account of playing the ingénue, and an invitation to join a cross-generational friendship. The Dud Avocado offers a welcome counterpoint to self-serious coming-of-age travel literature, and Sally Jay makes a perfect traveling companion.

by Lora Kelley YH Staff

“I saw life; I thought about death,” reads the morose caption beneath an Instagram photo of a lone Lego man. Brown plastic hair flowing, the Lego man gazes into the distance.

He holds a coffee in his left hand and sits on a brown plastic bench. The @LegoKarlOve Instagram account stages scenes from My Struggle, Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six volume, 3000+ page narrative autobiography. Converting what is widely considered to be the most navel-gazing, introspective philosophical meditation since Proust into the boyish medium of toys, @LegoKarlOve sends up the self-seriousness of Knausgaard’s literary project. Scenes from the author’s epically self-absorbed life are depicted in chunky plastic—Knausgaard riding a boat on a slab of blue Lego “water,” his father lying in a brown Lego coffin, his Lego wife getting stuck in a Lego bathroom, trapped inside a grey plastic door. Scenes that eat up thousands of words are depicted in single comical snapshots.

The first five of Knausgaard’s novels have been translated from the Norwegian into English; his most recent volume Some Rain Must Fall was released in English last week. In his books, Knausgaard floats between his adult present, as an introverted father and resentful spouse, and memories

of the fraught days of his youth, when fear of his own father defined him. Recognizing fully that he is a largely average man with a normal, upper middle-class European life, Knausgaard jumps into the project of scrubbing banal childhood memories and laying them bare on the page. He turns the quotidian (brushing his teeth, rolling a bag through the airport, hiding a can of beer from his mother) into rigorously reported art.

So the idea of staging this self-important childhood examination, which depends completely on Knausgaard’s epic and tangled prose, into static Lego scenes, is hilarious.

Legos, plastic, pre-made, and only maneuverable into a limited range of postures, present a formal constraint. A Lego person can’t, for example, emote unless someone draws a new facial expression onto its plastic head. To convert literature to Legos is to leap from nuanced to stark. The creators of @LegoKarlOve have drawn on Knausgaard’s ocean of imagery and pulled out the richest visual nuggets.

The boyishness of Legos, also stands in sharp contrast to mature adult moments depicted on this Instagram page.

In the account’s most recent post, Lego Karl Ove stands at a white Lego sink. He gazes at himself in a brown plastic-

trimmed mirror. “I couldn't hide it. Everyone would see. I was marked, I had marked myself… #mystrugglewithselfloathing” reads the caption. A small blot of red—representing blood—marks his cheek. This image draws from an extended and thorny section in the second novel in which the 20-something Karl Ove struggles with a mental breakdown at a writers’ conference. It’s one of the darkest sections of these unhappy novels, and one in which Knausgaard retreats far into his own head, so to see it in simple Lego form is jarring.

Ironically, the Instagram takes on heavy scenes from Knausgaard’s adult life in first couple novels instead of depicting childhood memories from the third novel, which recalls his boyhood in Norway. Rather than depict simple or comical scenes through Legos, @LegoKarlOve takes on Knausgaard’s most cerebral, abstract sections and extracts expressive images.

As I flip through these Instagram photos of the plastic man and his family, some with dramatic filters, some with hundreds of likes, I can’t help but admire the purity of this quotidian form of Legos, where everything must click together.

Apr. 29, 2016 – 21

Email sarah.holder@yale.edu

peop

BULLBLOG BLACKLIST “Yale will keep the name of Calhoun College to teach & confront the history of slavery in the U.S.”

the North Western canon

What we hate this week

sick of keeping up with the brothers karamazov

imagine where we would be if Dr. Seuss had picked consonance instead of rhyming

cliffhangers seems dangerous

how the Odyssey is online only

how would Homer feel

consonance

when Santa Claus books are labeled “fantasy”

librarian said ya he’s not real then cackled and flew away on a broomstick

Rachel Ray go caramelize some onions u ho! leave Bey alone