Volume 1 issue 1 spring 1989 by Yale Literary Magazine

an undergraduate publication Spring

1989

Spring 1989 An Undergraduate Publication Editors-In—chief Brad Engelstein Alex Shakar Editors Andrew Cohen Jonathan Cohen Behrouz Montakhab Graphic Design Glenn Fleishman Photography Steve Smith Advisory Board Gerald Melnick '89, chairman Donald Gastwirth '66,'74 J.D. Brendan Gill '36 Henry James, Jr. '40 John Letterman "Excommunicate" is affiliated with Pierson College and was made possible thorugh the Sudler Fund. Special thanks to Pierson Master Ivo Bana. All correspondence and/or submissions should be addressed to The Yale Literary Magazine, P.O. Box 7027 Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06520. Copyright ©1989. All rights reserved.

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Contents

COVER Lowell Boyers oil on canvas, 11" x 12" Subtext TWO 3 New Mascot Paul Giamatti ink on paper 4 Mike Ananian oil on canvas 5 Mike Ananian oil on canvas Brad Engelstein The International School in Geneva SIX 8 Bill Abbott oil on paper Ted Cohen On the Image Reflected in a Magnetic Field TWELVE Hilary Liftin Talk TWELVE 13 Mike Ananian oil on masonite Jonathan Cohen Miniskirt Fascism FOURTEEN 17 Steve Smith photograph 17 Roger Kenna photograph Behrouz Montakhab Happiness EIGHTEEN Brent Edwards Good Evening, Ladies and Pencils TWENTY-THREE Brent Edwards To Whom It May Concern TWENTY-THREE Kevin Hicks To John Rockwell, Schooler of Wind TWENTY-THREE 24 "Am I God? I Forget." Thomas Daniel etching Alex Shakar Cyrus's Screen TWENTY-SIX William Cole Tennessee Fires, Nov. 1987 THIRTY

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Jason Fry Germany THIRTY 31 Andrew Cohen graphite on paper 31 Lauren Scharfman monotype Denis Hollier on The Question of the Interview THIRTY-TWO / 34 Thomas Daniel woodcut Alison Hurley Fifth Avenue First Loves THIRTY-SEVEN Eleanor Yu Housewarming THIRTY-SEVEN Semi Chellas Tempo THIRTY-EIGHT 41 Hannaline Rogenberg oil on masonite Liz Colker John FORTY-TWO Behrouz Montakhab Alcibiades FORTY-THREE 44 Greg Kessler acrylic and woodcut 45 Greg Kessler oil on canvas 46 Ian Spence lithograph Letters FORTY-SEVEN BACK Hannaline Ragenberg oil on canvas, 62" x 72" , ail/ I I ar you will have just begunareading the coroner's report. This introduction follows the illogic of publishing, whereby the last word tends to

r The Yale Literary Magazine

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Mike Ananian oil on canvas 43" x 45"

arrive first. For us, this finishes off the magazine, which has never been a document, something you browse through, express an opinion

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1989

The Yale Literary Magazine

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Mike Ananian oil on canvas 48" x 48"

about, and then shelve, but Instead a lived experience, not perfectly understood. Like all magazines, we aim for collectivity but will settle

The Yale Literary Magazine

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The International School in Geneva Brad Engelstein

SIX

1 Here comes Gustave, the chronic farter. As he enters the room people make way. Gustave is one of those unlucky boys, short and plump, fated to grow a handlebar moustache upon balding at the age of twenty. What is most remarkable about him is not his capacity, though enormous, but his range: sudden, panicked farts follow silent and more voluptuous ones. Rapturous farts; fancy farts; staccato farts — like hurried artillery rounds of punctuated fire; long, looping farts; farts with an edge; firecracker farts; teasers, and crowd-pleasers — he knows them all. Is there a language in which the fart is called by sixty different names? Then Gustave must have come from the land of that tongue. Already an impenetrable aroma spreads thick as soup, but now just a whiff of something threads the air — nostrils dilate: perhaps it wasn't Gustave after all, perhaps a diversion meant to confuse the trail, some hapless imitator paling before — ahl here it is, loud and low this time, quivering — the stench is unbelievable, there is nothing like the real thing but the real thing — it floods the room, a tidal wave of pungency we grow faint beneath, covering our faces, falling dizzy, our eyes watering — this is too much, he's a master, our Gustave, an artiste. But now the door whirs open and it is Ms. Slothrop: corkscrew eyes, pencil shavings for hair, a thin neck, almost wiry, encircled by creases, a few kinky white hairs shrivelling as if in embarrassment beneath her chin. A chicken-faced woman with bad teeth and wrists so.thin you expect them to snap every time she writes on the blackboard, which she does with a sharp, clipped fury. She thinks, Brats — and you can read it in her stiff posture and in her glare as well. Class has begun; if there is one thing about class — here or anywhere else — it is that it is always the same. We gag under Gustave's dispersing but quite inescapable smell — he, more than God, is omnipresent — and find our way to our seats. Peter Collin chews his pencil. Fair-haired William stares, drools, and fights the impulse to burst into tears because diagonally from him, precisely one row forward and one column to the right, sits Anne. She: the desperately beautiful. He: the luckiest, the saddest person who ever has existed because she will arch tiptoed by the stone wall and kiss him, whether she knows it or not, tomorrow evening and ask him to hold her tight. You break my heart, pretty pretty

Anne — every day William's resistance sinks, and he passes more and more readily into a hopeless drunkenness in which restraint becomes both impossible and absurd, it is there shining in his eyes, to be read like a public confession — at night he finds himself before her window howling not "I love you" or "Anne!" but howling with pitiable eloquence nonetheless. Does she hear him? Not really. Very rarely. It's that way, you know, with love. Her faithful Nikon hangs by its strap from the back of Anne's chair. I must go about this in an entirely heartless way. This, he reasons, is the only plausible means of wooing the girl. But he doesn't have the patience. She is thin and worldly with haunting eyes that are almost the only sign of humanity within the severity of her beauty. Her chestnut hair flows luxuriant, her brow is sharp, her cheekbones are sharp, even her eyes: endlessly preoccupied, active, almost hyper-active, tomboyish and yet never more than a half-step from a femininity that has borne up the most committed student — Franz Kosinski, in fact — and left him a wreck on the floor, trembling, wondering what had passed through his life and torn open his heart. She is one of those people rooted to the world by strict points of contact and yet most mysterious at precisely those points, uncontainable, elusive in some paradoxical way that stinks of profundity just for its obscurity. Her very accessibility is secretive, her competence containing within it some wild uncertainty. And she and her camera are inseparable, the endless snapshots suggesting a fear of unmediated encounter. Watching her, sometimes, I myself felt that a gentle tap on her shoulder might provoke a scream, for a moment, as if she expected to come face to face with something (who knows what?) she desperately flees, until, realizing her foolishness and calling herself "high strung" and laughing not at all nervously but sadly, almost, as if she wished whatever-it-was had been there — as if she were already tired of the monotony of evasion — she would sink back into the world. And sling her camera with a weary gesture across her shoulder. Often it is cold beneath her window. God help me, poor William thinks, staggering through the snow. What am I doing here? What is love anyway if not idiocy and derangement? Can there be a worse imbecile than the

for collection. And co-lecture, since as each of us reads alone, our reading may be bringing us together. Here is your literature; here is

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youth in love — a sufferer of any more deadly and yet universal convergence of maladies? Shouldn't a person like me be locked up after all? He wonders such things as he watches the waves hair shimmer before him, as she tilts her Anne's of head slightly and extracts a crisp sheet of loose-leaf paper from her notebook. He watches and measures his growing delirium. Watching, after all, is at this point the essence of their relationship. His window faces hers — standing on his bed he cannot see into the room but can tell only whether her light is on or off, and it is perhaps this fact alone which bears responsibility for William's misery as a youth. More than a few sleepless nights were spent staring at that recalcitrant glass, unable on the one hand to turn away and on the other unsure of just what he was looking for — bewitched by her distance and riveted by the conjured figures of her absence. Nor was he the only fool among the students. Jean-Jacques, for instance, was an insomniac at the time. He explained it like this: to strip and slip into bed implied defeat, you were quitting the day with the concession that you had accomplished, as always, nothing. (It should probably be understood that Jean-Jacques was a tall, stringy boy with dark hair and great ambitions.) His battles against sleep ended similarly each night. Jean-Jacques: in his arm chair, too tired to read, write or think with even a shred of coherence, forcing himself to be awake merely to be awake, sunk to the floor of a sleeping universe, spinning constructs in which the world's fate rested squarely on his vigilance, in which his closing eyes would surely seal it in the violence of stillbirth, in which the sun was dragged through dawn only by the sheer force of his will, the brute strength of his dumb defiance deprived of any object but the most exalted and transparently contrived, and etc. — Jean-Jacques: scattered across an endless chain of distractions, overwhelmed by boredom and mounting self-mockery, racked by exhaustion but unwilling to sleep, unable — having targeted so much attention upon the hope as to think it clearly beyond possibility. He waited for the coming day the way killers wait in the alley for a victim: and one after another, they fell beneath his blows, days raining like leaves from branches in a downpour. Eventually, raging, he forgot the point. Also, there was Jean-Jacques: the

obsessive-compulsive narcissist. The boy who checked his look a hundred times — literally — in the mirror each day, pressing his hair flat against his skull. Fatuous ass! "Come on!" "One minute," he says. He runs his tongue along his lips. Checks the curve of his eyebrows. Plays with his hair. Traces the dark under his eyes. Pinches his cheeks so that color flushes them. "Come on!" "One minute." For people like William it was all different. The days and he were acquaintances or — at best — accomplices, maybe collaborators, rarely peers, competitors or enemies: there was no such intensity of engagement between them. Ever since his earliest schooling he had needed a reason to leave his bed, some small hope — nearly anything would do: hot chocolate for breakfast, the possibility of mail, a quirk in his schedule — something to exchange for the vast comfort of a mattress and quilt, and now for a month it had been that rosy-haired wonder of a sixteen-year-old girl, for a month his first thought upon waking was "Anne" and he would dig his hands under his pillow in an ecstasy of fear and longing, cringing into wakefulness. Fool, fool — he delighted in blasting himself for even daring to imagine that she might choose him. Fool! He spit at himself playfully. "Come on!" Gustave forted. Ms. Slothrop struck the board. The stalk of chalk snapped, splintering between her fingers. A certain desk lay barren. Where was Jean-Jacques? He had not been to school in a month. "William!" It is Ms. Slothrop's icy voice, knotting him in its grip. He hasn't been paying attention and reaches, panicked, for his book — what was today's lesson? Her eyes narrow before him. His fingers fumble blindly through pages. Thirteen? Fourteen? "Can you tell me the meaning of — " "Well...isn't it...?" Where was Jean-Jacques? Ms. Slothrop struck the board. Every day is the same anyway, he can barely distinguish them, it's too great an effort to hold them apart. But Anne — Anne! He loses himself in the wildness of her hair. His childhood is there, somewhere, mysteriously tangled.

Exhibit A. Living or dead, corpus or corpse? The hair and fingernails of a body continue to grow after burial, and when the hanged man's

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neck Is snapped, it is not only his soul but his bowels as well that find relief. A post-mortem for would you say "post-modern?") excrement.

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2 "Anyway," Jean-Jacques had said, "it's better to be out of school and on your own. Meet real people — goddamn idiots but they're real, anyhow. No more snobbery for me. It's about time somebody faced the world. I'd like to work with my hands. Books are soft, William. They're lies, they're detours and evasions and are used in a thousand ways by a thousand people to put off facing the world and oneself in the world." "You don't believe that," William said. "I'm not saying you're wrong, I just don't think you believe it. You're playing devil's advocate is what you're doing." "No I'm not." "Yes you are." It was a rare moment of assertion and made William's head spin. "Maybe you won't admit it but you are playing devil's advocate." The thrill of confrontation tightened his throat. He stared into the careless blue of his friend's eyes, mysterious and dulled by a kind of neglect. They were sad eyes. Jean-Jacques, who had not seen his father in four years, turned away. He didn't want to infect William with his weariness or nausea or whatever it was that he could only understand — and barely that — as sickness. He just didn't. There was the time when William had run up to him, charming and radiant. "I just talked to Anne," he exclaimed, and went on to report with a child's clumsy breathlessness how he had been, not spectacularly but in a genuine sort of way, disarming. William was flushed with the ruddy power of youth and why stamp that out? He was pleased with himself in a harmless sort of way and why begrudge him that? He belonged to those who could find the promise of bliss in a lover's uncertain smile. But Jean-Jacques had seduced a married woman with dark eyes when just a boy and been told — you are an incredible lover, my dream lover — and had felt so many insecurities pass in that moment that he lost all interest in love, and even understanding of it beyond its physical dimension. More and more it seemed a mystery to him and very probably gibberish. He would think: William is Arkady to my Bazarov, perhaps. Perhaps. But it really isn't all that important. So Jean-Jacques kept aloof from women. There was also a sense in which chastity as perversion was more interesting than an embrace, as he told himself. There were periods of solitude. One time, almost mad with boredom and selft.

loathing, he struck his fist through a window pane, cutting himself so badly that he needed twenty stitches. A lot of his weariness, no doubt, was due to physical exhaustion. At night, at times, he was almost frenzied with yearning for his father. Not only tuition but pocket money came regularly in envelopes stamped from Madrid, Buenos Aires, London, Chicago, but they were rarely accompanied by more than a polite word or two of what could be called correspondence. The long, rather formal letter Jean-Jacques had written once received no reply. His tuition came, but now he was sulking and would not attend classes. Surely they would notify the man, they would say — he has not been to school — "And anyway I don't want to go to school!"

3 They discovered cafes and how to kill time. "Despite your passion for life," Jean-Jacques told William, assuming a serious air as he made these pronouncements, "you'll go to your death with a calm stoicism — and people all around will marvel at the secret wisdom in your face — while despite my listlessness I'll kick and scream and curse and spit and claw and cry like an infant and shout and scratch and defecate — I'm afraid I'll never learn discretion..." He permitted himself a smile. "People will even spend their lives trying to read your last smile, while they'll shudder at my memory and call me a dog, rightfully — a pathetic failure. But I'm talking garbage, neither of us will face death in some dramatic spectacle but become old bourgeois patriarchs of sprawling clans — bankers, schoolmasters and clergymen, all — and pass off quietly." "You're avoiding my question," William said, not amused. "Why won't you come back to school?" Jean-Jacques poked at his food. "Have a french fry, I can't eat all this." William put the french fry in his mouth but did not have the heart to chew and merely crushed the thing between his teeth. It was warm and greasy. He said, "What should I say?"

4 "And you can tell your friend — " Ms. Slothrop wagged her bony finger at William. But he knew, and she knew, that as long as his tuition

Literature considered as bullshit. If we are inclined to fear the death of literature — outsped by film and telecommunication, commercialized

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The Yale Literary Magazine TIN came Jean-Jacques would not fail out of the International School. William lost patience and turned his back on her and walked out of the room. Outside, in the hall, Anne was waiting and — click! click! click! — had taken a dozen shots before, hesitantly, she lowered the camera from her eyes. William turned his bare palms toward her gently. "Am I safe now?" he asked. "Not so safe." They walked arm in arm. She shivered at the contact. A girl desperate for authenticity, Anne found his sawdust-toned flesh, his pale eyes, his long lashes and protruding ears gave him a look of foolishness and honesty at once. There was a kind of rugged innocence at work, and she found herself trusting before she had reason to trust. William, William: she repeated the name over and over until it lost its shape and took on a rough texture, musky smell and unsettling resonance — and as she abandoned herself to a familiar eeriness she wondered at the feebleness of her command over this most simple of words, how it fumbled from her grasp and twisted slowly, unfathomably, to face her; she would lean back with closed eyes and wonder, as words now began to tumble in clumps and clusters beyond reach, which she were more afraid of: what she would lose or what would remain behind. And a kind of terror would set in as she reached for her Nikon. Sometimes she carried her camera without film, shooting anyway just to hear the reassuring snap of the shutter, just to frame the world and play with its focus.

5 All this time, a feeling of luxury distanced William from the hectic chaos of earlier months, bestowing upon them a dimension of banality. Accompanying the charm of Anne's attention, in this way, was a feeling of loss — a sinking sense of displacement or forgetfulness as if he were not where he should be, as if he were reneging on some crucial appointment. Because of this, perhaps, he was struck particularly when he returned to his room after lingering kisses and warm embraces to find a note protruding from the crack of his door. In blocked out letters, cramped almost to the point of illegibility, it read: My father is dead. My Uncle's sent for me — I'm to go to America on Tuesday. ”e. •'

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William found him in a bar, finally, dead drunk. His had seen so little of Jean-Jacques lately that his appearance was a shock: he looked thin, like some fragile flower, pale with dark eyes. William took him back to the room and made him lie still in his bed, covering him with blankets. Many times Jean-Jacques said, "I just can't see the good of it." He said other things — mostly his speech was incoherent — but that one phrase was repeated tirelessly. "I just can't see the good —" "All right," William said firmly. "All right." He struggled to banish Anne from his thoughts: her interference nagged at him. "But I can't see the good of it." Jean-Jacques was in tears. They spent a long time in darkness, neither of them asleep. William was sitting silently in the corner when he heard: "When did you age, so?" "What?" William asked. But there was no response. The day came.

6 The sun, though low, shone like a blast through the sullen sky. They had already purchased the ticket and now stepped back outside the station into the heat. A swarm of tiny insects flitted about their faces despite the deterrent of half-hearted swats. "What will you do?" William asked, his face striped pink — cheek to ball of nose to cheek — from sun-exposure. They had an hour yet, before the train would come to take Jean-Jacques to Paris. The boy shook his head and gave a stirring smile, his eyes flighty with disbelief. "I don't know." They had come to the curb and stood there a long time in silence. William picked up a handful of pebbles and began tossing them into the air, one after the other, in long, sweeping arcs. Finally, almost courageously and with a certain detestation for the drama forced upon him, Jean-Jacques risked a faint gesture with his thumb. "I'm going this way — wander a bit, feel sorry for myself, try to burn it out of me." William swallowed, tangled hopelessly and foolishly in the things he couldn't say. As he blinked a momentary clarity flooded the sidewalk, the leaves and distant church spires, sharp-focusing them in succession against the cold blue of sky. The swarm swarmed.

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Jean—Jacques slipped from him. Anne stroked his arm. "Did you love him? Did you love him like a brother? Like a lover?" "You don't understand." He wouldn't look in her eyes. Anne, Anne: Anne sat beside him, pressing his hand, trying to understand — big deal. Just a stupid girl. "You can't understand anything." He grabbed her arm then and squeezed. "Let go." He squeezed hard. It was the fleshy part of her arm, above her elbow. She let out a cry. "Ow, let go." They were facing one another, silent, he grinding his teeth as he poured on the pressure, she trembling but watching intently, locked in his grip and almost desperate with sudden longing for her Nikon, the tension pinpointed in pain but scattering, displaced, until her body was thick with desire. She grew frantic, she wanted her camera: she wanted to shoot a thousand shots. Suddenly he released her and in an instant had sunk to the floor, his head bowed low. She pressed against him, still trembling. Her arm was numb. She stroked his hair. She scratched at the back of his neck with her nails and did not reach for her camera and, as if unbalanced at the foot of some sheer depth, felt a rush. He nuzzled his head against her but only felt cold and hard and proud. They were silent. He searched, with some degree of despair, for a trace of tenderness or intimacy within him, but could come up with nothing.

And, more or less, that's how it was, that was my youth or a moment of it: the ruptured friendship of Jean—Jacques and William; Anne, to whose striking intelligence and willingness to face fears I very likely have not done justice; and of course the farting Gustave. Really, he was the only one who seemed never to change. Nothing could wean him from his farts — not humiliation or threats or the passage of time itself. I think of him almost as a hero. Why did he do it? Where did it come from, the interminable farting? Were they isolated outbursts of indiscretion or of protest — uttered in moments of complacency or anxiety? Even more to the point, were they performances of mindless production or cogitation par excellence? One wonders about these things, dallying in a world such as mine. It is hard to convey the tremendous respect I have for Gustave. It is hard to impress upon you just that. But perhaps it was really nothing. Characters shuffled this way or that; a self-consciously adolescent bombast entangling itself in plot and so giving way to more traditional narrative; the failure of even that and resurgence of a first—person narrator, presuming to lay his cards flat on the table. This game is over, he says. There is only pathos and cleverness left, and I am out of my depth. A young generation is breathing through my fingers after all, and one insatiable for epitaphs. Its cry is unmistakable. Listen: Literature is dead. Go back to sleep.

7 It was the same with Jean—Jacques as he left the city. He had planned to run off and, as he sat in the train, was animated by a kind of brutal conviction of selfsufficiency — but as he pressed his forehead against the glass, the towns slipping by in a rhythm of slick consistency, an immense loneliness broke through, worse and more sticky, somehow, than he had ever suffered, coating him utterly, and he began to weep. So much was unsaid, he thought, and could not and would not be said. This seemed to him unbearably sad. Across the compartment an elderly man shifted in his seat and looked uncomfortably away. The boy's dirty cheeks streaked with tears struck him as almost obscene.

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On the Image Reflected in a Magnetic Field She resists, a sacred image of her votive past, like a playing card arced between two fingers or a length of wire bound at the ends to snare my memory: and relents, sheets of rain on storehouse flat tops lying low; desolate reflection of rainwater, filtered through the stealth of twilight, in the passing windows of a train or the caterwaul of wheel on rusted track. In the wake of a hum, low and insidious, all that I hear is an explosion forever detonating: "No, that's not what I said," she said. "A word, one thing," tell me something.. only this: once my mother, now she is my fortress, the arch of her neck and breast flinty with jewels, their glare stifled in a diaphanous gauze like a catarrh in a cur's eye. She remains, a city that braces and repels in the distance, a muted echo in the downswing of the sun. Ted Cohen

Talk We have sculpted walls with our voices. Released, our words spiral down the plaster, crossing and creasing in deepening trails. I slow to you always, move against sound, leaning into it, held like a sail, echoing you. We move this way: our words turning music, stealing through hallways mine following yours pushing out windows beating inside gutterpipes finding the places where light filters through under doors and up chimneys and down between floors and we fill them with phrases, deliberate diamond tongues made to get through. We have spent days like this, wearing smooth the rooms around us with all that can be said.

But your last night I held you in half-sleep, my arm losing sense under your neck. I kept against you, full with your breath. I kept to your movement, following. You travelled miles for this silence, for the promise of a shoulder blade, for shapes and skin and my bare hands. You could not say what brought you back. And now, outside, another rain runs fingers down the windows, down to fill the open mouths of gutterpipes. Full, they are voiceless. And when I think of what you are to me I remember your exact fingers, the way you look walking, from behind, or the language of your final eyes. Hilary Liftin

literary magazine in America. It Included names like John Hersey, Archibald MacLelsh, Thornton Wilder and Sinclair Lewis In their under-

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13 Mike Ananian oil on masonite 6" x 9"

Mike Ananian oil on masonite 8" x 8"

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graduate years, figures who went on to shape American letters. The magazine survived wars and depressions, but vanished in the face of

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Miniskirt Fascism Jonathan Cohen

FOURTEEN There is a certain difficulty in talking about one's relation to theory. Immediate problems come up as soon as you open your mouth. Articles on the importance of theory get scrapped before they're even started. To qualify theory, to talk about it as though it were some kind of spatial expanse, with "turf" surveyed, bounded, and claimed by its various owners, and to then claim an enfeoffment, appropriating little corners and tucks for one's own cultivation and enrichment, is to transpose not only the figures, but also the relations of economy."Theory" becomes another name for property. You don't have to talk about theory any more; you can talk about "production." Making "theory" into an object of real property like any other, revelling in the combined intellectual vagueness and sensual tangibility of uninformed matter, is a fine way of getting a grip on it while not having to look at it. A "defense of theory" would necessarily fall into this

Richard Schweder, an idiot/savant at the University of Chicago, has produced, for the intended benefit of the January 8th New York Times Book Review and its readers, a piece of writing. "In Paris â&#x20AC;&#x201D; Miniskirts of the Mind" attempts to alert us to the "postmodern peril" that plagues these, our grim and latter days. Just as the power of women to dress themselves is nothing other than the sinister manipulation of Parisian fashion-mongers, just so, we are being led down a "nihilistic," "valueless" garden path by malignant Frenchmen and their thought. The sheer luridness of the mental picture is enough to imprint it in the mind, a stereotype redolent of the sneering Germans and Japanese to be found in wartime propaganda. Its lack of resemblance to anything else, is, for Mr. Schweder,a minor point. The selfconsciously jocular tone of the article is meant to diffuse any impressions of rigor or animus. Throughout, one can find figures of speech exaggerated beyond the point where one can imagine them, preposterous claims for thinkers, paraphrases which are so distorted as to parody themselves before one has finished reading them. Like bird-droppings on one's windshield, the article spreads itself wide and thin, leaving a residue which may be extraordinarily difficult to remove. We can quote Schweder's paraphrases of "French thought": "In paraphrase: That a person is made up of syllables and life is really a run-on sentence that only death can bring to an end. That reality.., is incomplete, if viewed from any one point of view; and it is incoherent, if viewed from all point of view at once." We can quote his historiography: "Long before Descartes' meditations, common sense had lost its grip on the French mind." We can quote his ideas on individual thinkers: "Levi-Strauss... thought like Salvador Dali, yet dressed up like he was on his way to synagogue." "I have somehow wondered whether Descartes was for real, or whether he may just have been a monk from Tibet, or an ancient Pythagorean, or perhaps Woody Allen, dressed as a French philosopher." We can quote his analysis of the "French mind": "That is how the French walk and hold their heads in their hands at the same time. They do it with mirrors; and then, captivated by their magic and pleased by their deceptions, they disappear into a puff of smoke that isn't really there." Mr. Schweder has set himself a broad target. It is a territory: the whole of France. It presupposes an economic relation: the artificial inflation and deflation of exchange values,implied by fashion and aided by a commodified sexuality. The economic metaphor cannot be supported: he has to resort to a description of a mendicant cult, as non-economic as one can get, to maintain even the vaguest connection to the ostensible subject of his article. The two characterizations which Schweder imposes â&#x20AC;&#x201D; the self-interested trickster and the selfless ascetic â&#x20AC;&#x201D; exist side by side, more in contradiction than in hypostasis.

the tepid complacency of the Reagan Era. During the late 70's and early 80's an alumnus, Andrei Navrozov, published a magazine under

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The Yale Literary Magazine FIFTEEN

pattern; intellectual property, it would seem, must be preserved by a military intelligence. This kind of transposition, however, is highly problematic. It grants description and definition to a word,"theory," which had rested entirely undefined. This description, this definition, exist only on a figurative level; there is no necessary resemblance between them and the word "theory" except what is asserted by the audacity of the original figure's creation. Even if one were to assert such a resemblance, one could only answer the question,"What is it like?"; one still could not answer the question of "What is it?" Oddly enough, it is precisely those people who place the most reliance in such a transposition who see its failure most acutely. It is equally odd that they do not see such a failure as affecting the overall validity of their transposition. If it does not work in its original sequence, surely it can still be made to recoil. Since there is

What is the subject of his article? One can't answer that question. The object of the article, however, is somewhat easier to find. In its final paragraphs, he gets down to what he would like to rest in the reader's mind as the core of the stereotype: "playing hooky from [method] and [logic]." As one might guess, the operative metaphor is one of school: in this case, P.S. 86, in the Bronx. The implication is that a return to "method and logic" is inevitable. A further implication is that this will be enforced, by truant officers, if need be. This sounds like a threat. All of this sounds like a threat. Schweder's imprecision, his long lists of "French-spoken consciousness," resemble nothing so much as the tentative advances of a public-school bully, trying out every possible taunt, every possible subject he knows to see what will make his victim jump: An author:Sartre,Levi-Strauss,Piaget,Barthes,Lacan,Foucault, Derrida, Kristeva. A text: "Being and Nothingness," "The Order of Things," "Of Grammatology." A movement: existentialism, structuralism, deconstructionism. A Gaulish mantra: semiology, post-modern feminism, intertextuality, the arbitrariness of the sign. All he knows are the names; all he knows is that they're French; all he knows is that they're connected to something bad: "negation, impiety, the void." Anyone who has ever seen a kid beaten up in a playground because of his name, because of the place where he's come from, because of his difference, has seen this kind of "reasoning" in operation. It doesn't need to have any accuracy at all in order to work. All it needs to work is a name: in this case, "Frog."' Once the kid responds, he's given the sign that the bully can start in earnest. Schweder goes one up on the average school-yard bully: he invents the prejudice as well as showing up in person to make the threat based on it. One must admit that this is a threat. There is no way to "defend" adequately against it. You do get slugged as soon as you open your mouth. When one tries to deal with the specific "charges" raised in the article, the response comes out something like "Yes, I have stopped beating my wife lately." It is in making oneself accountable to a bully, and to his terms, that one submits oneself to his power. The names are all he knows. Schweder rejects all attached to the name Lacan as the work of an "impostor," (an impostor of whom?) because the first sentence of a Lacan article which he

1 Schweder: "The French just love to give [critics] what they want, as long as it helps them miss the point." "Turning common sense into nonsense has always been a very French thing to do."

the title The Yale Literary Magazine, a right-wing commercial operation that shared little with the Yale undergraduate student body. In

Spring

The Yale Literary Magazine SIXTEEN something which they call "theory" which they wish to exist but for which they do not have an adequate definition, the lack of an adequate definition means that "theory" does not exist. The intermediate step — the substitution of an ungrounded figure for a definition — means, for such people, that the later step, of negation and dismissal, can take the form of a debunking, charged with all the moral fervor of a small town hanging a quack doctor. The possibility that a definitional approach might not be appropriate — that if one starts out with a oneword, all-enveloping generality, one is liable to end up with the exact same insubstantial mess — is not one that has been given serious attention. The hopes of scooping up a wide variety of very difficult thinkers, squeezing them all into one overstuffed word, and throwing the word into the trash can, are simply too promising. These hopes are, of course, consistent with the replacement of a word by a spatialized figure.

reads is a run-on.' It is when we acknowledge that the names, as Schweder uses them, are recognizable, when we make them into a place, that we are creating territory for Schweder to invade or police. Fortunately, the community in which Schweder is speaking is not P.S. 86; we are no longer subject to the brutal world of the school-yard. We have, in that way, grown up. A sign of our success in this is that Schweder sees the theory with which (or despite which) we live and work and read as "nothingness"; abstraction is always confusing to a bully, precisely because it is invisible. It is what can persist. Schweder terms "French thought," as a place name for "theory," "an act of resistance to the terrors of an all-too-efficient regime." For once, this hits its mark. The kind of power which allows this article to be published in the Times Book Review relies on the policing of the educational project, on a standardization of canon and content, to control the kind of intellectual work that can come out of it. It is the power and the control, as opposed to the project, the canon, or the content, which give one pause. The methods which Schweder uses in "Miniskirts of the Mind" are not those commonly used to deal with ideas; they are more suited to a bigot than to a scholar. The tacit sanctioning of these methods for use in a publication of the widest circulation implies a double standard. "Fact-checking" is useless against "The Big Lie," and this is well-known. It is for the sake of showing us the kind of institutional power which Schweder arrogates to himself that he lapses, for a moment, into accuracy. The horizon towards which he gazes lovingly is the school-yard fence, come back to enclose us all. In a sense, thinking like this is a self-subjection to what is only a possible imposition. Yet it is true that all one needs are the right names, if one is set on making institutional circumstances uncomfortable for others. Like the Earth-Spirit in Faust, we would like to say, "You can hold only that spirit which you comprehend; not me." "Miniskirts of the Mind" alarms because it is in spite of the fact that "theory" has never existed in a state of definition, in spite of Richard Schweder's complete incomprehension of the material about which he has been given the authority to write an article, that that article has had the potential to wreak harm. It is on this account, and on this account only, that an article might be written that might be mistaken for a "defense of theory." This is already a concession. 2 This is an essentially Scholastic move, though it dates back to the Aristotle of the Sophistical Refutations. If one does not know grammar, then one can be refused entry to the space of dialectic. Argument over.

recent years a suit was won In which it was decided that the name was the property of Yale. The Yale authorities, in turn, said the name

1989

The Yale Literary Magazine 17

Steve Smith photograph (silver print) 3.5' x 5'

Roger Kenna photograph (silver print) 8"x 10" belon â&#x20AC;˘ ed to the students. The magazine lay dormant until now. The discontinuities and interventions that mark the fortune of this name

The Yale Literary Magazine

Spring

Happiness Behrouz Montakhab

EIGHTEEN Odd to think that there is a button on this keyboard labelled "Return." I've hit it once already, almost nothing happened, and I'll probably hit it a bunch more times before whatever this thing here is comes to an end. "Return." The designer's intended meaning is of course to signify a request from the user to the CPU for the cursor to return to the left-most position of the line, to the beginning of the next line. Let me tell you, friends or neighbors, tonight when I hit that return key I mean to generate a prayer addressed to all the people who have ever deserted me, or whatever higher force of conservativism unites and guides them in this their chosen project. Someone — or let's be honest, please, anyone — return to me. Driving towards home from a dinner party, feeling almost filled with spaghetti and red wine, I was pleased to notice that the car in front of mine had a WHFS bumpersticker. In a minute I had recalled that WHFS is not a local station, that up here in New Haven it was a singular thing indeed to be displaying. A crack of light from a strange world opened up, strange only for its unexpected familiarity, and home began to mean a different thing altogether. The car was one I had seen before, and as I pieced together the few details I could observe from behind the vehicle — including the D.C. license plate and the make of the model — in the short time I had before the light changed, an image slumbering deep within me rapidly began to wake itself and make its way back to the surface of my thoughts. This car had belonged to Tracy White! And still did, if those weren't other than her bright curls overflowing the headrest to catch the light, providing me with a golden frame of this unfortunate obstacle to my clearer vision of their source. The feeling I got watching that blue Volkswagen Scirocco pull away from me is one I have felt before, many times, sometimes for months at a stretch, and it is a sensation that I know I won't be able to escape from this evening. Chasing her was futile — my girlfriend once, a professional model now I'm told — car and driver began a second vanishing, passing like a desert wind through my field of vision. Billy Bragg has some angry songs, but no matter how loud I play them, they can't block out the pictures that crowd my mind, snapshots memorializing this, my wasted life, rendering unto me accounts of time spent without consideration or generosity. The music comes in on a different channel to join forces with the

disastrous video, it becomes a soundtrack for this furious session, pushing me farther than I have ever wanted to go, and I am suddenly lost in a world of cold sweat. Even the Jam, who arranged the marriage of "smiling" to "beguiling" in the very model of a happy rhyme, even their guitars do nothing to block this signal. Even Husker Du, whose very name sets my memory unreeling, even the Replacements, not to mention The Cure, all the bands have been tried before, one after another, without any therapeutic success. They only remind me all too well of the last time I needed guitars, and heroes,0 Dylan,0 Costello, and I am sent back to sorrowful summers spent in isolation, to the days of adolescence when I recorded all this shit from other people's tapes, or off of the radio. I would never cut myself on purpose or even by accident, I would not pierce this flesh whether it were to spill blood into the bathtub or to place an earring in my left ear, nor would I trim the admittedly dead yet somehow attractive tissues of my hair under any circumstances, my sole concession being the clipping of fingernails necessary in order to operate this computer, and the baths which I enjoy. I avoid serious conversation, and when I can't snap off a joke, I stutter and mumble out excuses that even I wouldn't let pass if they came out of someone else's mouth. Because you must never accept that you are on trial in any way whatsoever. My moment of truth goes untested, like the untasted fruit that ripened and then began to rot away inside my refrigerator. It's the politics of living alone, kid, you can't go grocery shopping. I'm tired of your head-injury fiction, your faked orgasms. You think Kafka had a handful of microwave popcorn in his other hand while he wrote, you think Flaubert would get up from his desk to fetch a pop-tart? They erased faster than they wrote, and if the page was cold, they would burn it and start again. There are sacrifices that you have to make when you dream of writing the kind of story that puts the amateurs out of business, when you ache for the perfect word. They stood on the threshold and did not flinch. I want to be like them or die trying. When I came in tonight I turned on the television set in the living room, just for the company of voices while I worked in my study. The Tonight Show was to begin

expose the myth that an institutional body could be capable of speaking with a single voice. Navrozov's disastrous detour has freed us of a

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1989

The Yale Literary Magazine NINETEEN

soon, bringing comic relief into the awkward beds of thousands of impotent couples, mismarriages and lonely hearts. But for now the eleven o' clock news, in which a Kurdish child is interviewed after witnessing a mustard gas attack by the Iraqi government on a settlement of their own citizens. One of the few survivors, he gives a testimony which is translated into the voice of an American adult male and dubbed back over the face of the child in these words: People who smelled the bomb fell on their backs and died. Ten minutes pass, as I gaze at the computer screen, before I can find any humor in the situation. And then I begin to write. Is giving up on life worse than wanting to and for some reason or other not being able to? The passage from suicidal thoughts to tedious ones is an easy one for a patient man, a man with a gift for seriousness, a man never more than two weeks away from developing a perfectly scheduled routine. I am talking about myself again. What choice does he have, no one will hold still long enough for him to get a fix, no one offers to model for his work and he hasn't the confidence it would require to ask for favors, so it's another evening before the antique looking glass, it's another fadeaway self-portrait that his drawers will never be rid of. It is so much easier to write something that begins with a tender address. "Dear Tracy," I could write, or Dear Anyone, I have got a potential mailing list the length of your arm of names who wouldn't dare come within arm's reach of me on a night like this. If only I really were some wild animal in a cage! Even then, separated from both my native country and the one to which I had been transplanted, doubly caged, there would be a life raging within me, a great tension rolling about freely in my loose, powerful muscles, a gleam dancing on my sleek fur to catch the eye... But I am not that, my heart does not roar and pound against my ribcage but weakly flutters instead, like a canary dying in a coalmine, instead I am this miserable creature at the control panel of a useless machine, typing fast and fearfully, without interruption, waving my slender fingers at a hazily imagined panic of nothingness, the way an insect on its back might thoughtlessly wave its arms and legs in the air. During a commercial interruption these two Korean children come on the set trying to sell Karate lessons.

The girl says, nobody bothers me. To this the boy adds, nobody bothers me either. (The idea is that we are afraid of their lightning blows, that we identify with their innocence and their cute smiles, the idea is that we find their immigrant modifications of our tongue appealing, that they ask to be left alone and they are as a result of the damage they can inflict on a threatening stranger, as a result of the pain they can give you without even a weapon in their hands, the idea is that they are young, their hands are empty, and they want to be left alone, to be honest I have no idea what the idea is but if there is one thing that I know it is that the transfer of unpleasant sensations and the possibility of an avoidance of such must inevitably be tied up in all this somehow.) You have to wonder if they bother each other. Alexander Graham Bell didn't want a specimen of his unpredictably telepathic brainchild installed in his own house anymore than the good Doctor Guillotine would have wanted one of his devices cluttering up the living room. How could they market it at all when it's really no more than an alarm clock with a mind of its own? Yet they sell. Phones are like Walkmans, everyone has one, the same advertising firm must be handling the accounts of AT&T and Sony. You have to hate companies that big. But I parked, I picked up the receiver of the nearest payphone and asked for information, I was trying to reach a mutual acquaintance who might know what Tracy's car was doing driving her around my town in the middle of the night. The operator (a friend of mine worked as an operator for a while â&#x20AC;&#x201D; was changed by it) sounded like she didn't need my business and was probably delighted to find that Howard had specified his number not be published. Pronounced the verdict as if her own. You're not a monopoly anymore, you charmless cunt. Plus my quarter doesn't come back. Oneiric digression: everyone has their own uninteresting variation on this theme, the classic dream where I am naked and I know I am naked but no one else seems to know I am naked. (Sometimes you are given underwear.) In this involuntary and confused mode of exhibitionism I enter the department store where my ex-wife is now working, with the idea buzzing about my head of purchasing a neck-tie long enough to do me double duty as a fig leaf. Can you help me out, I ask her, disguising my voice. I reveal

considerable burden, by revealing both the impossibility and the undesirability of trying to adhere to the strictures of a great tradition. The

The Yale Literary Magazine

Spring

TWENTY that I am shopping for a friend, but she does not seem to recognize me at all, today she would laugh at any certificate that claimed she and I were ever married, and instead speaks to the man directly behind me, repeating her one simple question over and over again until even the professional monotone begins to lend itself to a strange inflection, such that it seems that with this very some phrase a question is alternately being asked and being answered: May I help you, she asks, May I help you. Et cetera. I could end it right there, perhaps with the old standby "And then I woke up", if I weren't precisely as sick and lonely as when I began. What would you do if faced with the decision between suicide and boredom, between onanism and necrophilia, "between incoherence and misrepresentation" and "between sickness and death?" Take a minute now to make your choice, take a lifetime if you have to, but not a minute more. I answer the phone on the first ring, I can't help it, I lie when I want to tell the truth, like I said, and I cry when all the sentimental Christmas pictures come on the set, in all their born-again colorized glory, I cry when Scrooge wakes up from his uneasy dreams to Find himself transformed into a generous human, I cry because it could never really happen. With the prize carcass broiling in the oven he raises a glass of the toxic solution offered to him by a family of strangers and employees — how could he drink it that way knowing it held his death? — and announces the first toast he has ever proposed in all his all but extinguished years. "Everything for everybody!" — can you believe that is what he says, he says he wants everything for everybody, and that's no lie. (What do you get for the man who has everything? Analysis?) I don't exchange gifts during the holidays and I don't want to, I don't want ill-fitting sweaters or predictable books or any of the other unsuitable items from your catalog to appear on my doorstep wrapped in gaudy papers, and I don't want to save up for months and then blow all my accumulated capital in order to celebrate the occasion of some messiah's destruction. Nor do I demand the whole process come to a stop because of my personal doubts, I simply want to know the difference between myself and these others who outnumber me by the millions, these believers who fill the churches and the K-marts at the same time every year, I want one of them, a representative of their body, their leader if they have found another fool, to

deliver to me an explanation, a few neatly typed pages would suffice, of who they are, what they are doing, and why they are doing it, this is to be slipped under my door, and I'd be willing to pay them a dollar a word, which is more than Sports Illustrated paid for Hemingway's bullfight coverage at the peak of his fame, and you know that's no lie either. As I pick up the phone to dial Tracy's number, which four years has not even begun to erase from my memory, Carson interrupts his monologue and asks: "Does anyone in the audience have any questions? Would anyone besides me like to know what I am doing or why I am doing it?" Carson smiles his Carson smile, sips from the Carson coffee mug. He is an American Classic. "The questions don't have to be about the show so far, but it might help if I am to answer them as an authority would. Yes, I see that we have some takers, step forward boys, step right up, are you all brothers?" In unison they answer that we are, in fact, all brothers, each of us is the brother of each of the others. They are the five Chinese brothers, who happened to be recording a children's special in a nearby studio and thought they would stop in, the way Hope sometimes walks into the show. One by one the brothers ask their questions. The first Chinese brother asks him what a desert is, he says it is like a beach without an ocean. The second Chinese brother asks him what coffee is, he says it is like Coke without bubbles. The third Chinese brother asks him what love is, he says it is like knowledge without suffering. The fourth Chinese brother asks him what prayer is, he says it is like talking without anyone listening. The fifth Chinese brother asks him what hell is, he says it is like a world without God. Then some woman without any particularly memorable qualities stands up and asks Carson how we can be happy, and is given this answer: "First you must escape to the freedom of irony." And then, Carson, and then? The audience bites its hp. "And then you must escape from it." As I finish dialing her number, I find my thoughts coming back to the "return" key, which I have hit fortythree times at last count. It's not too late to start over, that is the message this key has for us. If you hit it twice, you have a new paragraph, you are prepared, the manual of style tells me, to express a new idea.

title of The Yale Literary Magazine has been judged the official property of The Yale Legal Machine, the giant operation that has casually

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1989

The Yale Literary Magazine TWENTY—ONE

The ratio of ideas to paragraphs should be consistently one-to-one. It's not too late to start over, that is, if you would prefer failing again to a shot at getting it all over with. Which is the idea of this paragraph, or to put the same idea into different words: anything can be done — badly. You understand how going out of your mind could be painful, we have all witnessed the persecution from within in one or another of its terrifying forms, no one would defend it. But to have gone out of your mind, to have finished with the whole question of sanity and just be completely and irrevocably out of your goddamn fucking mind... The pleasure must be indescribable. A brief anecdote may serve as illustration of my point. My roommate freshman year was a shaved-head madman who carried a hardbound edition of Finnegans Wake with him wherever he went, and still does. For this he is not mad. He goes out for moonlight walks in the frozen heart of winter, what I'd call overcoat weather at the very least, wearing nothing but a white undershirt and jeans, barefoot, bare head gleaming, no wristwatch and no wallet, no worldly possessions at all except the Wake, I can only guess if he has underwear on. For this he is stupid, but not yet mad. But one night when the temperature dropped to zero and then below, I asked if he might not be cold and, failing to get a response, dared suggest to this dearest of my fellows that he put on a jacket. And he did put on a jacket. He looked at me for a minute, went back inside, looked on his bookshelf, found the dust cover for Finnegans Wake, and before going back out again dressed as before, he carefully eased the flaps of the book into the jacket with as much love as a mother bundling her young on their first day of school, cooing the whole time: my little Finnywinny, we have to keep you warm, my vinegar sweet, are you all comfy now, we don't want you to catch cold, now do we, my baby, my itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny bible of postmodernism, my precious, there now, that's better isn't it. And I swear to you now by every name that I have ever dropped that while his skull might have been just the slightest bit cracked, the binding of the book never wasl Ladies and gentleman, please put your hands together for him — the madman. And he thought I was crazy. The phone, the phone. How to write with it nearby?

The phone: looking at it as if it were something else is not so difficult. I mentioned the alarm clock idea though somewhat obscurely, perhaps only a latesleeper could understand. Mine has an old-fashioned rotary dial instead of a keypad, which allows any of a thousand visual possibilities to be entertained. The phone, the phone. It's the wheel of fortune — coincidentally the show of the same name is being rerun on the set, coincidentally a blonde named White is modelling herself on the set, but I assure you without any reservation on my part that there is absolutely no relation between these or any two atoms of trivial information — it's the wheel of fire, if you use your imagination. It's anything you want it to be, if you use your imagination, and who can help using their imagination, who could stop the spinning wheel of imagination if they wanted to, it's the wheel of the world revolving like youngish beauties shopping for jewelry with vacant eyes, it's the steering wheel in the grip of the un-give-up-able ghost of my high school sweetheart, extending itself through her central nervous system and into mine, it's the wheels of fate that swerve and crush he who would have liked to remain the eternal bystander of innocence, imprinting both pavement and corpse with the mark of its violent tread. The chain of your will is broken on the wheel, the links are scattered and still the wheel spins, the spinning becomes hypnotic, in the same way typing does when you stop thinking about each individual letter, you are falling into a trance, eventually the phrases grow larger, more specialized, perhaps they will someday think themselves, they will have their own CNS, their own CPU, their own central heating, perhaps the insect overturned on the floor a few pages back has now grown calm, has forgotten his desperation, has hypnotized his brain into numbness with the gestures of his extremities, perhaps he is even now entertaining notions of his salvation, initially out of the question, then unlikely, next a distant possibility, and now, look at his arms, legs, whatever those damned appendages are, the same by any name, look at them spinning in the air now, that creature must be in ecstasy, you just look at him go, he must be absolutely sure at this point that he will be saved, and not just eventually but immediately, in the very next moment available, without hesitation or delay, a hand will presently come down, take him up in its gentle grasp, and effortlessly turn his life around, I can see it, he is convinced, his antennae flailing in all directions in a hilarious parody of an epileptic fencing against

addition to its extended us credit, and Perhaps a loose-fitting credibility. We are on the lease, but not the leash, of an apparatus that, in

The Yale Literary Magazine

Spring

TWENTYâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;TWO multiple opponents, this bug is absolutely sold on the idea that he is in a disco and that this disco doubles as a waiting room on the same floor as God's great generous P is for Paradise of Paradises, why he doesn't even know I exist and yet it is as if he is signalling to me, his pathetic antennae are broadcasting as clearly as any radio station ever did, he has just surpassed WHFS to become my new favorite radio station, it is as if he has suspected all along a possibility that I can only now begin to realize, I guess he must know it in the way that one somehow feels the truth rushing in to fill up life's privileged moments: I could help him. Can you tell me why the telephone won't stop its stupid ringing?

acknowledged educational function, commands a massive amount of local capital, and serves both as an ideological training ground and a

1989

The Yale Literary Magazine TWENTY-THREE

Good Evening, Ladies and Pencils

To Whom It May Concern

Surely the later Leda isn't vague: her womb shudders, she can't discern her feet. And yet, where is the bulge's mark of makingâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; no swan gnaws her neck, no wings still beat her. Yeats' brutish blood, caught up, has stained the blank to dream a cause. Perhaps his strange heart, not indifferent, beat to break our bone with ink, bear there his vicious wings as master blow. He'd have us put on his words. Don't ask how rape's immaculate: instead, why Yeats erects his quill and tries to write us. Strutted quillâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; in truth but pencil, prop to the mind's conception. For Leda, for those of us who can read as women, the vital mark is made by the eraser.

Pursuant to our mutually manifest affection, punched and bound and stamped upon our hearts on a certain recent eve, now gone but recollected with relish as a test crucially successful, and since I have reviewed the schedule of my pressing bonds, which show no prima facie complications to ties so strong as those that we share, my message is cued: hereby, with all my faculties, mental and physical, formally ordered, and, observing the rule of my autonomous will, of course with all privacy, etc., respected. I name our dual existence Love, and promise my eternal devotion, even if I attend law school.

Brent Edwards

To John Rockwell, Schooler of Wind. Having moved with the wind over the sea In a search for that excellent union Divine and elusive, what did you find Before returning to New Haven's soil? You left the town's most beautiful woman And your family's embrace, John Rockwell; Traded a verdant frontier for the deep Bitter majesty of the Atlantic. You sacrificed the comfort of children, And were the last to bear the Rockwell name; Passed your grey last years in a whalebone hut, Weeping with fear as all tales blurred to one: Those fantastical narwhales off Greenland; That ironclad beast in Lisbon's bazaar Which they called by the name rhinoceros; The tragic foundering off Cape of Storms You alone survived, only to forget. Oh, John Rockwell, dead these two hundred years, You're as landlocked as the rest of them, now. Oaken tap roots gind your petrified ribs, And rich moss springs forth from your collapsed skull. At last, John Rockwell, you are with the world.

Kneeling on the skeletal winter grass, Tracing over the letters of your name Carved on the sea green slate of your gravestone; I hear the snapping of weathered canvas, And feel the rolling swells of open time. Speak to me from your angle of repose. Teach me what the school of wind taught you. I'm as far from home as you ever were. My land lies so low on the horizon, I can't even recall my mother's voice. My land lies so low on the horizon, I can't even recall my native tongue. Write me an answer, old Master-at-Arms, With a pen of iron and diamond point Upon the table of my transient heart. For as once you were called to the water, So am I drawn to follow your sad course, And escape from this torment long foretold. Kevin Hicks

network of privilege for the military-industrial complex. Despite the official ring of its title, The Yale Literary Magazine is not the voice of

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/ Yale, nor do we claim this privilege for it. No one has grounds to claim a unique authority, a lesson which our attempts to forge a manifesto

1989

The Yale Literary Magazine

25 Thomas Daniel "Am I God? I Forget." Etching 34" x 38"

brought into sharp focus. We cannot accept schools and missions uncritically. Nor can we articulate the grounds of our i

tions, our

The Yale literary Magazine

Spring

Cyrus's Screen Alex Shakar

TWENTYâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;SIX My older brother Cyrus is now awake. His head snaps up from a nest of folded arms on the desk, and infinite space resolves into the shining face of his computer. A cursor flashes, off and on under the code which has consumed him for some time. It is dark in his apartment; below, a car passes and black wiry shadows of branches flail up the wall and disappear before reaching the ceiling. Cyrus reaches around, hugging the warm plastic shell with a bony arm; he toggles the switch. As the spindly letters vanish, he realizes that he forgot to save to disk, and several hours of his life have been lost; his hand darts up to the fading face of the computer, as if to hold the words in place. Static electricity crackles at his fingertips, like a soap bubble popping into air. "Fine," he says to the empty room; his refractory grin decays in the darkness. He finds the door from memory. A twitch of his fingers completes the circuit and the engine spins; another, and the dashboard glows green on his hands, and a single headlight articulates a fragment of the gutted city street. He rolls up the window to blot the bitterness of his own exhaust, and adjusts the mirror after catching the sight of his own blank eyes. At dawn, the sun is bloody egg, and the city is a dark bulge dwindling in his mirror. My brother Cyrus is finally coming to visit me. CYRUS WAXING: Cyrus speaks to me all the time, in the vaulted space of his old Dodge Dart. He doesn't know it, of course â&#x20AC;&#x201D; he is barely aware that he is talking at all, much less to me. He remembers things, and forgets where he is; he talks in muted fragments, with a sharp word, or a noise from the bottom of his throat, or a hastily stifled flinch at the wheel. Sometimes, after he says something, he wonders why he said it; sometimes he can't even understand what it was that he just said. But usually I get the drift of it. Now, the sun has risen above the windshield, and Cyrus feels more on top of things. He shuts off his headlight and switches the radio on, consoled by the whimsical threads of neo-psychedelia unraveling around him. He wanders off with the music, singing. "What I am is what I am is what you are or..." Cyrus wonders what he sounds like. He knows that what he hears is distorted in some way by the rumbling inside his head. The first time that he heard a recording of his voice, he refused to believe that it was actually him. Cyrus used to hold two mirrors at right

angles to reverse the reversal of the image, pretending that it was a stranger whom he saw at the other end. Cyrus doesn't pretend anymore. "Grub," says Cyrus. At the roadside McDonalds, he selects a booth and eats while gauging the reactions of disarranged morning faces to the sparkling beigeness of their surroundings and their meals. Across the room, two children chew their greasy morsels, under the stern gaze of an old woman whose cheeks are sucked at by a plastic straw. Cyrus turns away, looking down at a placemat full of riddles and puzzles. There is no question that Cyrus could solve them all before finishing his Egg McMuffin; Cyrus is extremely intelligent, and besides, the placemat is designed for someone much younger than my brother. CYRUS, GRADE 3: Cyrus, on demand, wrote all the numbers from one to one hundred, for a substitute teacher conjured out of retirement to maintain order in the classroom. Diligently, he completed the simple task and strode up to her desk to show her the results. The aging remnant of a teacher brought the yellow sheet up to her myopic eyes with a trembling hand and scowled. "What are all these commas doing here? I didn't tell you to write commas, did I?" she rasped. Cyrus had separated the numbers with ninety-nine heartfelt commas. Cyrus stifled his vague outrage and sullenly returned to his seat to do it all over again. But Cyrus was right! He was! Every one of those commas was necessary; without them it would have been one interminable, meaninglessly huge number. Without my brother's commas everything will collapse into anarchy. No one will be able to tell one and two from twelve. Can't anyone see that? Cyrus thinks about this and decides that childhood is fundamentally unimportant. Except for a few trivial episodes, he can't even remember it. After all, children just don't know that much. "Dumber than dogs," he mumbles. Indeed, he regrets all the time he wasted as a child. Children are obscenely faithful and eager to please, and naive enough to think that they're special. "Crazy." He gets up and absently trashes his wrappers along with the placemat and the underlying plastic tray.

appropriations, our vigilance. "Earth," "youth," "life": we won't forget so easily who and how many they had gootestepping. We find no

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The Yale Literary Magazine TWENTYâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;SEVEN

"You're welcome," says Cyrus, to the flapping lid. Before leaving, he types a code into a payphone, reaching his editor. "I won't be in today," he says. An electromagnetic facsimile of concern scratches at his ear. He fabricates: "I'm going to visit my brother. Yes. I'm still working on that program. No. I can't tell you yet..."

CYRUS AT WORK: One month ago Cyrus had an idea. He was in the office at the time, locked into a closed circuit of glassy eyes and green dots. Cyrus works for a computer magazine. Contributors write programs on whatever computers they have access to; it is my brother's job to translate these programs into the particular dialects of every other major brand. Each kind of machine is put together differently, and speaks a slightly different language, so the translations can never be perfect. Cyrus would experience a mild frustration whenever he compared two versions of the same project, and found that they were not the same at all. "Useless," he said. His idea was to write a program that would translate the programs for him, and this is the project of which he speaks: to become the cause of his own obsolescence. But he just can't seem to get it done; he gets distracted from it so easily, and, for the life of him, he can't understand why. Poor Cyrus. "Gotta run. Bye." "Bye," echoes thinly in smooth plastic. CYRUS AT PLAY: For some reason, Cyrus usually had no one to play with while undergoing childhood. For this reason, his parents bought him a Home Entertainment System. One long afternoon he sat legs crossed and hands knotted around a joystick, wired to a television looming above. The game was called "Surround." Cyrus played against the computer, each of them represented by a square of light which inched along the glass, excreting behind it a deadly trail. Sometimes, the computer would surround Cyrus, and he would meet his end against its red wall. Other times, Cyrus would surround the computer, and it would crash into his blue wall. This time, the computer crashed for real, and Cyrus had to find something else to do. "Device driver. Compiler. Driver driver," Cyrus says. He files something away, for future reference.

Now, it is mid-day and his car worms along a highway coagulated with heavy traffic. He drums manic hands on the wheel, wondering what the problem is. Further down the road, colored lights flash, and he squints to bring the source into focus. Two police cars and an ambulance encircle a tractor-trailer, which has jackknifed in the opposite lanes; the cab has crashed through the low metal fence and halfway into his section of the road. As he passes, men are closing the back door of the ambulance; he sees a dog sitting in the passenger seat of the empty relic, watching him through the splintered windshield. "Like a dog," says Cyrus. CYRUS AND THE DOG: Cyrus sat on his father's lap, at the controls of the brand new two-tone Town and Country station wagon, driving, for the first time. His hands grappled with the huge plastic steering wheel as they rounded the corner onto their own block. Behind him, he felt his father leaning to the left and right, trying to get a glimpse of the road. Marty, the family's dog shot into the street, bounding toward the playground on the other side, his silly tongue cascading from the side of his snout. Cyrus wanted to scream but somehow was unable. They heard a muffled thump. The car stopped and his father was bolting out the door, and Cyrus was tossed up, hurtling through the air, hoping he would never land. Granted, Cyrus was driving too fast, and perhaps it is also true that he overlooked his peripheral vision. But it was an exciting moment for Cyrus, he was feeling in control, and he didn't realize at the time the tremendous responsibility inherent in that position. You may not like Cyrus much right now, after knowing all this. But you must, at very least, forgive him. That is all I ask. It could have happened to anyone. It was pure chance that it happened to Cyrus. Flabby carcasses of tires, garbage of the weedy slopes, squashed animals, splattered bugs on glass, faded declarations of love on every anonymous underpass, cannibalized husks of traffic on the shoulder: it is almost dark now; Cyrus squints at iridescent words on green signs, and tugs at a lever behind the wheel. A white flume shoots up and floods the road for a moment, before being swept aside by a mechanical arm, and left to tremble in the periphery of the windshield. "God damn," he whispers. At the Self-Serve Cyrus shoves a fuming nozzle

relation of justice between knowledge and action, only a common aesthetic aspect. We know what we have left is only the measure of our

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TWENTYâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;EIGHT into the slot, eyeing the digital readout. THE SECOND TO LAST TIME CYRUS HAD SEX: "That was beautiful," she said. Cyrus strides past the souvenir shop toward a cluster of videomachines. Towering above the throng of children at play, Cyrus gropes around his pocket and inserts a coin in a roadrace game. He enjoys himself, lazily leaning into the simulated curves, guiding the miniature wheel with two light fingers. The goal is crystal clear: simply cover as much ground as possible. The combination of his skill and diffuse nonchalance excites some of the children, who gather around to watch. "No sweat," says Cyrus. He places high at the end of the first lap; the digits of his score flicker, and a new race is underway. Superimposed onto the speeding cars, he finds his face, with half-closed lids and a lopsided sneer, further twisted by the monitor's curve. He spins the wheel, and the tiny car is replaced by an explosion icon, raging at the edge of the road. To his delight, the car reappears, and he spins the wheel again, repeating the cycle of destruction and rebirth, until his time runs out. As he wanders away, one of the children grabs the back of his jacket, demanding an explanation. My brother fights the sudden urge to hurl the child across the room. Instead, he turns and shrugs. "Sometimes you just flip out, you know?" he says. CYRUS, BAD AT SMALL TALK: He found himself at an office party, listening, now nodding, now shaking his dull head, to a woman listing for him the opinions and activities which made her who she was. He knew it would go badly, he knew that they would both become flustered and obscenely hollow, after failing to describe those terribly unique intricacies of their respective psyches; he knew that when they would see each other at the office on Monday, they would pretend that they hadn't. She came to the end of her catalogue, which was, as always, surprisingly brief. Cyrus stared at her, emptied in that moment of silence, before she would compose her inevitable counter-question, and he would degrade her with his meaningless facts. He found her beautiful, then. He wanted to save her that way, to somehow fix her forever in that moment, head bent, loosing a gridlike sheen of dark falling hair, looking to

him with hopeful eyes and transience lingering in the sliver of her smile. Now, he remembers this. He could chart her out from that stale memory again and again, in any number of ways. But there's no point. She is somewhere else now, and he, Cyrus, is pacing the floor of a comfort station, with a mind full of useless memories. "Bitch," he says. He rams a bony forehead into the mirror, wondering if either will break. But he hears no decisive shatter, only the dull clatter of shallow surfaces colliding. If Cyrus knew how precious every single instant of his life is to me, he wouldn't be so down on himself. If only he could see that there is someone who knows his every thought, someone who revels in his successes, and mourns his defeats. Cyrus is everything to me. After all, without him, where would I be? THE LAST TIME CYRUS HAD SEX: "I don't know," she said. "I feel like...1 still don't know you at all." What are you thinking now, Cyrus? "Fucking cold out here." And now? Now the sun is on the other side of the world, and Cyrus stands with his back to the dark road, shivering. The beam of his headlight shines on the beam of his urine, making it sparkle as it shoots down and steams in the black mud. Emptied, he zips up, lies on the warm rumbling hood of his battered old car, and gazes up at the sky. "Where..." he says. CYRUS AND HIS NAME: Cyrus sat on his mother's lap, at the dining room table, his spine pressed against the warm swell of her distended belly. She was teaching him to write; his hand, clutching a black pencil, was guided by hers to scratch letters onto a pad of paper. He felt a thump at his back. "He's kicking now," she whispered into Cyrus's ear. They finished the word; five wide wobbly letters mocked him from the page. "That's your name," she said, "Cyrus. That's your The sight of the word frightened Cyrus, and he started to cry. "It's not me. It's not," said Cyrus. "Of course it isn't," she said, with a gentle laugh.

personal suffering and our audacity. Tell us that there is at least dignity in our knowing? One still feels compelled to produce a manifesto.

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The Yale Literary Magazine TWENTY-NINE

But he wouldn't stop crying until she got up and tore the page from the pad. She walked out of sight, into the kitchen, and Cyrus heard a crash followed by a high shriek. "Where..." The firmament is full of stars tonight, referring endlessly to one another. A car passes. Then another. One star is moving, slow and steady, climbing to the top of the sky. It is a satellite, falling forever around a nervous core. Watching him right now, perhaps.

single headlight slashing across the silver axis of the highway. It is like the entire universe is spiraling and draining into us. The feeling is so familiar, but singular as well. Because this time there will be no impact, but at most a flicker, across the flimsy span of words on our screen.

CYRUS WANING: In the hospital waiting room, Cyrus sat with fists clenched over his eyes, and legs dangling above the floor. He heard noises all around: the clatter of a typewriter, the rolling of a cart, the short hurried steps of nurses' feet, the bawling of a baby. Rocking himself back and forth, he let out an unending murmur which wove all of the sounds into a manic symphony. When he knew he could not wait anymore, he slid down from the chair and walked up the stairs and across the hall. He pressed on the door and peered into the bright sliver of light. Cyrus saw something. What it was that he saw, only Cyrus knows. And he would see it again in his dreams, over and over, each time in a different guise. There were people in white rushing around his mother, where she lay with white arms at either side of a flat stomach, crinkling the sheets with slow, regular spasms. Cyrus wandered into the room. "Where's my brother?" he said. "Where," said Cyrus, "the hell am I going?" We are driving impossibly fast now; the spidery road is drawn from darkness and sucked into the dim periphery before even being seen. The pedal is pressed to its threshold, and Cyrus is tensed and silent, fighting the urge to spin the wheel and test it all once again. All it takes is one fleeting impulse; the faulty firing of a single synapse, and the system shatters. Cyrus turns to me, his gaunt face half-lit by the green glow of the console. He tells me that there once was a time when he thought he could solve the problem, or barring that, at least understand the problem. But now he sees that he can't even describe it. "I know what you mean, Cyrus," I tell him, and Cyrus nods. Something happens, and our car lurches from side to side and starts to spin. One of us is screaming or laughing as the rampant car hurtles down the road, its Perhaps this is because we live in an age where the landscape is contingent on the map, where there is no life without a code, no

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The Yale Literary Magazine THIRTY

Tennessee Fires, Nov. 1987 II First came the wind, the cold wind followed by warmth and haze. In New Jersey, they said, the smoke lay so thick in the dew, you could barely breathe mornings. In Connecticut, there was only the increased vagueness of things, as if a jostling had left the world off-focus, but so far north, I figured the whole South was burning, blowing ash and cinder northward, the Appalachian Trail becoming a blackened branding â&#x20AC;&#x201D; scar from West Virginia to the Carolinas, like the charred fissures I carved in leaves with a magnifying glass in the sun as a kid, watching the gray smoke-line rise or chasing ants with my home-made death ray. Tennessee ash via jet stream. First the cold, then the haze.

And two days later came the rain, pouring, the first rain in months, like they'd seeded the clouds with acre on acre of Kentucky's blue grass, or as if the water was a balance of the burning; like the ash, a dumping on Connecticut of Southern baggage stolen by the fires. And then the cold returning, and the first snow not sticking, and me walking in it all, no longer figuring the correspondences, nor classifying the water around me as rain, sleet, hail, snow, but walking with a swagger and impervious, like a young god, come with the ash-cloud to celebrate winter. William Cole

Germany In the bones of her face I watch the days creep backward As she chases her family back across the Atlantic. So many pictures; in their cool silver oval her dead parents stare, The others came out of the attic, in thick books of black crepe, Sepia images whose corners crumble under her careful touch, Ancestors whose names slipped away like noiseless sand. She takes tinkling bracelets and charms from some grandmother's chest; They whisper to her of secrets in the streets of Hanover and Bremen. A tiny music box of pine, wound with shaking hands, Plays Deutschland Ober Alles with guileless antiquity â&#x20AC;&#x201D; With wet eyes she says I guess we can't sing it anymore; I try to force a thousand warnings into one careful smile. It's all gone now, she says, they destroyed it, didn't they? But I say No, we did, at Dachau, and Treblinka, And a hundred other places you don't want me to mention. As I pull on my boots she cries hot tears for Berlin's unclean death And for a moment something old and hungry stands between us. The gravity of eastern Virginia will no longer hold her; Somewhere among the bones of Germany she thinks to find her face. Jason Fry

movement without a manifesto. How can we know the players from the program? The pronouncement of aesthetic imperatives is another

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Andrew Cohen graphite on paper 贸"x 12" Lauren Scharfman monotype 4"x 11"

form of imperialism, more e9re9ious for its dissimulation. The ambitious artist knows that anything put into the form of a rule is already

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The Yale Literary Magazine

The Question of the

THIRTY-TWO Denis Hollier is a professor of French at Yale University. He is the author of two works published by the University of Minnesota Press,"The College of Sociology" and "The Politics of Prose: An Essay on Sartre." Forthcoming is the translation of his book on Georges Batuille, "Against Architecture," to be published by MIT Press. Currently, he is editing a comprehensive history of French literature, to be published on the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution. How did you become interested in Sartre? In some ways my work on Sartre was linked to my move to America, to my decision to stay here. When I came to teach fifteen years ago, it was my first contact with America, and I had the feeling of a very strange and foreign civilization. To tell the truth, I was rather resistant to many elements of American life and behavior, and thought. At one point I realized that much of my resistance to America was essentially Sartrean, that my negative relationship to America was in some ways patterned according to Sartrean categories. I realized that Structuralism, which in fact was supposed to be anti-existentialist, hadn't changed very many of my daily intellectual and political reactions, all of which were still rooted in a very Sartrean type of problematics, concepts and questions. I think, if I remember that book,' it is rather ironic towards Sartre's anti-Americanism or even his general allergy to whatever is Anglo-Saxon, starting with 18th century empiricists like Hume and going to Faulkner's novels. As far as it was linked to my intention to stay here, it worked. It's allowed me to distance myself from that Sartrean pattern. Foucault considers Sartre the last intellectual and an end point for transcendental philosophy. It seems that there is less interest in Sartre's work now than there once was. Do you see your book as an attempt to revive interest or to finish him off once and for all?

1 Denis Hollier, The Politics of Prose: An Essay on Sartre, THL 35, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).

(think that Sartre's presence is still very imposing. The only thing is that since his death, he is not part of a very cohesive tradition, and it is not clear from which angle you are to address Sartre. So what I would say briefly is that Sartre is clearly the great precursor of freelance intellectuals. His influence is negatively working on what's going on today and of course it produces blindness, it produces misreadings, but (think that the post-Sartrean break is in fact deeply rooted in what was one of the core of Sartre's orientations. It is quite obvious to me that there will be a rereading of Sartre from that point of view, a reopening of the question. We can go back through Sartre to our previous question which is the relationship between an intellectual and academia. Sartre is the only example since Nietzsche of a leading intellectual figure who was trained as a real professor and who made it outside the university. I think that Sartre, for that very reason, occupies in the French mythology an unshakeable position. He managed to leave academia, and he entered into something which can be called the "real world" of politics, of literature. There is that gesture of trespassing which is essential to Sartre's image. I think that's very wonderful even though there is something naive and utopian in it. Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze â&#x20AC;&#x201D; all are always valorizing what they call the "outside," there is still, at the biographical level, the exception of Sartre, who managed to go outside of academia. You can say that is in fact a naive transgression, that he is the most academic thinker, but there is still something very significant and very emblematic in the fact that he decided in '45 to stop teaching. You delivered a paper at a conference at Columbia recently on the occasion of the release of a new book of interviews with Foucault.2 What can these interviews add to our understanding of Foucault's project? I think it would be fascinating to do a history of the interview as a genre, to see how it developed, and to see also how Foucault was exceptional in that way. In fact, Derrida has always been extremely resistant towards interviews, which is quite the opposite behavior. If Sartre's interviews were to be collected, 2 Michel Foucault, Foucault Live,(New York: Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series, 19891.

obsolete, and that the soundest imperatives seem to come from within. The demands of political discourse play Wile E. Coyote to the light.

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The Yale Literary Magazine THIRTYâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;THREE

there would be huge volumes. He was one of the most public figures of the 40's and 50's and 60's, of course. There's a very interesting book by the French scholar Philippe Lejeune on the impact of radio and television on literature and especially on autobiography. Finally, interviews are very often about telling one's life. But in the case of Foucault a lot of those interviews were linked to that desire to go outside the limits of a normal academic audience, to address questions which were not academic, and to address people who did not belong to academia. And it is therefore linked to that move which I think is very strong in France, and especially in connection with the '68 period, that movement of testing the borders of the institution, to see how far outside one can go, instead of what's more the American attitude, which is to wait a little, generally to stay inside the ideological campus. The book of interviews has been given the paradoxical title "Foucault Live." This points to the complicated questions of the death of the author and Foucault's own authorship after his death, made even more complicated by the very form of the interview of which a single person cannot be said to be the author. However, Foucault is listed as the author of this book, as well as being listed third among the five names who received "special thanks". Do you foresee any danger in the possible appropriations of Foucault's name, which, ironically, his very own work has taught us to be aware of?

Do you foresee a danger now that Foucault himself is no longer around to be the world's leading authority on Foucault? No. The concept of faithfulness here is a difficult one since Foucault had his own way of being unfaithful to himself. Maybe what's going to be the "After Foucault" will be a conflict between betraying him by being faithful and betraying him by being unfaithful, a kind of double-bind situation, which is part of the posthumous institution of a name. In my view what's going on now as post-Foucault live, or rather post-live Foucault, which is a sort of new historicism, is important but misses what I think is the root of Foucault's project, and which he never dismissed totally, his radically metaphysical relationship to what he calls literature. I think that that kind of double level of Foucault's work would be most inscribed around the question of the death of the author. Foucault's essay,"What is an Author?," has been very influential in literary studies, and has now become a cause of the very phenomenon it wished to describe. But there is a body of his work that has been somewhat neglected, on authors like Roussel, Blanchot, and Bataille. What do you think his influence will be in the future, after these texts have been authorized (for example, translated widely and collected) and begin to authorize? It seems that he wished to distance himself from literature, as he does in one of the interviews in the book, where he not only appears hesitant to have his literary essays collected, but criticizes historians for relying on literary landmarks or monuments, and questions the existence of an audience for avantgarde literature, perhaps all literature, outside of the university.

The first one, 'The Order of Things,' is from a book by Raymond Bellour, a book of interviews very nicely titled Le Livre des Autres, a title that gives the formula of the paradox you described.' Who is the author? Who is speaking in an interview? Which is both the charm and maybe sometimes the dishonesty of an interview, on both sides. Maybe the interview is the genre of what Sartre called "bad faith," which, you know, allows people to disassociate themselves from what is said. To say that's not exactly what I said, and so on.

Let's think about the most historical text published by Foucault, which is the Pierre Riviere document, a confession of murder written by a young criminal in the 19th century.4 Even though Foucault talks in an

3 Raymond Bellour, Le Livre des Autres: Entretiens Avec M. Foucault, (Paris: Union Generale d'Editions, 19781.

4 Michel Foucault, I, Pierre Riviera, having slaughtered my mother, my sister, and my brother... A Case of Parricide in the Nineteenth Century, trans. F. Jellinek, (New York: Pantheon, 19751.

footed humor of the Road Runner, on aesthetic hero if ever there was one. A refined sensibility undermines the terrible seriousness of that

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Thomas Daniel woodcut 35" x 44" which

nominally political In the hopes of a more authentic liberation. As Stevens would have it, the only emperor is the emperor of Ice.

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The Yale Literary Magazine THIRTY—FIVE

historical way about the document, what clearly motivates him is that it is pure Blanchot, that in fact Pierre Riviere, a totally uneducated young peasant, writes and connects his writing to his own death. There is a kind of automatic, posthumous, autobiographical move which fascinates Foucault in that text. The fascination here is not historical, it is literary, and literary in the sense that Foucault defined literature when he was talking about de Sade, when he was talking about Blanchot, and in all those texts which he condemns when he talks about Riviere. But finally the pattern hasn't changed. The only thing is he doesn't use the word literature; that is the only difference. So to put it another way, I think there are two dimensions of the concept of the death of the author in Foucault. There is the one that is appealing to historians, which is that the modern concept of authorship is recent, and that you can trace the various historical and sociological instances which allow something like an author to be copyrighted; but next to that, there is the idea that the author doesn't need to be alive, it is just a dispositive, a social mechanism. But the second definition, which was actually the first one in Foucault's writing, goes the other way: death is what produces an author, and therefore to talk about the death of an author here does not mean the disappearance of the author but on the contrary the production of literature. Literature starts with the death of the author. It is a kind of homonymic concept but with opposite implications. One claims to be the end of literature and the move towards a socio-political approach, or historical approach, while in fact the other one is the very beginning of literature. The Roussel also is a book which is essentially about Roussel's fascination with his own death.5 The point of departure for Foucault — and Roussel is, to him, really the first Pierre Riviere — is that Roussel wrote a text in which he explains how he composed some of his previous texts. And in 1933 he committed suicide. Just before killing himself he gives his manuscript to his attorney with very specific instructions on how to publish it. Now Roussel was the most obsessionally clean man — Leiris tells a story about him wearing shirts only once — so he was totally allergic to any mark or personal vibration. He was the most anti-

autobiographical writer you can imagine, and his automatic way of composing books were also an expression of that. There he plans his suicide, and does that in relation to the publication of a text which is more or less the key of the work he published during his lifetime. It is his only text written in the first person, which is How I Wrote Certain of My Books P What fascinates Foucault is how the first person is a counter-effect of death, the emergence of death as a situation of enunciation in the discourse. And Foucault will have exactly the same description of the mechanism which produced Pierre Riviere's writing. Roussel is a book which is fully literary, I mean it is about a writer, while the Riviere is presented by Foucault as a total break away from literature.

5 Michel Foucault, Death and the Labyrinth, trans. Charles Ruas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 19871,

6 Raymond Roussel, How I Wrote Certain of My Books, trans. Trevor Winkfield,(New York: SUN, 19771.

The recent book of interviews, "Foucault Live," is a book about Foucault, precisely about his life, if mainly the life in his work, and the life of his work. It is also very much a book by Foucault, largely comprised of his attempts at self-representation before the public. Do you think the interview necessarily contains a variation on the specular moment that de Man associates with autobiography? It is true that Foucault allowed himself to speak about other things in interviews which he would never have written about. That's what I was referring to in the reference to Lejeune's book, the fact that the interview, the media, are intensely autobiographical. The interview is one part of that discourse produced by the media, and the conclusion of the media is to produce confession, to produce an autobiographical discourse. The first person is infinitely accelerated by the networks, more than it would be by writing. So that's probably why one has the impression that there is always a very significant autobiographical dimension in an interview. How do you think the status of today's university has changed since the sixties, when both France and America saw a movement of student rebellion?

cream. But the merely stylish Is insignificant unless lives are at stake, unless the game is a fatal and serious one. Leiris aims toward an art

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The Yale Literary Magazine THIRTY-SIX I think that it's true that what we are facing today is an academic institution that is comparatively tolerant. (There are conflicts; we should not transform that into a total pastoral.) I would say that probably what's most odd and at times upsetting about it is that there is a kind of threatening assimilative power. One wonders if there really is a discourse, which as a discourse, would not find a place in the institutions. But one should also take into account the context, that of less obvious historical and political emergency than was the case twenty years ago. We are in a moment, in a time, which is less dramatic in terms of this international and internal politics, and therefore discourses circulate as discourses with no obvious political performances which can be referred to as dangerous, threatening and so on. What is the potential for a discourse that is neither philosophical nor literary, since both those terms are bound to the academic arena?

Quel, and the feeling he had that a big part of literary production in the French avant-garde was becoming a kind of "little sample" for academic dissertations, that what was produced today as literature had no real status per se but was just a kind of artificially hermetic text meant to be decoded by academia. This means that in some ways literature itself, for Foucault, did not believe in literature but believed in the faculty of universities and academia. But on the other hand, Foucault always had a quite respectful attitude vis a vis writers like Genet. So this distancing is a very circumstantial gesture, one which I am sure is linked to Foucault's experience of literature departments in America. Many students will wonder on which leading French writer they are going to write their dissertation, and in a symmetrical situation, a writer in France says, "Well here I am, still alive, and there is nobody writing a dissertation on me." It's like shopping for the specialist. The author says, "I am not dead, you can interview mel"

I think that today's topography is very complex, but I don't see any clear instances which can escape academia. Maybe the real conflict, if we go back to the interviews, is between academia and media, and there will be a kind of competition about which one is the most driven towards order. I don't think today that there is anything which can be described as a real possibility of a nonacademic discourse. But what is at stake, what's really fascinating, is the way Foucault very powerfully and playfully at the same time escapes from classification. I remember when Foucault was at Berkeley, of course philosophers would be furious that the French department would invite Foucault, a philosopher, but at the same time when it was a question of the philosophy department sponsoring his presence, he was not a philosopher any longer. There is a kind of ambivalence which is the mark of a very powerful effect. And I think that's probably where today's more interesting things are happening. We don't know on which side of the border it belongs. What does Foucault gain by turning away from literature; perhaps a return to a philosophical conception of truth? Well, I think all that should be considered within some historical parameters. I think that Foucault's turn against literature is linked to his relationship with Tel that is more bullfight than ballet. If literature is to be original, it must find the courage to risk excess or bad taste â&#x20AC;&#x201D; banality, self-parody,

The Yale Literary Magazine

1989

THIRTY-SEVEN

Fifth Avenue First Loves I resist the long looks of this laconic girl, My sister's second daughter, imported from green Suburban lawns and commuter rails—the 'walk' lights Of Manhattan fascinate her. Granting the stores Only a sparrow's shocked stares, the girl and city Do not share love, yet to her I am beautiful.

When it hails in Manhattan and the yellow lights Move above poised buildings, women huddle in stores Testing expensive perfume as they wait, a green Scent to fool men who cannot find us beautiful Into remembering, perhaps, that first scared girl They kissed before they dreamed this life of the city—

Can she not know I am only as beautiful As the so-fine tensing fashions of this city Allow, granting favor as a miser from stores Long loved? That flat, still-born adolescent love lights Her eyes which I recall from the tight-budding, green Stalked memories of loves I gardened as a girl.

So long before they lived the dream of this city Whose gleeful selfish glow bleeds white the ancient lights Of stars that still lack nothing of the beautiful But its passage to our eyes and the ever green plateaus of our dreams. I feel the dreams of this girl Invade my body not grasping the loss it stores.

Loves I prodded into life, a myth-making girl Who prayed to God everyday to be beautiful— Who, when the light of a rainy day made green Ache in the hills and lifted the hidden city Of spiderwebs from the grass, wept finally the stores Of tears saved from the terror of the sky's strange lights.

It is no image of me she carefully stores Away among her notions of the beautiful To fondle in her quiet bed after the lights Are out, but the soh sibilance of the city That will plead with the sweet lisps of a pouting girl And has the power to destroy everything green. These infinite naked lights pour forth the spoiled stores Of my now whoring city, that once was as green And gentle as a beautiful, yet unkissed girl.

Housewarming

Alison Hurley

Our new rooms are still taking to the paint job, And in the space, in their cardboard anonymity, the boxes adopt hopeful, shifting poses: chair, armrest, unwitting easel for jokes about 'modern art'. They open up new holes by their waiting, wide mouths that warn of settling, of the loss involved. Now, the walls cradle day's longest rays. Catch the beer foam on your fingertips and flick the stuff down on me. Then trace the drops that light on my lips: they are clearer there. Old mayonnaise jars dry on the window, curved glass against glass. I once believed these jars could house captive fireflies; line the stretch of sill with a firefly zoo for the frequent summer blackouts. But, falling behind, we'd only name them as they died, too small to feed from twigs and grass and a child's imagination. Eleanor Yu pornography, pessimism — for the sake of passion- If we are to introduce even "the shadow of a bull's horn", we must improvise with every

Spring

The Yale Literary Magazine

THIRTY—EIGHT

1 Last December, four days before Christmas, they told my father he had four to six months to live. His heart. There was something wrong with it, the valves: they were stretched to twice their size. Blood was pumping through them and then washing back. A murmur. When he told me this he had already told my mother. He explained it quite technically so that I felt my neck closing in on my throat, wanted to tug at my collar, cough, swallow. I didn't see what he was saying until he had almost finished.

My father' took me out to lunch. He told me this: "In the summer we used to drive up to the great lakes, me, my sister and my mom, and meet our cousins at a beach house on Thunder Bay. Not the town in Ontario, but an actual bay, where the water hit up against a reedy shore and a rickety dock that extended a hundred feet out from the shore, toward a raft, anchored another hundred feet out, where the water was deep. We kids would swim under the dock. It was slimy under there and pitch dark, but there weren't any barnacles, like on the salt water docks at home. We'd play frogman; that's how I learned to swim, in fact, crawling on my belly in the reeds, dipping my face and kicking, learning because I wanted worse than anything to be able to make it to that raft. My sister and my cousin Janey were too small, but Janey's brothers were two and four years older than me, and they'd get out to the raft first thing in the morning and on some days they'd play with me but if I couldn't keep up they didn't wait." My father paused.' He looked down at his beer and then up at me, as if his next words were somewhere in my face, waiting there to be read. Then he toasted my face with his beer, saying, "This was when I was still little, and when we'd come out of the water to join the grownups, lying in the sun, my uncle George would let me have a sip of his beer. It was beer from up north — it was cheap that close to the border — and it was shockingly cold in the heat of those summer noons. He would hold up the beer and call to me, Like some Canadian Ale? Then, that all right, Sally? to my mother, who would have been indulging herself in her flask all morning, she'd loll her head over and say, Sure, he can have a sip.

2 My father ticks now. They unzipped his sternum and took out the bad valves, put in better ones, metal ones. Stitched it up to hold them in place. When blood pumps through these valves, they click shut, and hold it in place. The tick of their metal is half a heartbeat. But louder: you can hear it in a still room, my father shows this off, smiling like a ventriloquist, like a child with its Look no handsl In the in between moments of conversation, this ticking comes up and over the silence, like some rhythm of the talking which has continued after the words.

Even then, I had a funny sense about alcohol and my mother; that would have been nearly twenty years before she drank herself to death, but it already showed on her face. I was too young to know what that look was, but I knew that look. So I'd have just a sip of my uncle's Canadian ale, and it was so strong and cold, I'd get goose flesh up my legs, and I was skinny for a kid anyhow. "Canadian beer is different from American; it's the risk the Canadians take. Americans smooth theirs out, no bitterness, no oddity. Canadians leave that, for interest. When I started drinking beer as a teenager, I was surprised at how mellow it tasted. Surprised me. We'd eat lunch on the beach and then my mother would make us wait an hour before we could go back in. We'd dig — I had forgotten this — we'd dig shallow pits in the sand and make cars. We'd erect reed windshields and pack the wet sand for seats, use the plastic picnic spoons for gears. It was great fun, because at home in Florida, the beach sand was too light and hot to sculpt. We'd race around in our sand cars, it felt like racing: and pretty soon when we got sick of the cars it was time to go back in. I'd get in the reeds and practice my swimming. My cousin Dickie would hike up to the road and sell lemonade to the cars going by. He was an entrepreneur — you know how every family has a story about each member? The story was that Dickie would get rich and famous. Already at ten he hoarded his money and lent it to his older brother at usurious rates." I said, your cousins were called Dickie and Janey?' My dad said, "Yes, and Georgie Jr. They had a lot more money than we did, my dad had left years before. But Dickie was the doll of my aunt and my mother, they'd fuss over him and pull up his bathing trunks and talk about how he was going to be so rich. The story was that I was going to be smart. Even then, they respected that, kept a distance. I had a skinny body and a big egg head. Dickie was spoiled and good-looking. Georgie was a big guy, a natural bully, but he was friendlier to me, used to hold my back so I could float on it,

3 In the summer in the hospital, I learned to do this: perpetuate a train of thought, to engage. Keeping him company, I ran out so quickly of anecdotes, college stories. Sat in desperate rhythmic silence, trying to provoke reflections such as this. Funny that I would crawl with embarrassment in high school, when he told my boyfriends endless stories of Florida and childhood; boyfriends who thought he was hilarious and egged him on, In the hospital, the nurses were my conspirators, we would have listened to his epics, but he lay quiet and all my voices were yes or no questions.

means at hand, to proceed by trial and error, or even to try several plans of attack at once. Our interest is in a literature committed to

The Yale Literary Magazine

1989

THIRTY—NINE breathing up at the sky. He always owed Dickie huge sums of money, and he would get furious when asked to pay up. We didn't dare fight on those beach days, because my auntie would shoo us right back into the beach house where there was nothing but nothing to do. So we saved our fights for days we went into town, and let the grownups sit in peace on the beach, drinking their beers. My sister —" He stopped.4 He took a drink, and said, "My sister would collect pebbles off the beach, and sit by my mum, rubbing cream on her arms. She was blond and fair, and peeled horribly in the summer. She was so well behaved it even made Janey mad. The pebbles were never very beautiful, not like the shells and polished glass we'd pick up off the beach at home, but my sister always had casefuls when we packed up to go home. "If it rained, we'd go into town or stay in the beach house. Georgie and I would read comics: I had a subscription to Tarzan, and he had some war comics. Dickie built models, he was brilliant at it, steady handed and careful, they always looked just like the picture on the box. I was terrible at that, I had no co-ordination. I remember my mother would make Christmas presents every fall, covering little glass jars in velvet ribbon and sea shells, and she'd make my sister and me stay in to help her. We'd wrap ribbon around the outside of the glass, and the sea shells were formed into beautiful rosette designs. You could buy matched shells in little shops in Sarasota. The glue would stick to my fingers and peel back the ribbon when I tried to smooth it down. My mother was a perfectionist — her designs were beautiful and intricate and she would sit with the tweezers, putting each shell carefully in its place. Come to think of it, she was probably getting high off the glue."

4 In the hospital, my father would weep for spaces such as these. His tears took my words away and I would sit awkwardly in silence, while he sobbed arhythmically. I wanted to leave, to get far away from the tears and the hospital smell, but I stayed in my chair like a good girl, like a little girl sitting in the corner. A naughty girl, I guess.

He said, "My cousins were richer than we were: to make them Christmas presents, but they sent had we us department store shirts and glass music boxes for my mother. The music boxes would wind around and play carols; the shirts were the right size, my aunt had that kind of taste. When my sister got older, they sent her bracelets with little charms hanging on them. We sat in the sweaty Florida Decembers and wrote them thank you notes under duress. By then, the summer had faded — the freshwater smell left our clothes and the sun submerged itself in school compositions, What I Did Over the Summer: you know." I did know, but college is different from that.5 I drank my beer with self-conscious care not to interrupt. My father was lost in his hands, and he found my eyes again with a certain surprise. "It's going to snow again," he said, without looking outside. We smiled complicity at each other.° "It must be strange for you growing up in Canada; I spent my childhood running around on the sand. When you were little, your mother and I hardly knew how to bundle you up to play outside. Couldn't even get your mittens on. All those little down-filled jackets, and scarves and touks. Your mother and I, southerners." We were both laughing now. "My family couldn't believe we were going to move to Canada. Couldn't believe it. Still can't locate us on a map. And

5 I came back to college three weeks after my dad got out of the hospital in August. I said, Fine how was yours? when people asked me. I didn't say, I sat in a room with pale green walls and a single print hanging at the foot of the bed, I made up stories and lies and told them for truth, anything to make a ripple in a measured silence. I didn't say, even what I did wasn't good enough, I am tangled in guilt and tied to myself, what did you do?

6 The print on the wall: he watched it for two and a half months, a simple landscape in perspective, a road going off into the distance, with snow fields on either side. He couldn't get up to come close and read the title, but I could, I moved around that room and filled it. The picture was called, This Snow Will Probably Stay. Above it there was a big clock with a second hand, the kind they have in schools: it marked the medicines and the nurses who worked in shifts which made endless repeating patterns, moving like waves through the ward.

transgression, break-through, penetration, working — if necessary, with its back turned — closer and closer to the heart of the unspeakable.

The Yale Literary Magazine

Spring

FORTY

7 My father fixed: forever, and as long as he stays near doctors, so they can check his blood and thin it out around the strange metal of his heart. They keep the ticking in a certain time with the tiniest pills I have ever seen, keep it from syncopation, keep it monotonous and ever so quiet so that the room has to be absolutely still to hear the rhythm of my father's extra time.

Canadian prairie, at that. No water for thousands of miles." In fact, my face was in my water glass, and there was water in my nose from laughing. My dad had finished his beer. "Dickie lives in Sarasota now. He's a lawyer. His kids have never even seen snow. They're growing up like I did. But it used to be that at Christmas, the town would drive in a dumptruck of snow and leave it in the park for us to play in. We'd get in and have snow ball fights and make men and angels; by five in the afternoon it was just slush, and we'd go in for hot chocolate. With the sun up over head, we didn't need scarves and nobody had mittens. The little kids would touch the snow and jump back with their hands in their mouths. They thought it burned, you see: they thought it was hot. "But the summers were the good times. We should go sometime and see if we can find that Thunder Bay, on the south side of the great lakes. I haven't seen Janey in years. My sister keeps in touch with her, I think. Sometime in the car, you and your mother and me. We are quiet, and the silence moves my fingers: I touch my fork, my water glass, the hair at my temples. The conversation of the restaurant fills the space between us.' My father eats quickly, finishing his sandwich in staccato bites; I have finished already while he was speaking. I avert my eyes a little, look around myself and not at him. "Do you want anything else?" he says. I move my head, no. "Can I have the rest of your water?" My dad tips the water from my glass into his and I drink the last swallow of beer. He takes a handkerchief out of his pocket and unfolds it on the table. He puts the tiny pill, pale pink in the centre of his palm. He looks down at it. "I have to break them in half now," he says. "They lowered my dosage, because I'm such a healthy guy." The pill is minute, almost disappears into the lines of his hand. "Isn't that an incredibly small thing?" says my father. "Isn't that an incredibly small pill to keep me alive for the rest of the afternoon?"

I think that other people talk and for them it is easy. I muster words but I have rur. out. I would like to apologize, but something is closed around my throat, and my own heart flutters. This is the panic of the summer, a hot panic that would damp the sheets: an eerie kind of panic that still overtakes me when my dreams get out of time.

Writing must extend itself beyond its own failure, in order to be faithful to its original impulse. It is in theory and not in practice that the

1989

The Yale Literary Magazine 41 Hannaline Rogenberg oil on masonite 12" x 16"

literary now takes this risk, and students recognize in the threat to traditional reading a challenge which, though unsettling to some

The Yale Literary Magazine

Spring

John Liz Colker

FORTY-TWO

This guy I know was telling me about different jails he's been in. The stories were pretty funny. Like supposedly you're not supposed to whack off in jail, and the guards actually check with flashlights to make sure the inmates aren't playing with themselves on their cots. This guy, John, also says that they put saltpeter in the food — you can taste it — but that it doesn't stop you from getting a hard-on, that you can still get them all the time. Personally I can't believe they still do that kind of shit, it seems as outdated as electroshock, but it's a pretty common belief among people who have done time. John talks about hard-ons and beating off a lot, especially if he's been doing dope that day or has had a couple of beers. If he hasn't actually been doing dope you can be sure he'll talk about it; the only time he can really talk about much else is when he's already really high. Anyway if you're a guy and you boot some heroin, your dick apparently can get partly or completely erect, and can stay that way on and off until you come down. Like you're so high that gravity doesn't work the same on you. John says that he shared a cell with a Puerto Rican for a month, and I guess he got to know the guy's masturbatory routine pretty well, as you would in jail even thought that shit is supposed to be illegal. (What's the punishment?) Supposedly Puerto Ricans have to draw a girl's body on the wall to whack off to — they can't do it from their heads. That struck me as pretty funny because the same day, I'd just seen a cartoon of a guy in jail drawing a girl's spread legs on the wall and after he'd drawn it really nice and detailed he went up and licked the wall. The look on the cartoon guy's face was perfect: pathetic, ecstatic. Also it reminded me of a story I'd read about an artist who was obsessed with this one model but was too shy to touch her so he cut holes in his canvases and fucked them instead. This guy John is a good guy but sometimes I get nervous with him in my house, like using my toilet and shit. I'm probably too paranoid though. Anyway, John has a hard time staying out of jail because he loves heroin, and I don't think there's much that would stop him from getting it and doing it, despite all the new information and all the risks. But I like his stories a lot and he never makes himself the hero of them but usually the guy who gets caught. There's the one where he was two nights in a holding pen with forty guys, twenty of them junkies, so they all got dope-sick at the same time, and you know what that is, and so that's one toilet for twenty sick junkies, plus the other guys

who were probably pretty drunk and so forth. The numbers do seem kind of large but still even half of that would be pretty disgusting. Sometimes John gets lucky though. Like last week he met a really fat girl named Denise and she bought him a bag of dope. He took her to his motel room and then the next part of the story is, he was waking up next to her and taking a look and jumping out of bed. Apparently she was really ugly and has some kind of a skin problem, but you know how it is, when someone has exactly what you want she can look like the most beautiful person in the world. But Denise likes dope too and is trying to kick like John so they go to meetings together; she understands John so I guess he's getting over the appearance part of it. He's a funny guy. I used to like coke a lot and he always told me to stay away from it, but the fucked up thing was, he wanted to turn me on to heroin instead. He said you can save money that way because you don't have to go right out and buy more. So I tried it once, just snorting it. I expected some great ecstasy but all it did to me was make me throw up and nod out. So I really didn't like it, but he loves it. He says Liz, stay away from that C, it'll just burn a hole in your pocket, if there's anything you should do it's D. Like I really should be doing it. Now I'm not doing either because I've got too much else to do besides looking for the best high. I still see John. He sometimes calls to ask for money but I never give him any. Actually I did once and it was a mistake because of course I never saw it again.

academics, may prompt a revitalization of American thought. Turn off the late-night movie, take a seat by an open window, and turn the

The Yale Literary Magazine

1989

FORTY-THREE

Alcibiades Alcibiades owned an exceptionally large and handsome dog, which he had bought for seventy minae, and it possessed an extremely fine tail, which he had cut off. His friends scolded him and told him that everyone was angry for the dog's sake. Alcibiades only laughed and retorted, "That is exactly what I wanted. I am quite content for the whole of Athens to chatter about this; it will stop them saying anything worse about me." â&#x20AC;&#x201D;from Plutarch's Lives

1 A man loved by men, he refused many offers, maintaining his own company and choice of ways. A number of his crew stayed in, grew drunk, and had nothing to do, 'til recall of the night chez Anytus. "We'll not crash gates, for he did invite us!" At the head of the clamorous riot he ran to disturb his good host's quiet evening talk, framed himself in the doorway, in the awe of all assembled did say, "My slaves, those silver cups do suit my taste. Take them, we go," and then left without haste. How the guests were enraged by Anytus' response! "Be glad the all-deserving has left you the bronze."

2 Hyperbolus, who was quite fond of gags, and spoke of excess in his trumpet's voice, tired of hearing Alcibiades brag and called for all Athens to make her choice. "Which citizen is the greatest danger? For by our tradition he will be stripped, driven out, and forever a stranger. We must whip the mighty, before we are whipped!" Quick with interest of his own survival, Alcibiades resisted election. He sought out Nicias, his great rival, and the two reversed the motion's direction. The poor Hyperbolus was the last ostracized; The rich soon after deemed the practice unwise.

3 His glory shone in Argos, freeing her from a league of aristocrats who called themselves the Thousand. Liberated, walled well against invasion in the future, the city owed to him a thousand thanks. "Now we are slaves to Athens' sea-power," one complained. "But Sparta would devour you in an instant," he was told. "Our flanks will swallow you gently and by degrees. Never again will men pull down these walls, nor sing their ode to victory in your halls and temples." Thus spoke Alcibiades. It seemed in every town his sword found food but his heart was served a cold ingratitude

4 Alcibiades, Alcibiades, you are the most favored son of Athens. Your beauty increases at every season. The runaway lion, authorities pursuing you always with their traps. You struck the teacher who knew no Homer, carried your wife from court on your shoulder while she beat your back with curses and slaps, loving the winner and hating the cheat. You battled hard for us on honor's field and never tired, with Eros on your shield and a sword that never slept long in its sheath. Precious to the luxury of Persians, With Spartans spare. How we still miss you in Athens! Behrouz Montakhab

Page. Satisfaction is not guaranteed. These are works which excommunicate. Excommunicate says that language is at once reaching toward

The Yale Literary Magazine

Spring

Greg Kessler acrylic and woodcut on paper 13" x 12"

and In rebellion against its impossible functioning as communication. It conceives of literature as a language that Is exterior, alienating,

The Yale Literary Magazine 45 Greg Kessler oil on canvas 6' x 7'

Greg Kessler oil on canvas 6.5' x 7.5'

condemned to self-referentiality, born of and perishing in unresolvable conflict, a language by nature desperate, heroic and ashamed in its

The Yale Literary Magazine

Spring

46 Ian Spence lithograph 17" x 25"

very persistence upon the page, line by line, word by word. Are we back where we started, or is this ending a different form of beginning?

_Abell._

1989

The Yale Literary Magazine

FORTY-SEVEN

"guess you were right about kansas and the shit that would go on here. wichita turned out to be a total disaster I worked 4.00 hour cutting veggies and going home nights to smoke pot alone and watch tv never saving any money but just thinking life sucks and when the hell do i get out so i moved back home and am stacking plates in restaurant for 3.35 in small kansas town outside wichita so feel great about life as can finally save money and future looking brighter as career opportunity has sprung up (but it only took two days to master platesâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;will i be bored in 3 or 4 years). so obviously hating life and not making money to return to yale and father still unemployed so they have no money, but hey i cut off small part of finger and have grease burns up left arm so i cant complain...all of this reaffirms desire to leave yale and that civilized/conformist/consumer game and to get back to nature and easy living in cali so not really feeling bad but when will i leave here? that is big worry...life is bad as get up 2 go to work 5 get off 9 smoke pot until 2 then bed till 2 and no one worth talking to so bored shitless and nothing really flowing in ol brain except readings but i feel so detached from life. i hope things go well with you and that lit mag is getting off and write if get chance" greg

"There is a great deal of this elitism going aroundâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;and not just at Yale. What they seem to overlook is that William Shakespeare (for example) was likely a hard-drinking, sweating, hard working commercial writer who wrote some of the worst'comedy' known to man, who used all the familiar quotations to arouse the restless audiences, at the theatres, who had to 'please' his audiences as Neil Simon has to please his on today's Broadway...I have been called 'the leanest and meanest' of the 50's writers. I have been called 'king of the early paperbacks' and the French have kindly named me the 'best' of the second generation, after Hammett, Chandler & Cain of the first generation. But I can tell you truthfully, I wrote what would sell, or what I prayed would sell, and I gave it the best I had in me because I knew of no other way to sell my material. I knew no publishers or editors. It was seven or eight years after I sold my first work that I ever even met another published writer." Harry Whittington

â&#x20AC;˘ "Thank you for your letter to the Language Research Service. You ask an interesting question. I think you're right in suggesting that Coleridge had something besides 'plain' or 'simple' in mind when he wrote 'The silly buckets on the deck...,' but it doesn't seem possible to attach a meaning as specific as 'dry' or 'drained' to silly in this context. I can find no evidence that silly has ever been used with those meanings. What silly is apparently meant to suggest in Coleridge's poem is the uselessness or even the foolishness of the buckets that had long waited for rain that never came...Coleridge presumably chose silly as the adjective because of its suggestion of contempt, however mild. A man dying of thirst would probably not feel very friendly toward a bunch of empty water buckets...I notice, by the way, that in Webster's Third New International Dictionary we follow the Oxford English Dictionary's lead and use the Coleridge quotation to illustrate the 'plain' sense of silly. I'm sending a note to our files recommending a correction. Thank you for bringing this matter to our attention." Stephen J. Perrault Merriam-Webster Inc.

.c.era

This writing is only the promise of a promise, and therefore incomplete. It will never help or harm you.