The College Hill Independent Vol. 37 Issue 9

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Parent-Teacher Talk (2016) by Pablo Herraiz García de Guadiana [RISD]. Adobe Illustrator and Google Sketchbook.

A BROWN / RISD WEEKLY

30 NOV 2018 VOL 37 ISSUE 09

FROM THE EDITORS Cover Art Pablo Herraiz Garcia de Guadiana NEWS 02

Week in Sad Food Jesse Barber & Gemma Sack METRO

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Bus is Turning Marly Toledano ARTS

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Late Night Texts Nathan Sorscher FEATURES

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Raking in the Records Ella Comberg & Lucas Smolcic Larson

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Throwing Stones Jacob Alabab-Moser & Alex Westfall SCIENCE & TECH

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Placent-yeah Mia Pattillo CLIMATE

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Recycle the Red Tape Colin Kent-Daggett BODY

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Smash the Slipper Star Su LITERARY

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Not My EW Wen Zhuang

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Goosing Off Nicolaia Rips

Descartes tells us that indecision is “a species of fear,” useful only when it delays our actions long enough for contemplation without causing us to squander our limited time to act, but I have to confess that I also find it wonderfully exciting. Lingering, even languishing, in indecision can be intoxicating and addicting.

But is the potential to do or not do really an expression of the freedom to indulge in both, or is it just a third independent state, a refuge for the cowards and apaths among us? Alas, I always run out of time before I reach a satisfying conclusion. The need to affirm myself, to identify a time, a position, a place, and claim it, can only be deferred for so long, and I’ll have to get out of bed at some point.

The specifics are often irrelevant; I tend to take the strongest positions and make the most final decisions on the easiest subjects. I display the intensity of my commitment to one decision or the other as proof of my existence, but the boring truth is that the majority of my decisions are arbitrary, instinctive, and habitual. Waiting, pausing, and delaying, even if I already know what decision I’ll eventually make, remind me that freedom isn’t the action of decision––being or doing––but the neutrality preceding it. I’ll meditate on that for eight more minutes.

-GYS

MISSION STATEMENT The College Hill Independent is a Providence-based publication written, illustrated, designed, and edited by students from Brown and RISD. We are committed to publishing politically engaged and accessible work. While the Indy is financed by Brown University, we hold ourselves accountable to our readers across the Providence community. The Indy rejects content that explicitly or implicitly perpetuates racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, ableism and/or classism.

EPHEMERA 11

Thanksgiving Smorgasbord Jorge Palacios

Though this list is not exhaustive, the Indy strives to address these systems of oppression by centering the voices, opinions, and efforts of marginalized people in Providence and beyond.

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The Indy is constantly evolving: we are always working to make our staff and content more inclusive. Though our editing process provides an internal structure for accountability, we always welcome letters to the editor.

Stains Tif Bushka

WEEK IN REVIEW Sara Van Horn NEWS Mara Dolan Lucas Smolcic Larson Paula Pacheco Soto METRO Jacob Alabab-Moser Harry August Ella Comberg

ARTS Isabelle Rea Marianne Verrone SCIENCE & TECH Mia Pattillo Julia Rock Eve Zelickson LITERARY Shuchi Agrawal Emma Kofman

FEATURES Tiara Sharma Wen Zhuang

EPHEMERA Nicole Cochary Claire Schlaikjer

BODY Pia Mileaf-Patel Cate Turner

X Maya Bjornson Maria Gerdyman

30 NOV 2018

VOL 37 ISSUE 09

LIST Alexis Gordon Signe Swanson Will Weatherly WRITERS Ben Bienstock Mica Chau Jessica Dai Eduardo Gutierrez-Peña Liby Hays Jorge Palacios Giacomo Sartorelli Ivy Scott Marly Toledano Kayli Wren COPY EDITORS Grace Berg Seamus Flynn Sarah Goldman Miles Guggenheim Matt Ishimaru Sojeong Lim

ILLUSTRATORS Natasha Brennan Natasha Boyko Julia Illana Halle Krieger Katya Labowe-Stroll Sophia Meng Sandra Moore Rémy Poisson Katherine Sang Mariel Solomon Ella Rosenblatt Miranda Villanueva Alex Westfall

DESIGNERS Pablo Herraiz García de Guadiana Bethany Hung Amos Jackson Katherine Sang Ella Rosenblatt Christie Zhong

ILLUSTRATION EDITORS Alex Hanesworth Eve O'Shea

WEB Ashley Kim

The College Hill Independent is printed

by TCI Press in Seekonk, Massachusetts.

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DESIGN EDITOR Jack Halten Fahnestock BUSINESS Maria Gonzalez

SENIOR EDITORS Eliza Chen Katrina Northrop Signe Swanson Will Weatherly MANAGING EDITORS Olivia Kan-Sperling Chris Packs Erin West MVP Bethany Hung & Katherine Sang

BY Gemma Sack, Jesse Barber DESIGN Bethany Hung

WEEK IN

SAD FOOD

1-800-BUTTERBALL “Alexa, how do I cook a perfect turkey?”

This year, for the first time ever, you may have heard this asked at your Thanksgiving celebration. Alexa can now guide anxious chefs through the process of roasting the traditional holiday bird. But unsurprisingly, Jeff Bezos and the Amazon engineers are not turkey experts (in fact, thanks to them, you can simply buy a fully cooked turkey on Amazon Prime).

Instead, Alexa’s newfound culinary talent comes from Butterball’s Turkey Talk-Line. Using pre-recorded answers to frequently asked questions from the TalkLine, the new “Butterball Alexa skill” can help you troubleshoot your turkey for the big day.

Butterball, a popular American turkey brand, created its Turkey Talk-Line in 1981, hoping to help frazzled or inexperienced cooks prepare for meals during the holiday season. Since its establishment, the Talk-Line’s staff of six female home economists (yes, that is their actual job title) has grown to over fifty trained turkey experts who take nearly 100,000 calls every holiday season, and about 10,000 on Thanksgiving Day alone.

But how do we know that the mysterious voices on the other end of the phone can provide the best solutions to our turkey-related woes? Butterball carefully selects the operators of the Talk-Line, ensuring that they have met rigorous standards of turkey-expertise.

Every year, the chefs, culinary professors, food stylists, home economists, and dietitians who staff the TalkLine must satisfactorily complete a training program called Butterball University, in which they must cook their own turkeys using seven different methods, including grilling, frying, microwaving, and multiple types of roasting.

Year after year, the most common question asked on the hotline is

“how do I

thaw my turkey?”

But operators must be able to give advice on even the most seemingly bizarre turkey-related issues — distressed chefs have called in about unconventional thawing tools (such as electric blankets and dishwashers), turkeys misplaced in snowbanks and bathtubs, and disputes between spouses about proper cooking techniques. Sue Smith, Talk-Line operator, likes to say that “you can’t stump a turkey expert” —she

has failed to salvage only one struggling chef’s bird in her 20-year tenure.

But the “typical” Thanksgiving celebration does not look the same as it did in 1981 — the crop of Thanksgiving chefs is rapidly diversifying. In order to respond to these changes, Butterball has added Spanish-speaking turkey experts and male turkey experts (because apparently only men can explain to other men how to cook). And for young people, many of whom might not be in the habit of talking on the phone, Butterball has made the Talk-Line’s services accessible through live chat, text messaging, social media, and now Alexa.

However, in its attempt to (in Butterball’s own words) “meet the needs of the modern holiday cook,” the Talk-Line has losts its characteristic warmth. Alexa can calculate how long you should cook your turkey based on weight and degree of stuffing, but she is no substitute for Sue Smith, or any of the other friendly turkey experts. For a frantic chef in the midst of the holiday frenzy, what is often wanted most is not precise answers —one can get those from a cookbook, or from Google—but the emotional comfort provided by the Talk-Line expert, and the affirmation that everything is going to be okay.

-GS GATHER TO EAT… WHAT? The complimentary spread at the Rhode Island Democratic watch party for the 2018 midterm elections was predictably modest. There were cubes of orange cheddar cheese next to an empty space where, presumably, bread once sat, a bowl of salsa fresca with no chips in sight, and the obligatory crudité, a pile of vegetables encircling a viscous, opaque dip. There were tomatoes, celery, cucumber. I picked up an angular slice of the green vegetable and took a bite. My suspicion was confirmed. It was raw zucchini…raw zucchini.

It was almost impossible to ascertain the location of the party. It took five telephone calls and half an hour of stalking Rhode Island politicians on Twitter to learn that the secret party was open to the public at the Biltmore Hotel; it was merely not publicized. 200 attendees, largely the friends and family of politicians and campaign volunteers, stood around with drinks

in hand, jovially clapping people on the back, shaking hands, and casually watching the local news coverage, much of which was being recorded in the back of this very same room. Periodically, attendees would goof around in front of the camera just to see themselves up on the big screen.

To the left of the stage hung an oversized velvet curtain. At around 9:00 PM, the Rhode Island results were announced to roars of applause and whoops from the crowd. Then, each of the notable election winners emerged, in turn, from behind the velvet curtain to a dramatic walk-up song as they arranged their families and shook all the hands in reach of the diminutive stage. They preached about job creation, civil politics, and “sticking up to the ugliness in Washington” in vague terms, mingled with the obligatory “Four more years” chant from the crowd. There was no mention of Providence’s exorbitant income inequality, third highest of any city in the country.

From the General Treasurer to the Secretary of State, the speakers were as puzzling as they were complacent and unsubstantial. Newly re-elected Mayor of Providence Jorge Elorza said, “By the time we are done in four short years, we are going to be known throughout the United States of America as

“the best mid-sized city

in the entire country!” which elicited a hum of confused cheers. It was hard to tell if this was a self-effacing joke about the size of the city or a genuine aspiration, which begs the question: what is best? The headliner of the event, Governor Gina Raimondo, took the stage as her chosen anthem, “Girl on Fire” by Alicia Keys, blasted out of speakers.

Reminiscent of seventh grade Bar Mitzvah parties, the middle-aged crowd shrieked with glee and a pair of elderly women belted the song at the top of their lungs. The Governor (who was in fact not aflame) gave a speech to her friends and family, like many of the others, filled with thank yous, calls to action, and self-congratulation.

All the while, the starchy, green and yellow zucchini spears crowded the platter, untouched.

-JB

PERSONAL EFFECTS

BY Liby Hays

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

WEEK IN REVIEW

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BY Colin Kent-Daggett ILLUSTRATION Peter Lees DESIGN Bethany Hung

A LACK

This article is the second installment of a month-long series, “Through the Muck,” tackling climate change in Rhode Island.

Last December, the frustrations of Rhode Island environmental activists boiled over. In one of the final public hearings on National Grid’s proposed liquid natural gas (LNG) facility, the Coastal Resources Management Council (CRMC) voted 8-0 in favor of the plant, despite significant community opposition expressed at an earlier public hearing. In a video taken by a local environmental news site, ecoRI, attendees can be seen chanting, “Shame! Shame! Shame!” as the eight members of the CRMC silently file out—escorted by state police—leaving onlookers furious and in tears.

A similar, if less fiery, scene took place in January at another hearing held by the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management (RIDEM) at the Veterans Memorial Auditorium: Numerous members of the public in attendance pointedly denounced the venue’s drastic security measures and scorned the silence of the RIDEM staff. At both hearings, the disconnect between regulators and activists was obvious: Concerns about community health, climate change, and environmental racism went largely unaddressed by State employees tasked with scrutinizing individual parts of the project.

The liquefaction facility—a proposed addition to National Grid’s existing LNG storage tank in the Port of Providence—received final approval from federal authorities this October. Though public debate over the LNG facility has now drawn to a close, the project’s contentious path through State and federal agencies over the past few years reveals how Rhode Island’s current bureaucratic structure is fundamentally ill-equipped to forcefully combat climate change.

The State government’s rigid division of authority, Rhode Island’s minimal national leverage, and federal ineptitude have created a regulatory environment that neglects disparate and discriminatory impacts of climate change, excludes activists and concerned residents, and embitters like-minded state employees.

Some of this inaction can be attributed simply to Rhode Island’s inability, as a small state, to dictate federal policy. But even on the local level, where agencies like the CRMC do have authority, the failure of the State’s attempts to adequately respond to citizens’ concerns highlights ways in which a fundamental lack of flexibility and empathy often defines bureaucracy.

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CLIMATE

Climate change, by nature a cross-cutting, non-dis- regulatory structure—and Rhode Island’s size—as a crete, and uncertain problem, is the ultimate riddle for long-term hindrance, rather than an advantage. For a segregated and impersonal State bureaucracy.

Coit, the most effective responses to climate change must come from a regional or federal level. While +++ RIDEM has “nibbled around the edge of its authority” on many topics, almost 60 percent of the State’s energy The partitioned structure of State agencies—and the use comes from transportation and residential sectors, broader division of responsibility among local, state, rather than industrial or commercial, Coit told the and federal authorities—impedes and demoralizes Indy. The EPA and the California Air Resources Board activists and regulators alike. Monica Huertas, coor- set automobile pollution guidelines for other states dinator of the No LNG in PVD campaign, explained to follow, and RIDEM has no authority over a single to the College Hill Independent how this bureaucratic home’s energy efficiency. labyrinth further exacerbates the environmental Vehicle emission standards and a carbon tax, injustices of climate change. Huertas joined the No which Coit identified as the two most impactful soluLNG campaign on a neighbor’s invitation and imme- tions, would be largely symbolic in Rhode Island due to diately had difficulty discerning who was responsible the state’s insignificant market share. While symbolic for regulating the proposed LNG facility. Daunted by action could make Rhode Island a national model, the tangle of red tape, No LNG hoped to coordinate “we’re not going to change the automobile industry,” with experienced allies. “I thought more established she told the Indy, “My neighbors would just drive to environmental organizations would help explain Massachusetts for gas.” Bozzi, at the RIDOH, said things, but there was no equity lens,” Huertas told Rhode Island was lucky that, as a small state, it could the Indy, leaving her unsure of where to bring her respond quickly and nimbly to emerging issues, “but concerns about the industrial port near her commu- it also means there’s one person per office” working nity. Deciphering regulatory language, attending on climate change. These issues combine to limit what public meetings, and constantly feeling ignored was, to even the most adamant proponents of environmental Huertas, directly related to the “historical ties between action would be able to achieve in a state like Rhode environmentalism and racism,” citing the ignorance Island that has little sway in decisions made on the of many influential conservationists towards issues of federal level. environmental injustice. The uphill battle to be heard left Huertas feeling abandoned by her elected officials. +++ While employees of State agencies may not face the same acute risks of asthma, chemical exposure, The problems Huertas and environmental regulaand flooding as Huertas, they are also frustrated by tors face begin with the structure and authority of the limits of their authority. Janet Coit, Director of Rhode Island’s state agencies. While RIDEM is the RIDEM, and Laura Bozzi, the climate change program most obvious home for the State’s response to climate manager at RIDOH, entered government service change, the department’s sequestered internal organifrom environmental non-profit positions at the Nature zation limits its effectiveness. Within RIDEM’s enviConservancy and Southside Community Land Trust, ronmental protection bureau, for example, different respectively. Coit told the Indy that she draws on her rules and regulations govern the air, water, and waste own experience as an activist when listening to public divisions. The federal Environmental Protection criticism, and acknowledged the value of residents Agency (EPA) establishes standards for myriad indiwho push their government to adequately address their vidual chemicals and compounds, which RIDEM then needs. (Disclosure: I was an intern in Director Coit’s evaluates and enforces throughout Rhode Island. Each office in Spring 2018.) division reviews a narrow set of environmental impacts Both Bozzi and Coit described the overall when regulating a proposed or existing development,

30 NOV 2018

Climate change tests the brittle Rhode Island bureaucracy

OF AGENCY and RIDEM works best when faced with discrete instances of pollution (imagine a single plant dumping industrial waste or emitting toxic gasses) that its air, water, and waste divisions were designed to handle.

The National Grid LNG facility challenges this structure: though the project will generate few changes to the air, water, and waste pollution levels at the site, its contributions to climate change are clear when accounting for the consequences of pipelines, fracked gas, and continued commitment to fossil fuel infrastructure more broadly. Local resistance to the project has centered around this more inclusive analysis, as well as claims that siting another industrial facility near low-income communities of color in South Providence is an act of discrimination. “It is not only morally wrong, it is cruel," State Representative Marcia Ranglin-Vassell said at a hearing last year. "By wanting to build in this neighborhood it sends a clear message that National Grid does not care about our infants, children, seniors, aging population, our poorest and most vulnerable citizens, many of whom are already suffering from compromised immune systems.”

The grassroots No LNG in PVD campaign has raised those concerns at every available opportunity.

Still, RIDEM’s narrow, scientific authorities rarely force the agency to account for disparate impacts or community concerns.

The agency best disposed to examine the interconnected social impacts of climate change, on the other hand, is the Rhode Island Department of Health (RIDOH). Though Director Nicole AlexanderScott issued an official comment raising various health concerns with the LNG facility, RIDOH has no authority over the project. Again, the division of authority prevents comprehensive and equitable analysis: RIDOH predicts that climate change will exacerbate myriad public health crises, but is limited to commenting on the fossil fuel projects at fault.

While the LNG facility pinballs between State agencies, neither RIDEM, nor RIDOH, nor the CRMC can dictate what can or can’t be built in the first place. That falls to local zoning and siting institutions and federal commissions like the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). FERC—which oversees the country’s interstate energy commerce and oil and gas infrastructure—is the single regulatory body tasked with a holistic review of natural gas projects like the National Grid LNG facility. Though FERC is required to provide opportunities for public feedback and has broad discretion in siting energy infrastructure nationwide, it is “basically a rubber stamp” for fossil fuel projects, according to Monica Huertas, coordinator of the No LNG in PVD campaign. FERC approved the Providence LNG facility in October 2018, dismissing opposition from No LNG in PVD, the Environmental Justice League of RI, and other detractors in its decision.

+++ Coit, Bozzi, Huertas, and their respective organizations are all committed to confronting climate change despite these barriers. Coit told the Indy that Rhode Island is an environmental leader “where we’ve had the opportunity to do so.” Coit pointed to RIDEM’s ongoing system-level infrastructure vulnerability assessments, above-ground storage tank reviews, and investment in clean vehicles and electric charging

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

stations as impactful initiatives. Bozzi told the Indy that RIDOH’s emphasis on local buy-in and collaboration with other agencies has allowed her to promote climate change and community resilience in a variety of projects—such as RIDOH’s Health Equity Zones and its mini grants that fund “on-the-ground work to build resiliency” in ten municipalities.

More ambitious solutions have come from higher levels of Rhode Island government. Recognizing the siloed nature of State agencies, legislators created the Executive Climate Change Coordinating Council (EC4) as part of the Resilient Rhode Island Act passed in 2014. Governor Raimondo also appointed a Chief Resiliency Officer in 2017 to help coordinate the State’s response to climate change. The 12-member EC4, chaired by Director Coit, brings together administrators from different agencies to discuss how State government can study, mitigate, and adapt to climate change. Terry Gray, the associate director for environmental protection at RIDEM, told the Indy that EC4 has been an effective, if slow, strategy to generate interagency dialogue and reach the State’s goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions at least 80 percent by 2050.

In the past year, the EC4 has only met 5 times, less than once every two months.

When asked about EC4’s tangible achievements, Gray described the institutional change that has occurred within state agencies. “Three to four years ago, 75 percent of people would’ve said climate change was a problem for Air Resources at RIDEM,” Gray told the Indy. “Now, people are responding on every level of our Department.” Gray attributed that shift, in part, to the interdisciplinary work of EC4. But because EC4 is not a regulatory body, its influence is limited: while the Council can publish reports and emphasize resilience, voluntary implementation falls to its individual member departments. Add in EC4’s rare meetings, and climate change is left to slowly and circuitously trickle through the bureaucratic maze of each agency.

The EC4, reflecting the flaws of its member agencies, also fails to systematically incorporate the holistic concerns expressed by Huertas and the No LNG in PVD campaign. The EPA has long recognized this failure of traditional environmental protection agencies. So far, the solution of choice has been writing formal rules for environmental justice (EJ). While activists like Huertas interpret environmental justice as a comprehensive reorientation of environmentalism around social equity, attempts to to include EJ in regulations have produced more paltry results. EJ rules typically mandate more public meetings in the neighborhoods actually affected by proposed projects, or in locations easily accessible by bus, with live translation services.

While Rhode Island may be a leader in energy efficiency (third best in the nation), it lags behind in formalizing EJ. Both Massachusetts and Connecticut have employees assigned to EJ and statutes requiring public involvement plans, but Rhode Island has neither. Though the RIDEM Site Remediation staff are required to hold accessible public meetings, air and water personnel do not. Even if they did, the LNG project hasn’t failed any of RIDEM’s siloed and scientific standards—more public meetings would only have meant additional time before approval.

Equity concerns are similarly suppressed at the federal level: the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the State of Alabama in Alexander v. Sandoval in a 2001

discrimination case, neutering the section of Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that had previously permitted legal action against policies with unjust disparate impacts. These shortcomings of the formal EJ framework leave EC4 and other Rhode Island agencies no mandate to address environmental equity and no way to enforce it. +++ There are other strategies available to Rhode Island in its fight against climate change, despite daunting structural barriers. RIDEM could, like other states, employ a staff member responsible for guiding public meetings and communicating with activists and concerned residents. The department could pass additional EJ regulations for air and water, but these are band-aids that largely fail to address the bureaucratic web hindering motivated regulators and residents.

A more promising strategy already exists on the local scale: The new City of Providence Racial and Environmental Justice Committee (REJC), has begun to advise the Mayor on local EJ issues and has “been very effective on the local level,” according to Huertas.

Huertas, a member of the REJC, cited the Committee’s influence on the City’s plastic bag ban (vetoed by Mayor Elorza out of concern for low-income families) as a recent success. The REJC could become the Citylevel resource that Huertas herself once needed as a new activist: a formal institution for equitable environmental protection.

Even a state-level REJC would fail to correctly counterbalance climate change. Like Rhode Island’s EC4, the Providence REJC is a not an official agency with its own staff and statutory power. While market share and federal disinterest create a ceiling for Rhode Island’s response to climate change, a formal process or department that centers those working on environmental justice issues, one with regulatory authority, would have more influence than the current working groups and committees. And while constructing fossil fuel infrastructure like the LNG facility is just one piece of the puzzle, the State’s inability to apprehend the most obvious culprits is a testament to the profound limitations on Rhode Island’s response to climate change.

Stripped of any real power by the Supreme Court, FERC, RIDEM, the CRMC, et al., Huertas has been forced to disrupt the project on technicalities that Rhode Island agencies actually govern (the CRMC ruled the LNG project’s “scenic and visual impact” was insignificant). This prohibition of legal challenges to structural racism harms low-income communities of color, first and foremost. To State employees like Coit and Bozzi, who have long histories of fighting for environmental protection before joining the government, this structure leaves them with little recourse to drive comprehensive climate action. Attempts to foster productive dialogue between regulators and residents, address inequity in environmentalism, and bypass the rigid agency structure have often resulted, instead, in tense public meetings and a growing perception of bureaucracy as another contributor to structural discrimination and violence. New strategies to combat climate change in Rhode Island will continue to neglect the fundamentally divided and impersonal structure of environmental regulatory authority until they enshrine human and holistic concerns with real authority.

COLIN KENT-DAGGETT B’ 19.5 is waiting for the RIDEM to update its environmental justice homepage.

CLIMATE

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MUCK-RAKERS

BY Ella Comberg & Lucas Smolcic Larson ILLUSTRATION Alex Hanesworth DESIGN Katherine Sang content warning: graphic descriptions of police brutality In 1980, Steve Kohn returned to the offices of the Providence Human Relations Commission, where he was ushered into the office of his boss, executive director Ray Rickman. Rickman had just received a phone call from an unidentified Providence police officer. Its message was clear: “Tell Kohn he has a pretty face. Ask him if he wants to keep it.” +++ The eighties was an era of almost-unchecked police impunity in Providence—and Rickman, Kohn, and the Human Relations Commission were taking a lone stand. “The police could do almost anything they wanted to whoever they wanted,” recalled Rickman in an interview with The College Hill Independent—a cabal of “15 or 16 real bad police officers” participated in beatings, racial harassment, and intimidation, facing virtually no consequences. Police violence was normalized, if not outright sanctioned, by the Providence Police Department; then-Chief of Police Angelo Ricci was quoted in the Providence Journal in 1978 saying, “You’re [not] going to stop crime by being nice to people. You have to push people around.”

Rickman arrived in Providence from Detroit in 1978 to fill an appointment at the Human Relations Commission, an independent public agency tasked with fighting discrimination and promoting civil rights in the city. His team took on the police. “We had all kinds of powers never [before] exercised, and we exercised them,” Rickman said, beginning by hiring 23-year-old Kohn as his personal assistant and sending him to the Police Department for internal hearings on civilian complaints against officers. Kohn, then a master’s student at Brown, played a lawyer-like roll, representing victims of abuse. In effect, this transformed internal police hearings, once only procedural, into trial-like environments. “That had never happened before, where someone sat and aggressively questioned the policeman about what actually happened,” explained Kohn in an interview with the Indy. It was returning from one of these hearings that Kohn learned of the first threat against him.

The pair of advocates was not surprised. “The public knew that there were renegade officers,” said Rickman, “the City Council knew it, everyone knew it.” Lacking was proof: the paper trail. Enter the Rake collective. +++ In the year after Kohn’s first hearing as an advocate at the Human Relations Commission in 1980, he and two Brown undergraduates, Cheryl Jacobs and Mark Toney—founding members of non-defunct radical Brown student publication the Rake—would uncover hundreds of civilian complaints against Providence police officers. In the process, they would also test the power of Rhode Island’s 1979 government transparency law, the Access to Public Records Act with a case that reached the state’s Supreme Court and affirmed citizens’ right to an open government.

The results of Kohn, Jacobs, and Toney’s investigation were published in a special issue of the Rake, featuring anonymized, first-person accounts of police abuse in a section titled “The Victims Speak” and an article titled “Can the police police themselves?” about the hearing process, through which only seven percent of officers were found guilty of misconduct.

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FEATURES

The Rake faded out of existence in the late eighties, just before The College Hill Independent was founded in 1990. As Indy editors, we dove into the history of the Rake and its investigation of the Providence Police Department to uncover and narrate to the work of independent student-journalists decades before us and to understand the history activist-journalism in Providence and at our institution—alongside the ongoing, and hard-fought struggle for an accountable police force for all of Providence’s communities. This is the story of the Rake—a glimpse into the movement for just and nonviolent public institutions in Rhode Island. +++ The Rake was founded in 1979 by a group of students who had been active opponents of the Seabrook nuclear power plant in New Hampshire. As Cheryl Jacobs, one of the founding members, told the Indy, after “three days camping in the marshes” to protest the power plant, “we got back to the campus and they were still building the nuclear power plant, but everyone was very cognizant of the power of direct action...and we said, how can we carry this momentum? Wouldn’t it be cool to have a newspaper? And among that group was Steve Kohn.”

As an undergrad at Boston University, Kohn had led the efforts of another student paper, the bu exposure, to bring attention to Boston University President John Silber’s crackdown on progressive students and professors. “There was a lot of student interest to do an investigatory and muckraking paper,” he remembers.

He brought his muckraking message to Brown as a graduate student, where he and others founded the aptly-named Rake.

The minutes from the first meeting of the Rake on November 29, 1979, archived in the John Hay Library, reveal these students weighing the application of their ideals to the tedious work of producing a monthly, investigative paper: “The Rake is maintaining a couple of internal contradictions which are hurting us. First, our approach is a mix of liberal and radical, we should choose between the two (radical). Can we advocate both writing your congressperson and doing direct action? The second is on our focus as a community paper. Isn’t almost the entire staff Brown-oriented? We can’t be both a Brown and a community paper and be successful. Which will we choose?”

The Rake never took firm stances on these questions, but their politics were definitively leftist. In an undated letter to the paper’s staff, Mark Toney—another active member of the paper—typed in all caps “OUR GUIDING PRINCIPLES MUST BE TO SUBVERT, AGITATE, AND INCITE, FOR THE UNIFIED GOAL OF LONG-TERM DESTABILIZATION OF THE SYSTEM.” He then circled this paragraph, annotating it in pen as “the Main Point.” He signed the document, “yours in the struggle, Mark.”

Despite its somewhat nebulous goal of destabilizing the system and its of-the-time conventions (internal documents for the paper are marked with “Earthdates”), the paper took up both serious direct action and investigative work. According to Jacobs, the

30 NOV 2018

Forty years ago, student journalists uncovered records of police brutality in Providence

former often led to the latter: “within the Rake collective there was a subset of people who were doing things off-campus with the community—with unfair housing, involved with very far-left groups, doing kind of guerrilla theatre....I don’t think [the stories published in the Rake] are something we would have heard about otherwise.” The collective nonetheless maintained its journalistic focus, publishing stories that ranged from a report on Brown’s historical involvement in the Manhattan Project to a feature on “alchemy at the UEL [Brown’s Urban Environmental Laboratory],” published alongside impassioned indictments of CIA-backed violence in Latin America and poems about sexual assault on college campuses. But it was with the police brutality issue that the Rake left an enduring mark on Providence. +++ Stories of police brutality first arrived at the Rake through Steve Kohn. Kohn saw first-hand evidence of abuse—beatings, hate speech, and coercion—in the citizen police misconduct complaints shared with the Human Relations Commission. The ability for victims to file complaints with the department had been established just several years earlier, when the Coalition of Black Leadership, a Providence-based group formed to respond to police violence against communities of color, sued the City of Providence alleging a “pattern of police brutality on the part of the Providence policemen toward the black population.”

The resulting 1973 Consent Decree allowed citizens to file complaints and mandated internal investigations and hearings, which were presided over by a “hearing officer”—a member of the police department—who rendered a verdict for approval or rejection by the Chief of Police (this process stands to this day). The Human Relations Commission had been allowed to participate in these hearings by the decree, but before Rickman, defendants were rarely positioned well to argue their case against the word of a police officer.

Mark Toney, a prolific activist who would go on to found Providence’s Direct Action for Rights and Equality (DARE) after graduating, reflected on the city in the early eighties in an interview with the Indy: “Back at that time, there wasn’t a lot of appetite among city councils or among people in authority to hold the police accountable,” he said. “It just didn't happen.” As Kohn was getting threats for aggressively questioning police officers in internal hearings, Ray Rickman was being forced out of his role as director of the Human Relations Commission by what Kohn called “bipartisan opposition” to those challenging police power.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Rickman confirmed this. To take on law enforcement in Providence in 1980 was politically and personally risky—Rickman told the Indy that he received threats from the police, and, on one occasion, was threatened at gunpoint in City Hall by a high-ranking public safety officer. It was only “bravery and ignorance” on the part of Rickman and his team that kept them going. +++ Kohn told the Indy that he was concerned that there was a major cover-up of the extent of police abuse and that solid evidence of these civil rights abuses was not known to the public. Through his position at the Human Relations Commission, he had access to the civilian complaint files. However, even 38 years after the publication of the exposé, Kohn would not comment on the record as to how the Rake obtained the first-person accounts of police violence that made it into their eventual October 1980 issue.

At Kohn’s suggestion, in the spring of 1980, a group of undergraduate reporters at the Rake—Jacobs and Toney taking the lead—made the decision to launch a broad investigation into the police department. In search of documentation of police abuse, Jacobs and Toney began in City Hall. “We went into the basement...and found this little office full of records,” Jacobs told the Indy. “We wave this document at [the clerk] and are like, ‘we can see these. The government says we can see these.’” To the pair’s surprise, the clerk led them back into the filing room where they began to rifle through documents. Jacobs remembered their reaction as no less than elated: “this is it, the motherload, this is what we’ve been looking for, my god! And we’re trying to act really casual, and we start shoving things into the copier as fast as we can, just copy it, copy it. We’re just stuffing these pages into our backpacks as fast as they come out.”

Unbeknownst to the reporters, the clerk had called a supervisor. “She makes the phone call, and we notice her whole demeanor changes. Somebody’s just ripping her out from somewhere else. And she gets agitated.

She says, ‘okay you can’t be doing this. You’re not allowed to copy these.’”

Though Toney and Jacobs were legally entitled to the records under Rhode Island’s open government law, the clerk abruptly ordered them to leave.

“Our backpacks are full. We walk out as fast as we can without running with the copies we’d gotten, which are like gold. And we jumped on the city bus to go back to the hill,” recalled Jacobs. “I was terrified...I’m like squinshing myself down in the bus, like, ‘are there any state troopers following us?’”

+++ But a stack of civilian complaints—some from the Human Relations Commission and others from the visit to City Hall—were not enough. Wanting to prove that, even with the internal complaint process, officers were not held accountable for their actions, Jacobs and Toney turned to Rhode Island’s government transparency law, the 1979 Access to Public Records Act—the state’s version of the federal Freedom of Information Act, which gives citizens the right to request any documents created by public agencies. Kohn, beyond his work at the Human Relations Commission, had a keen interest in using these laws to gather government documents. Toney, remembers his friend Kohn’s ability to access previously classified information: “He had boxes and boxes...Eugene V. Debbs prison files.

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn prison files. Like absolute originals. And it was like un-fucking-believable to see Big Bill Haywood—all these [documents]!”

Over the summer that followed, Jacobs and Toney sent a series of letters to the police department (addressed to Chief of Police Angelo Ricci) requesting records of these hearings, citing the Access to Public Records Act. The reports would show how frequently the complaint process resulted in a “guilty” verdict— and, more broadly, if the system was working to address abuse. “We definitely expected a response,” Jacobs told the Indy. “These are public records. These people are public servants.” However, Toney and Jacobs did not receive responses to any of their requests for records within the 10 business days, which “shall be deemed to be a denial,” according to the statute.

Following the law, the reporters then appealed this denial to Commissioner of Public Safety Sanford Gorodetsky. They received no response. +++ With unreturned requests to Gorodetsky and Ricci for officer hearing reports, Toney, Jacobs, and Kohn (writing under the pseudonym Kevin Stone because of the threats against him and his role at the Human Relations Commission) published “The Problem of Police Abuse in Providence”—the October, 1980 issue of the Rake, populated with narratives pulled from civilian complaints and interviews with victims, police officers, and city officials.

Some of the complaints recount forced confessions: one man brought to the police station requested that his attorney be called. Then, he said, “the captain

FEATURES

06

informed me that ‘this was not kiddy land.’ He then gave the detective a billy club and ordered: ‘make sure you get a statement from him, or use this’ [pointing to the billy club]. After the captain left the room, the detective beat me with the club when I persisted to ask for an attorney. Finally, after getting hit several times in the right knee and the nose, I reluctantly signed a statement.”

Other victims quoted retell stories of verbal abuse: a woman arrested after an illegal search was made on her home was driven to the police station. “Officer X rode with her to the station [and] in the car made remarks about ‘you people should learn not to act like a bunch of animals...It’s about time you learned that when we speak, our work is law.’”

The sum total of the investigation was a dismal portrait of almost entirely unchecked police power on the streets, in police vehicles, and at local precincts.

“The story,” said Jacobs, “was that guys get picked up in the middle of the night, they get the shit beat out of them, and then basically thrown out in an alley to be charged.” But the Rake collective’s investigation wasn’t over. In the three years that followed the article’s publication, the Rake would take the Providence Police Department to court in search of the hearing officer reports—evidence that the police were rarely prosecuted for the abuse the Rake documented. +++ Having been rebuffed by Colonel Ricci and then Commissioner Gorodetsky, Jacobs, Toney, and Kohn approached the Rhode Island chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. Steve Brown, Director of the RI ACLU, assigned R. Kelly Sheridan to the case. After the ACLU helped the students draft a second round of (unsuccessful) letters requesting the officer hearing reports, Sheridan filed a lawsuit in Rhode Island’s Superior Court. Sheridan, in an interview with the Indy, remembers “some pressure to get a good outcome,” a feat that would require “the court to embrace and endorse the legislative objectives and principles” of the newly-passed—and untested—Access to Public Records Act. In that case, Sheridan maintained that the files were public records that necessitated release under the act (which assumes all records are public unless an agency claims a specific exemption). In its defense, the Providence Police Department argued that the hearing reports were private “personnel records,” and therefore sensitive information exempt from release.

On August 3, 1981, Judge Cresto of the Superior Court of Rhode Island ruled in the Rake’s favor, writing that “to withhold this information defeats the very purpose whereby the Consent Decree was entered and for which the access to public record statute was designed.” Judge Cresto ordered Commissioner Gorodetsky to “make available to the plaintiffs each and every Providence Police Department Hearing Officer’s report on civilian complaints.” Sheridan says the “critical decision that Mark and Steve and Cheryl made at the time” to consent to receiving hearing reports with the officers’ names redacted “was key to our success” because without identifying information, the City’s claims that the reports were “personnel records” no longer held up.

The court order, however, did not stop the

07

FEATURES

Providence Police Department, which continued to withhold the documents in question. As the Rake filed a contempt of court charge, Rake v. Gorodetsky made its way to the State Supreme Court, where, on December 3, 1982, Judge Florence Kerins Murray ruled once again in the Rake’s favor.

After a monumental win for the Rake, the Rhode Island ACLU, and advocates of police accountability, the staff of the Rake had reached an impasse: they still had to raise the funds to pay for the document reproduction fees (roughly $600). A copy of the “Rake Log,” written by staffers immediately following the Supreme Court decision, reads, “Currently, the decision rests with the RAKE staff.” Option A, according to the document, was to “raise the necessary funds through reggae/new wave dance at Sayles [a Brown building]” or “through the sale of leftist junk: pins, buttons, bumperstickers, etc.” Ultimately, the Rake obtained the records (recollections are hazy about how exactly the collective raised the $600), but for at least for a moment, the Rake’s ability to obtain the documents they’d worked three years for rested in the staff’s ability to pull off a reggae concert. +++ The Rhode Island Supreme Court’s final decision in the Rake’s favor called the suit the state’s “first opportunity to examine” the newly-minted state public records law. The case set important precedent for citizens’ and journalists’ right to access public information, absent strong reasons for secrecy.

The questions debated in Rake v. Gorodetsky are still the subject of litigation around police transparency. Today, said Sheridan, “there’s not this broadbased opposition or resistance to transparency.”

But selective noncompliance still exists. Just last year, Sheridan and the ACLU sued the Pawtucket Police Department on behalf of the Rhode Island Accountability Project for failing to release reports of alleged police officer misconduct generated by its own internal review process, in a case strikingly similar to the Rake’s. Unlike civilian-generated complaints, the City of Pawtucket argues complaints generated internally (which include anonymous tips from outside the department) should be exempt. Sheridan called it a “distinction without a difference.”

Rickman, who has held a variety of political and advocacy positions in Rhode Island, said of the Providence police in the eighties and today, “you cannot compare the two police departments,” adding “there are no famous rogue cops,” unlike in the eighties when Rickman—and police officers on the force— could list the most violent officers by name. Rickman remembers them to this day.

This month a WPRI investigation revealed a rising number of disciplinary actions since 2003, which Providence Chief Col. Hugh Clements, quoted in the article, attributed to “high standards.” Even so, of the 679 citizen complaints filed since 2006, just 11.5 percent resulted in some form of discipline, according to public records used in the investigation—the same type of documents won by the Rake’s suit. The Rake’s investigation in 1980 found this rate to be 7 percent.

Complaint proceedings are still handled internally— and the continued fight for police accountability has focused on the absence of meaningful civilian review

of police misconduct.

In 2002, community activists (many with DARE) building on the legacy of the Coalition for Black Leadership’s 1973 Consent Decree, succeeded in lobbying the City Council to establish the Providence External Review Authority (PERA) to provide civilian oversight of the police. But after a strong start (weathering a lawsuit from the local Fraternal Order of Police), the PERA board was inactive for years— City Councilwoman and DARE activist Mary Kay Harris, who sat on the original board said in a public meeting this June, “politically [PERA] was supposed to fail,” defunded by the city and marred by changing membership. But PERA was reinstated by the April 2017 passage of the Community Safety Act, fought for by a coalition of local organizations concerned about police harassment of people of color in Providence.

In the face of these imposed measures of law enforcement accountability, the Fraternal Order of Police has raised vocal opposition, and implementation of the Community Safety Act (rebranded the Providence Community-Police Relations Act) has met resistance. +++ When we asked Mark Toney, who now works as a utility justice advocate in San Francisco, if he had any advice for us, editors of the Indy, he said, “There is value to history and people knowing the history of struggle."

Forty years after the Rake’s police brutality investigation and its Supreme Court win, we set out to assemble the pieces of this story—archived memos, scribbled notes, and decades-old recollections—because we hope this picture of the past can serve as a reminder that the the work student journalists do can be impactful in the months and years after the day an article is printed. We recognize, as the staff of the Rake did, that our paper exists in tension, caught between the ideals of an independent, journalistic pathway to social justice and the bounds of a fundamentally conservative and powerful institution-upon-a-hill. The students of the Rake—as a collective whose direct action was the bedrock of their journalism—leveraged their position as ‘agitators’ to contribute to what still is an ongoing struggle against the violence and racism embedded in Rhode Island’s policing institutions. The Rake began as a direct action collective protesting the Seabrook power plant and ended as one, too, pushing government transparency and police accountability alongside other activists and advocates in their city.

Special thanks to Raymond Butti and the staff of the John Hay Special Collections Library, as well as the Rhode Island Historical Society for helping us unearth the archived documents that made this story possible.

LUCAS SMOLCIC LARSON B’19, ELLA COMBERG B’20 want to keep their pretty faces.

30 NOV 2018

SAFETY FIRST—BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE Juggling multiple interests in the improvements to Kennedy Plaza

BY Marly Toledano ILLUSTRATION Rémy Poisson DESIGN Amos Jackson

Although plans to improve the downtown area have been a topic of conversation in Providence over the past decade, the City only recently began a more concerted effort to improve Kennedy Plaza. In 2015, when a Rhode Island Public Transit Authority (RIPTA) bus struck and killed a nine-year-old girl on her way to school, it became clear that the City has to focus on pedestrian safety. In light of a series of other tragic deaths involving RIPTA buses, and the city’s desire to upgrade public recreational experience, work will begin in 2019 on the most recent plan to reconstruct the transportation hub. The city aims first to improve the logistical aspects of the area and, second, to create a successful heart for Providence, downtown, and the state at large.

The “bus is turning” warnings that sound on Providence street corners serve as an uncanny reminder of the multiple tragic deaths that have resulted from the RIPTA system in Rhode Island.

Because bus traffic is so congested in the downtown central area of Providence—a popular place for pedestrian activity—redistributing bus traffic can minimize this safety concern. The downtown center represents the aspirations of the city but in neglecting the security of pedestrians, Providence lets its residents down.

The City has also been trying to make the downtown area more livable. In the past ten years, landscaping and bus improvements have been enacted.

Additionally, design committees have submitted project proposals that enable the city to create a longterm vision. Since then, a long-term design was created by a team including Union Studios, Project for Public Spaces, Birchwood Design Group, and VHB which can be viewed online. This project stemmed from a conversation including the voices of private design organizations, government, and public crowdsourcing. As presented at a City meeting this year, the City’s goals primarily relate to safety, specifically in bus circulation, vehicle circulation, pedestrian safety, and bicycle safety. The final goal, which is currently the least developed, is to improve the public space.

Don Powers, a designer at Union Studio who worked on the original project, told the Indy that “The biggest problem is that it’s trying to operate both as a transportation hub for the bus network and a social space.” The impetus for his vision, and that of City, is to make Kennedy Plaza into a city center that “allows all sorts of users,” he told The Indy. Ideally, not only would the city center serve all residents, but the public would also share a sense of ownership of the area, both as far as accessibility and ensuring a pleasant experience. A successful public space has goals of both community usability and enjoyment—the aim of such a space is to be safe and pleasant for everybody.

In urban design, thinkers like those at the Project for Public Spaces, a nonprofit that consults on public spaces in order to improve communities suggest that a public space should include multiple functions, including public amenities like a park, bike trail, or cafe. Kennedy Plaza, in this way, serves a potent opportunity; already, it offers space for public recreation, transportation for bus users, and events. However, it does not balance these various capacities in a way that accounts its maxiumum utility—the utilitarian and social needs instead function against each other.

The primary purpose of Kennedy Plaza is bus circulation, as Bonnie Nickerson, Director of Planning THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

for the city of Providence, explained in a presentation on the City’s plan. In the past six years, thinkers in city planning have shared the concern that this area has been designed almost exclusively for this purpose.

From an architectural standpoint, this is far from ideal.

In 2017, Friedrich St. Florian, architect and professor emeritus of the Rhode Island School of Design, and Dietrich Neumann, director of urban studies and an architecture professor at Brown University, wrote a proposal, published in the Providence Journal, to remove bus stops from the area altogether. The immediate plan to counter the public safety concern will remove the bus stops on Exchange Terrace, Fulton Street and East approach, making Washington Street the main transportation hub and leaving the other streets clear for pedestrian use and vehicle traffic.

Additionally, the service between Kennedy Plaza and Thayer Street will be improved with the introduction of bus only lanes. This attempts to resolve the problems with RIPTA, and builds on steps the bus company took to do with training and investigating staff to deal with safety concerns for pedestrians.

To address another purpose of the Plaza—private vehicle use—the city plans to redesign the intersection on Memorial Street and Fulton Street and make Fulton Street available for two-way traffic. This, in addition to the changes in RIPTA circulation, will also help with a third mode of transportation: walking. The efforts to improve the area as a transportation hub will be buttressed by more noticeable crosswalks, fences, and trees to indicate safe places for pedestrians to walk and navigate the area.

And to improve bike safety, the City has plans to provide a two-way protected bike lane on Exchange Terrace. Bonnie Nickerson, director of City planning, pointed to the improvements the city does plan to make for bike friendliness, though she suggested that in the future, there could be further improvements.

Beyond just transportation, Nickerson addressed the plans for the improvement of Kennedy Plaza as a public space. While the mitigation of the traffic concerns does offer an opportunity for a more pleasant pedestrian experience, the positive improvements she suggested remain underdeveloped. She mentioned a list of ideas, including a farmer’s market, pop-up art installations and an opportunity for temporary structures, like tents, food trucks, and recreational activities. She also talked about a potential call for artists to design proposals for ground murals. However, none of these ideas made it onto the timeline for the actual construction of the project, which will begin next spring.

The Plaza renovation essentially works in phases.

Eventually, the idea is, by an organic process, and as money becomes available, the City will further develop the project to more fully expand to meet the needs of the public, both practical and recreational.

Since at this point, the concerns being addressed have almost exclusively to do with the bus system, and other problems with the transportation system centered in Kennedy Plaza, the consideration of how this will impact cost of living seems secondary. The immediate fact is that the current circulation in the downtown area of Providence has dire consequences, and the City needs to takes its first steps to address. However, longer term, the City would ideally prioritize recreational activities, building on the park, shopping, and

ice skating rink. The City, and the State, would have a heart that reflects not only the physical safety of its citizens, but their multiple needs and interests. +++ When considering improving a public space, urban designers must consider how it will impact users.

“Everyone involved in this project has been very sensitive to the fact that is a public space,” Powers told the Indy. Because Kennedy Plaza is not residential, making improvements would benefit public experiences.

Oftentimes, the people most resistant to the improvement of public areas have a preference for private streets and enclosed areas, but a public space that is really successful feels like it belongs to everyone.

Instead of focusing on demographic distinctions, users have an opportunity for a sense of joint ownership. In its best form, public space can overcome social divisions; it becomes common ground, where people can enjoy recreation, public events, and the outdoors. It is essential that common ground provides safety to its users—but a more hopeful visionary might also imagine a place everyone shares that is aesthetically beautiful.

In Denmark, Jahn Gehl’s firm attempts this. The firm he started, which has studios in Copenhagen, San Francisco, and New York, has a global influence and a legacy of designing “cities for people.” Gehl, an urban designer who became prominent in his people-oriented approach to urban design, told the Indy, “cultures and climates differ all over the world, but people are the same. They’ll gather in public if you give them a good place to do it.” His desire to create spaces for the public good included a balanced combination of functional and pleasant design. “Public life in good public spaces is part of a democratic life and a full life,” he said.

For downtown Providence to improve urban life, City planners and creative thinkers need to come together and think beyond the immediate safety concerns. Kennedy Plaza offers a potent space for this possibility. However, most of the money, which comes from the state ($2.5 million) and city governments ($500,000) has been designated for infrastructure improvement. Down the line, designers hope to raise money for aesthetic concerns. Investing in these “softer” projects is a necessary second step. Quality of experience in public areas has a high potential to make the lives of Providence residents more pleasant.

The city, hopefully, will continue to put energy towards the Kennedy Plaza project even after the questions of circulation become mitigated. It’s time for Providence to not only to offer the public the basics, but to provide the quality of life every resident deserves.

MARLY TOLEDANO B ‘20 lives off of burgers from the food truck in Kennedy Plaza

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MY FINEST JACKET 09

SCIENCE & TECH

Reimagining the placenta’s place in our birth narrative Though addressing the experience of all placenta-bearing folks, I refer to mothers in this piece using she/her pronouns for the sake of continuity, to address histories of misogyny, and because the majority of placenta-bearers are cis-women. However, it is necessary to acknowledge that those who do not identify as women and/or use she/ her pronouns are equally, if not more, affected by the issues and discourses of reproductive justice.

Minutes after a child is born, the mother’s body must act as a vehicle of expulsion for one final entity: the placenta. It is likely that no one has prepared her for this process, sometimes referred to as the “afterbirth”; no one has told her the contractions don’t stop quite yet, that she needs to push out a disc about the size of a pizza. It exits with a gush of blood, splattered with pulpy crimson blobs on one side, shimmering with a thin membrane on the other, crawling with a network of blue and red veins that flower from a stalky umbilical cord. She may be shocked by its size; some parents faint at the sight of it. The placenta is a Shirley Jackson novel in organ form: formidable, enigmatic, raw and meaty, smelling of liver, oozing pulp and power.

The placenta is the organ that precedes all other organs before the fetus develops a stomach, lungs, or kidneys. The organ that grows alongside the fetus and filters blood, removes waste, and provides oxygen— all simultaneously. The organ that keeps out bacteria, while letting in glucose and antibodies. The only organ that mother and child ever share and ever will share, linking her air to child’s air, her nutrients to child’s nutrients, and her heart—filling and contracting and ejecting and relaxing—to that of child. A jack-ofall-trades kind of organ, but also a transient kind of organ—the only transient organ to exist in the human body. Expelled from the mother’s body and severed from child with one swift snip of the gelatinous umbilical cord.

The placenta is neither secreted by the mother herself, as blood is, nor does it exist as its own organism, as her child does, but rather straddles the space between mother and child, between the developed and undeveloped, between what is fully human and what is not. Sustaining a child for months only to often be forgotten immediately, it possesses the power of ownership, the weakness of ephemerality. But above all, the placenta is a mystery. According to the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the placenta is “the least understood human organ and arguably one of the more important, not only for the health of a woman and her fetus during pregnancy but also for the lifelong health of both.” As a result of the fact that medicine has historically been and continues to be run primarily by cisgender men, the actual bodies that carry placentas are disproportionately understudied—those of both cisgender women and anatomically female trans folks. We simply accept the existence of this individually-paired organ that once developed alongside us in our mother’s body like a sibling, spoon-fed us what we needed to flourish in the uterus, and then obligatorily left us post-womb, never to be seen again, save for the times it is crushed into pills, blended into smoothies, or fried and eaten.

Thus, it continues to maintain its enigmatic identity— who can fully comprehend the inner machinations of

the placenta, other than the placenta itself?

The ominous pucker of our belly button teases us: the only wrinkly relic of the critical connection to our placenta, our mother, our lifeline. +++ My infatuation with the placenta began with an interview on NPR’s Fresh Air podcast with Angela Garbes, author of Like a Mother: A Feminist Journey Through the Science and Culture of Pregnancy. As she described the “double-sided hybrid interface,” the “conduit connecting present, past, and future,” I paused in my hike in the middle of the woods and frantically scrambled to take notes in my phone, spending the next few days obsessing over what I had learned, shocked at how little I had previously heard about it. Why wasn’t the entire world talking about this?

“If my body is doing something, I want to know,” Garbes said when I spoke with her over the phone. “I think that when you learn something about how you’re able to nurture a fetus…that’s something that makes pregnant people feel empowered, that makes them admire their body, and I think as a culture we can also admire the work of pregnant people and what they’re contributing.” But the placenta is difficult to study: it’s complex, it’s temporary, it’s one entity connected to two people. It also has a finite lifespan, growing for around thirty-four weeks within the womb before it begins deteriorating. Upon expulsion, its time is already complete; the window for studying its function has elapsed.

As Garbes pointed out, the placenta is also a part of female reproductive health, which has been systematically undervalued—scientifically, financially, and culturally—for centuries. In response to pregnant women’s negative reactions to several sedative drugs, the FDA issued a ban in 1977 preventing all women who could become pregnant from participating in early-stage clinical trials, including women who were not sexually active, women who used contraception, or lesbian women. Thus, all clinical research in the period following was done primarily on, by, and for men. It was only in 1993 that the the National Institute of Health mandated that women and minorities be included in any government-funded health research. And yet the scope of our scientific knowledge still remains disproportionately skewed toward those with male anatomy, as evidenced by a survey of studies published in 2004 revealing that only 37 percent of the participants were women. Pregnant women, specifically, continue to be routinely excluded from clinical trials under the guise of protecting fetuses from the potential harm of an intervention.

But studying the placenta would have impacts far beyond understanding a fascinating organ—it could save lives of all genders, Garbes explained. A lack of blood supply in the placenta can lead to disastrous results, such as stillbirths, miscarriages, and longstanding post-delivery health problems in both mother and child. Pre-eclampsia, a potentially fatal disease caused by an abnormally small and weak placenta, affects two to five percent of pregnant women in the United States. And yet, exactly how and why this problem occurs has yet to be completely understood.

30 NOV 2018

BY Mia Pattillo ILLUSTRATION Mariel Solomon DESIGN Katherine Sang

According to a New York Times article from July 14, 2014, the perturbing word that scientists repeatedly use to describe the placenta is “invasive.” The placenta forms along the uterine lining beside the implanted egg, burrowing deep into the mother's tissue and leeching off of her nutrients. It is an entirely new organ within the mother’s body, “50 percent originating within the fetus, 50 percent somebody’s DNA—yet a mother’s body tolerates it,” Garbes explains. Indeed, it taps into a mother’s body with a ruthless yet welcome aggression, a process that many researchers have parallelled with cancer. But describing the placenta as “invasive” implies that it is unwanted, an encroachment on the womb. Though this adjective may be applicable to a disease like cancer, these negative connotations do a disservice to the placenta, whose “invasion” is critical to sustaining the life of a human being.

On a scientific level, both placenta cells and cancer cells share the same secret: the mastery of mimicry.

In early pregnancy, cells called trophoblasts on the outside of embryos swarm over the uterine walls like ants, destroying cells that stand in the way through digestive enzymes or inducing cells to kill themselves.

They then imitate the very vessels they invaded, as the arteries lining the uterus become “remodeled” with trophoblasts instead of the mother’s cells. This remodeling in order to convince the mother to accept the placenta may also open up avenues to a better understanding of organ transplants. When a foreign organ enters a body, the natural inclination is to reject it without extreme pharmacological suppression, Garbes said to the Indy. The placenta serves as a stark counter-example to this bodily rejection. Thus, it is critical to study the placenta not only for maternal and female reproductive health, but for overall adult health: a fuller knowledge of the placenta could offer realms of understanding in cancer cells and organ transplants.

The Human Placenta Project, a collaborative research effort launched by the National Institute of Health in 2014, is working to fill this critical gap in our knowledge. But a long road still remains ahead in tapping into the workings of this extraordinary organ to help us better tend to and make sense of our own bodies— regardless of whether they carry placentas or not. +++

ate their placentas were white, wealthy, and married, perhaps reflecting the economic barrier of $200400 for encapsulation services or a sense of status in consuming “delicacies.” If one hopes to incorporate a little culinary creativity, a quick Google search provides entire placenta cookbooks, chock-full of placenta recipes including placenta lasagna, placenta chili, placenta truffles, placenta tacos, and placenta smoothies. The common theory holds that placentophagy will prevent postpartum depression and help the uterus heal more quickly, although there is currently no scientific proof of any health benefits. In fact, a 2016 literature review published in the Journal of Obstetric, Gynecologic & Neonatal Nursing “did not find strong scientific evidence to support the mood, energy, and lactation-enhancing claims of placenta-eaters.” Furthermore, the June 2017 issue of the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report warned against it, citing an Oregon woman’s baby who was diagnosed with late-onset group B strep in 2016, a disease whose bacteria were found in the mother’s post-delivery placental pills. With no standards for how a placenta is encapsulated, it can be done in the home or sent to outside facilities, where the placenta is placed into foreign hands to be dehydrated, put into pills, returned, and ingested.

Garbes ate placenta pills with her first pregnancy, but not with her second. She attributes the increasing interest in placentophagy partially to the fact that female reproductive health continues to be undervalued. “I think a lot of people turn to the placenta as another way of helping them, because they don’t really have the support that they need post-partum,” she said. “People are like sure, I’ll eat my organ, because I only have one six-week check-up and I’m feeling overwhelmed. Someone’s telling me that this might make me feel better.” But at the same time, she also finds the intuition and testimonies of mothers who attribute health benefits to the placenta to be compelling.

She doesn’t find it at all extreme to believe that something a woman grew, that is hers, that her body created, is beneficial to her. “We need to take it seriously and study it better,” she added.

In some cultures, the placenta is spiritually revered, carrying symbolism of life and individuality. Among New Zealand’s Maoris, who use the same term for placenta and land, as well as among the Navajo nation, the placenta is buried within a sacred area of soil. Filipina mothers may bury their placenta with books in hopes of a smart child, while the Igbo of Nigeria perform full burial rites for the placenta, treating it as a dead twin. Many Vietnamese and Chinese mothers prepare the placenta for consumption by boiling it and making it into a broth. Among the Hmong, the word for placenta can be translated as “jacket”—an infant’s first and finest item of clothing.

Burying it outside, they believe that after death, the soul must retrace its journeys until it returns to its original placenta jacket. Without it, the soul is doomed to wander eternally coat-less, cold, alone.

blood, every month; the expulsion of human life, for childbearers. Both of these carry an incredibly heavy weight in the lives of women and mothers. The former implies puberty and growing up, the possibility of childbearing, but it also can consume a woman’s life for up to seven days of pain, bloating, and mood swings.

The latter often entails intense pain too, while simultaneously bringing about new life, perhaps a future of love and warmth and growth. So why do we ignore this third, huge, life-dependent expulsion that occurs in the lives of many mothers? This undertaking that also carries an incredibly heavy weight, of pain, of birth, of sustenance?

“I see [the placenta] as this place where mother and child are first communicating to each other, but it’s also a place where there’s invading, altering, and doing things to the mother’s body, so it’s a site of conflict as well,” Garbes told the Indy. Indeed, the placenta serves not only a multi-functional purpose, but one whose multiple functions span two sides of the same coin of pregnancy: cooperation and conflict. That juxtaposition, perhaps, extends beyond the arteries and veins of biology—isn’t so much of any relationship between mother and child a deep grappling with cooperation and conflict?

In one of my favorite parts of Garbes’ book, she likens the placenta to Janus, the two-faced god of beginnings and endings, transitions and passageways, who looks both to the past and to the future and after whom the gates of a building in Rome were named after. The placenta, too, is our past and our future, a transition from our mother, to us, to (potentially) our child. It is a beginning—our first connection to life, and it is an end—snipped away with scissors, likely never to be seen again. It is a passageway stretching back into past generations, and a hallway extending down future generations. And ultimately, the placenta stands at the gate of human life, carrying all of the power to breathe (literally, through its respiratory system) a being into existence.

I ask my mother about my own moment of expulsion. Where is that lifeline now, the pizza-shaped veiny blob with which I formed a physical relationship closer than that with any human being? “I have no idea,” she replies. “All I remember is being in the most terrible pain. I was pushing, stuff was coming out, no one told me what was going on. Then I had a baby.” I imagine my mom’s placenta, disposed of in some waste freezer, incinerated in a landfill, or perhaps sold on an online placenta black market (which is apparently thriving in Japan, where I was born). I think about the time awaiting me in my future, when the life-span of my body comes to an end. And I picture my soul, wandering, scouring the Earth like a character from Spirited Away, hoping for a glorious reunion with my finest jacket.

Tabloids blew up when Kim Kardashian ate her placenta last year, groundup and encapsulated in pill form. “I had great results and felt so energized and didn't have any signs of depression! I definitely had to do it again.

Every time I take a pill, I feel a surge of energy and feel really healthy and good. I totally recommend it for anyone considering it!” Kardashian wrote on her blog.

The placenta certainly challenges our definition of what we consider food, what we consider human, and what we consider our own body: is placentophagy—the MIA PATTILLO B’20 wants to try placenta sushi but is act of eating one’s own placenta—vegetarian? Vegan? having vegetarian qualms.

Cannibalism?

Most mammals, even domesticated pets, eat their placentas immediately after birth, a trend that +++ is catching on among women in the United States. A small study published in 2013 in Ecology of Food and I often think about how women are taught that their Nutrition suggested that a majority of women who bodies are vehicles of expulsion: the expulsion of

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SCIENCE & TECH

10

~ Thanksgiving Smorgasbord ~ A pumpkin pie made from jack-o-lanterns leftover from Halloween

~grav y a deca ~ d anima ent l mea juice t

Let’s thank our friends in the Andes for crafting such tasty potatoes ! ~

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y Every year m a mom makes alsa guacamole s ily that my fam pours on everything.

d s an e o t ta t et po s are no e w S d!! toe pota lly relate a actu

And sweet potatoes and yams are not the same thing!!

Is for till ge The t no Cra stalg nbe i rrie c s Today killed 46 million tu for Th anksg rkeys are iving alone

There’s always at least two bowls of salsa going around

green bean casserole : a mush th hugs your at tongue. in g redients in greenbean clude: s, upgrade d funyuns whole can and 2 s of tasty s odium sou p

ican What’s more Amer

aghetti is My mom also thinks sp ng dish... a traditional Thanksgivi

than apple pie?

A holiday founded on th e “peace” between Wampanoag natives an d Pilgrim colonists

BRIEF ELEMENTAL THINGS A conversation with essayist, editor, and translator Eliot Weinberger Robert Atwan likened the essay form to a solitary, restless individual; Montaigne believed essays could only be written in paces; Hilton Als considered the essay to be concentrated life. Defining the essay has proved a more elusive task than the essay itself. And few have stretched its limits as wide as Eliot Weinberger. He has often attributed his preference for essays, for fact over fiction, to his lack of imagination. Knowingly or not, Weinberger has pushed the essay genre to unimagined ends.

Weinberger’s writing is eclectic and dense. His stories cover nearly every corner of the world, and render even familiar places surreal, as if we’re hearing them described for the first time. In Weinberger’s 2016 essay collection, The Ghost of Birds, the first story begins quite literally with creation, titled “The Story of Adam and Eve.” By the middle few essays, we’re asked to consider George Bush Jr. as a “postmodernist” feeding readers details as granular as the “hot coat hanger” he used to “brand the buttocks of pledges to the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity at Yale.” We end the collection of essays somewhere in Albania, and walking the Great Wall with presidents past.

Weinberger’s approach to translation is equally as brazen and sweeping: “One can translate MobyDick even if one has never hunted whales,” he asserts.

Shortly after finding a book of poems by Octavio Paz in his high school library, Weinberger started translating from the Spanish. By 19, he’d become friends with Paz and worked for years as a primary translator of his work. Along with his essays, he’s gone on to translate from Chinese, working closely with poet Bei Dao. “Weinberger tracks cycles of human violence and dreaming, like huge vortical whirlwinds,” writes poet Forrest Gander, “they stalk each other across the widening desert tracts of human history.” Weinberger, Bei Dao, New Directions—Gander and Weinberger’s publisher—gathered with others at Brown University last week as part of a two-day celebration of Forrest Gander, who retired from his post as Adele Kellenberg Seaver Professor of Literary Arts & Comparative Literature this Fall. In the weeks leading up to the event, the Independent spoke with Weinberger sporadically over email, discussing his voracious approach to the world. +++ The College Hill Independent: Reading your stories has offered me, among other feelings: solace, humor, unease, hope, and I am looking forward to experiencing it all in person at your reading and through our exchange.

Eliot Weinberger: Well thank you—but they’re not really “my stories.” I sometimes have stories in my writing, but they’re other people’s stories, which I retell.

The Indy: Can you share your relationship to the poet and professor Forrest Gander and to his work? The title of the event, A Restless Melancholy—how does it resonate with you personally?

EW: I don’t feel particularly restless or melancholic.

I can sit for many hours in a chair just happily and blankly staring. Forrest has been my friend forever. I read everything he publishes, and he’s one of the very few writers whose next book I’m eager to read. Among many other things, he is a master—in both the poetry and the fiction—of landscape and the invocation of place. I wish I knew how he does it.

The internet has, of course, changed nearly everything, but the consolation of literature is that it hasn’t changed fiction, poetry, or essays at all. They remain what they are—the only difference is that more people can find them. +++ The Indy: You are no stranger to the current political climate, having laid it out meticulously in “Ten Days in Trump’s America” for this past October’s London Review of Books. It seems that the ideas you’ve built your writing career on—reaching past American literatures, cultures, borders—are antithetical to the current US agenda.

The Indy: Every interviewer you’ve sat with has begun their introduction with hesitation—finding your work unclassifiable. There is a sense of responsibility in your work. Not for an audience nor reportage, but a desire to feel as if you’ve communicated a story across in as genuine a manner as possible. Have you thought about yourself as a messenger? Have you ever had any desire EW: My writing always comes out of either curiosity to classify your work? or indignation. Curiosity for the literary essays, indignation for the political. The literary essays are almost EW: I’m certainly not a journalist, in that I rarely deal entirely located in other cultures; the political essays— with the present and I do not go somewhere to report and there were many more during the Iraq War—are on what I have seen. Messengers convey someone about the USA. The little bit I have done my whole else’s words, which they are supposed to do verbatim. life has been completely opposed and contrary to the In my writing, all the words, or almost all the words, current xenophobic and racist agenda of Trump and, are mine—what is not mine is the information. I don’t more important, the entire Republican party. make anything up, or blur the line between fiction and non-fiction. And I’m afraid I always associate messen- +++ gers with angels: the Biblical word for angel in Hebrew (ma’lak) and Greek (angelos) means “messenger.” The Indy: As an essayist, you’re a stickler for truth; I’d Needless to say, I don’t qualify. like to get your thoughts on something I read recently.

American psychologist Jon Haidt, published an essay I consider myself an essayist, though some of my essays this past October where he positions Karl Marx against are more like stories and some are more like poems. John Stuart Mill, one as the patron of “Social Justice,” I try to write them as one writes a poem: listening to another as “Truth” respectively. Can you speak about the sounds and trying to present exact and concrete truth and its nuances, if you believe there are any? images. But their lack of imagination means that they are neither fiction nor poetry.

EW: I can’t talk about universities, having never had any academic affiliations. Of course I believe in absoThe Indy: You’ve often mentioned that you were first lute freedom of speech. Nevertheless, there is a differdrawn to the essay because it’d been “collecting dust, ence between the freedom to say what you like and the untouched since 18th century English.” institutional validation of what you say. Academic articles like Haidt’s imagine a Platonic dialogue between EW: Yes, with a few exceptions, it still follows the 18th enlightened and reasonable conservatives and liberals, (or earlier) century format of the narrative of a first- which is simply not the current reality. Steve Bannon person investigation. In English, at least, it largely is not John Stuart Mill. The so-called conservatives hasn’t had the wild range of open possibilities that these days are not conservative at all, but mongers of poetry and fiction have had for a hundred years. So it hate, and you can hear their opinions easily enough struck me as unexplored territory. on Fox News and on the internet. So no, I don’t believe in giving racists a platform (and a speaking fee!) at a The Indy: Reading essays on the internet have become university in the name of “open debate.” common practice. You were booed off stage at St. Mark’s Poetry Project for voicing your support for the The Indy: On the topic of academia, you haven’t internet and digitized text. Most recently, you’ve always been on the periphery of institutions, hailing revealed that the internet has “kind of ruined [my] from rather prestigious academic settings, from The life.” How has the “essay” changed in the 21st century Putney School to your brief stint at Yale. And in some with the rise of the internet? You’ve talked often about ways, poetry, the literary arts, have always felt antagowhat the internet makes possible in terms of access in nistic to the academic setting. How do you think poetry the Third World. Has it rendered anything impossible? ought to be taught?

EW: To clarify: very early on I thought the internet was the best thing to have happened to literature, in that interested readers far from urban centers—and particularly readers in the Third World, without decent libraries—would suddenly have access to so much of the world’s writing. In 1994, on a panel at St Mark’s on “poetry and revolution,” I was widely ridiculed for saying that the internet was about to be a powerful political force. (Amiri Baraka, for one, responded, “The revolution is not going to come from a bunch of yuppies with laptops.”) As Fidel Castro used to say, history has absolved me.

My recent joke in an interview that the internet has ruined my life was referring to email, the information overload, and current life in Trump USA, where there are three or four unbelievable new developments daily.

(Unlike, say, the Bush era, when the news was depressing, but was basically more of the same every day.) It’s become, as we all know, difficult to concentrate on anything else.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

BY Wen Zhuang ILLUSTRATION Eve O'Shea DESIGN Pablo Herraiz Garcia de Guadiana

EW: I went to a wonderful progressive high school, Putney, on a farm in Vermont, and then barely made it through a year at Yale, which at the time was still a boys' school full of Brett Kavanaugh types. Having had no academic connections since, I naturally have a reactionary idea of what a university should be. I'm afraid I think that anyone who wants to be a writer should study anything—biology, anthropology, astronomy, history, religion—except "creative writing." It helps to know something. And I'm afraid I think that, in literature, students should study what they otherwise wouldn't read. That means no living writers. After all, there are thousands of years of literature to catch up on. +++ The Indy: So many things are happening and at an egregious speed, how do you deal with overconsumption? What do you do to combat feeling overwhelmed?

EW: Happily. I travel quite a bit and when I travel I don’t read. I just look around.

LITERARY

12

TEXT, CONTEXT, RE-CONTEXT RE-CONTEXT Let’s play a game. Pick a story you think you know well.

Romeo & Juliet, Star Wars, Harry Potter, or Twilight would all be good choices. Find a friend, sit down with them, and tell them that story. Do your best to remember every detail as accurately as possible. Why does Romeo go to that party? Where does Yoda live?

What are all those Horcruxes? Maybe your friend helps you come up with these most intricate details, maybe you’re telling them a story they’ve never heard before. Either way, you’ve created a replica of the text from another story. All the characters, plot points, and themes that your mind retained are present, and while some imperfect memories have changed the minutiae of the text slightly, no one would deny that you’re (re-) telling a famous story. Indeed, in this act of recollection, you’ve simultaneously recreated an older story while creating a novel one.

This game reveals a few inconsistencies in the way that we think about “text.” In performance studies, “text” is a somewhat nebulous term that includes the “script” provided by the author and the “performance” as seen in real time on the stage. While each production of Angels in America uses the script by Tony Kushner, each performance is changed by decisions made by the director and actors, as well as the design of the set, sound, lights, and costumes to create a “fresh” experience. The elements of text within cinema are similar. Because the screenplay traditionally has stronger influence on the final cinematic product, and there exists a physical archival text of “performance” (i.e. the edited final product), the evolution from the screenplay to the resulting film is made permanent in a performance that can be watched again and again.

This gives the audience the opportunity to pick apart each actor’s line delivery, camera pan, or shot composition with repeated viewings of the movie. The text, in this case, cannot be seen purely as the screenplay or as

13

ARTS

the edited performance, but rather as the summation of the two, and the audience indulges in the text by observing the film. In all these cases, we can assume that “text” refers, in part, to the final product as experienced by the the audience, the listener, the reader, etc.

Our game challenges our conception of text by introducing the volatility of memory. How does your story differ from the literal text of your chosen subject?

For one, you have chosen a new medium in which to tell the story. For another, your embellishing, omissions, and other unavoidable changes have inherently altered the original author’s intent. Indeed, even “re-staging” the text as a story to your friend diverges from its original intent. Imagine that instead of simply telling the story to a friend, we add an intermediary step: transfer the story to paper as a script, screenplay, or novel adaptation and then deliver that to your friend, who can then experience the text independently. In the case of a performance, say we add yet another step of creating a production based on your written script. With these additional steps, we have created physical and performative artifacts of our memory, completing the steps necessary to create a new text, and adding script and performance to create something that can be experienced by an outside viewer. In effect, these steps are superfluous, since we can argue that the result of telling the story inherently involves the mental process of creation of a “script”, and the telling of the story can be viewed as a “performance” for your friend. Who can claim authorship of this new text, then, remains unanswered.

where memory would not play a role in the maintenance of text, then the results we see would be vastly different. Each time we told a memory of a story, we would see it as a completely novel experience, when in fact our brains are wired to recognize and appreciate the patterns that text creates, retaining them in our psyche. Therefore, let us modify our definition of text to include three elements: the manuscript, the live performance, and the enduring memory of that manuscript and live experience. This definition opens up our interpretation of the game and solves the riddle of authorship. When I tell you my recollection of Romeo and Juliet, I am, in effect, telling you Shakespeare’s script and Baz Luhrmann’s (or any other director’s) interpretation of that script as manifested by live performance, so, in effect, every theatrical or cinematic text must have several authors. There is the primary author (in this case, William Shakespeare), a secondary author (in this case, the director Baz Luhrmann), and a tertiary author (the person who experienced the text, me).

Attributing authorship to many persons, however, opens up a whole world of relativistic dilemmas.

How do we parse a situation in which you and I are both recollecting a specific text in different ways?

Our expanded definition of text would say that either interpretation, if done in good faith, would be equally valid. This means that common so-called “misconceptions” about a movie are completely valid as pieces of text. For instance, Lawrence Kasdan and Leigh Brackett did not write the sentence “Luke, I am your father” in the screenplay for Irvin Kershner’s film The +++ Empire Strikes Back (Darth Vader actually says, “No, I am your father.”) However, the first phrasing is so Indeed, text would not exist if we did not have a long- often the way we have remembered the line, we still term memory in which we store the text, reflect on the treat the misquote as a valid incarnation of the text of text, and form critical opinion on the text. In a world Star Wars. Although these misremembered lines are

30 NOV 2018

How the stories we tell shape cultural memory

never explicitly present within the first two aspects of text, their common (and cultural) presence within memory of a text grants it all the privileges of the other two aspects. Put simply, my memory (and the cultural memory) of Star Wars is more pertinent than the actual physical artifacts of the text.

Since no one is necessarily “wrong” when sharing memories or interpretations of text, the way we tell stories is ultimately democratizing. An example that I love of this adapted definition, whether intentional or not, is the Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s 2009 production of Romeo and Juliet, where rather than using the folios written by Shakespeare as their script, the company staged phone calls of people remembering specific productions of Romeo and Juliet (indeed, a variation on our game!). Each scene, although unique in its narrator and remembered performance, still had a fundamental “Romeo and Juliet-ness” to it. Rather than attempting to directly replicate Shakespeare’s text, the Nature Theater of Oklahoma instead showed the cultural imprint of Romeo and Juliet, reminding us that the production exists independently of the script.

There is a circularity between our three aspects of text.

Each one can inform the latter and revise the former. +++ These same revelations are what allows us to appropriate forms of text as a schema for other stories. Let’s continue with our Shakespearian archetype of starcrossed lovers, popularized by Romeo and Juliet. Even though it is entirely feasible that not everyone has read or seen that play, there exists a general cultural understanding of the text (i.e. our third element of the text) which allows us to engage with adaptations and reinterpretations of Romeo and Juliet with a general consensus of how that archetype works. This phenomenon is what allows West Side Story, The Lion King II: Simba’s Pride, and Gnomeo and Juliet to work as standalone pieces of art. Because we know the original story, we have a contextual understanding of the new ones. Our cultural memory of Romeo and Juliet allows us to form a pseudo-genre, bouncing our set of expectations from our shared memory against new texts. This pseudo-genre gives us the basis to describe new work effectively. Rather than having to start from scratch when describing Game of Thrones, I can say that

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

it’s kind of like Lord of the Rings meets House of Cards meets The Sopranos. To a certain extent, therefore, all texts that we experience must be creating some overarching memory narrative or network within our minds, simultaneously granting our ability to compare disparate texts as well as informing our own aesthetics and preferences.

Our expanded definition of “text” also explains the phenomenon of knowing a text without ever experiencing the prerequisite written and live aspects of text.

Consider another incarnation of our game, in which I tell you the story of a text of which you have no prior knowledge. After I have shared the story with you, you now have memory of a text without experiencing its original form. Since people often know the aspects of art without having seen them in person (i.e. I have never been to the Sistine Chapel, but my educational background would allow me to immediately identify Michaelangelo’s famous The Creation of Adam) and there is a somewhat common fear of “spoilers,” we can infer that cognition and memory perhaps influence text most with their ability to preemptively describe or “ruin” other aspects.

Our game reminds us that text is not something that exists in a physical reality. Written word and live performance yield to individual and collective memory, becoming scaffolding upon which to build a new text. Indeed, even the earliest recorded stories remain pertinent today. We retain Beowulf’s sense of duty and use his heroic qualities as many of ours today.

We honor the same existential themes that powered the Epic of Gilgamesh. We respect the power, ambition, and dangerous beauty of Circe. Although we have transformed the ideas represented in these early texts, their early influence on society has grown into the fundamental archetypes upon which we base such powerful terms like “masculinity”, “power”, and “evil”. Our notion of masculinity wouldn’t exist without our memory-genre linking Achilles to James Bond. Our concept of evil traces Grendel to Grindelwald.

Rather than thinking of text as a physical object or an unchanging event, we must think of a text as an evolving organism, with the written word being its DNA and the live experience being its birth into the world. A text does not stop its development after nascence; it changes and matures over time, existing within human cognition forever, or until it is completely forgotten. As texts are continually recalled, more nuanced and modern minds adapt and reframe our dated cultural metaphors. A first step towards dismantling the hostile archetypes of our time is to recognize

BY Nathan Sorscher ILLUSTRATION Sandra Moore DESIGN Katherine Sang the linkage between cognition and text, whether it is in the form of Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s production, or in an entirely new paradigm that encourages the audience to engage with the text and misremember it.

Our game is as productive as reading a book or seeing a play or film ; it allows us to facilitate the growth and maintenance of a text through repeated recollection and revision, discreetly transforming and improving upon the work on a societal scale.

NATHAN SORSCHER B’19’s favorite game is “Telephone.”

ARTS

14

GLASS HOUSE, SHATTERED

A walkthrough of Philip Johnson’s famed residence took selfies with the vanity mirror in the semicircular bathroom studded with iridescent green tiles then imagined sitting on the leathery mid-century furniture set (no touching allowed). Inside the house, we were immersed in the 360-degree panorama of the snowWe visited Philip Johnson’s Glass House on a chilly capped New England woods.

Friday morning in autumn. After multiple failed attempts to reserve a visit on the Philip Johnson +++ Organization’s website, we finally managed to secure spots on a tour two weeks in advance. We hopped in a Until his death in 2005, Johnson exerted an outsized borrowed car and set off from Providence at 6:45 AM influence on the twentieth-century American archito arrive in New Canaan, Connecticut by 9:45. Once tecture, though the consensus is that this was tied there, we were quickly ushered into a private tour more to his taste-making authority and social connecbus, which ascended above the town’s center before tions than any creative talent or contributions to the descending down a narrow, winding driveway into discipline. He began in the realm of architecture at the the fabled compound. Besides our guide, an elegantly then newly founded Museum of Modern Art as a chief dressed middle-aged woman, we were joined by four organizer of the seminal exhibit International Style: other guests: a twenty-something-year-old English Modern Architecture of 1932. Many allege that he popudesigner and two homeschooled fifth-graders accom- larized the architectural style of European Modernism panied by their Australian educator for their weekly in the United States with the exhibit, and through excursion. We got off the bus and faced our main his work, like the Glass House and Pennzoil Place in (and only) attraction ($25): a long rectangular glass Houston. He later did the same with the style’s antithbox amidst idyllic rolling, green grounds. The Glass esis, Postmodernism. Aside from some commissions House sits on a compound of a dozen other structures for museums and public spaces, his work has almost designed and utilized by Johnson, including a private exclusively served the interests and tastes of the elite; sculpture gallery, a library, and a greenhouse, which the demographics of the creator mirrored those of his we could tour for an additional $60–$120. The Glass clients, with little concern for public function or social House is managed by the National Trust for Historic responsibility. In his obituary for Johnson in The New Preservation—a nonprofit whose mission is to preserve York Times, Paul Goldberger wrote, “As an architect, he places that “tell the stories of all Americans” and made his mark arguing the importance of the aesthetic inspire “broad public support”—though the ethos of side of architecture and claimed that he had no interest our visit seemed to be: the more you pay, the more of in buildings except as works of art.”

Johnson’s life and work you get to see. As an example We spent just over forty minutes in the Glass of work that has been praised for its aesthetic accom- House, learning about the level of attention Johnson plishment for the past half century, the Glass House paid to the design of his creation, down to every joist raises questions about the significance of art’s func- and beam. To avoid glare on the glass at night from the tionality, both in the sense of its form and its contribu- reflection of outdoor lights, Johnson installed downtion to greater society. ward facing lights around the house’s perimeter. He At a shocking 1,800 square feet for a single- always had staff present to watch over and maintain room home, the Glass House is simple and elegant: the pristine property. The guide described how the a minimalist’s dream. Considering this house has architect would stand at the edge of the house with not been inhabited since 2005, there were almost binoculars to dictate to groundsmen over the phone no personal belongings in sight. What we saw was which trees he wanted removed. Glass, which in most similar to Johnson’s actual living space, given his other architectural contexts denotes transparency, uncluttered lifestyle. Despite the lack of objects, in did not function here to allow others to peer in, as the a strange way, there was much to explore. Light from compound is a gated private residence in the middle of all angles flooded in through the floor-to-ceiling the woods. Rather, the glass allowed for Johnson and windows, which also serve as walls for the house. We whomever he invited over to gaze out onto the world, one-sidedly—a metaphor of the architect’s lifelong elitism. “His career mirrored American life of the postwar years, marked by increasing corporatization and the concentration of power and wealth among a privileged few,” the architecture critic Mark Lamster wrote in his biography of Johnson, The Man in the Glass House. Interestingly, the first fact our guide told us was that Johnson was heavily inspired by—or perhaps ripped off entirely—Ludwig Mies Van Der Roes’ Farnsworth House, the similarly transparent, minimal structure designed a full two years before Johnson’s Glass House was.

Though it stunned visually, we left questioning the house’s functionality as a living space, even though Johnson himself lived there until his death. Our guide encouraged us to touch our hands to the structure’s ground: the tile floor was piping hot. This, she explained, was an added feature once it was discovered that the house’s original ceiling pipes froze early on, forcing the floor heaters to over-exert themselves. “You couldn’t go in with bare feet,” Port Draper, the estate’s maintenance engineer once noted. Furthermore, the flat roof made the house prone to leaking. Our guide then told us that Johnson rarely used his kitchen––he and his friends would almost always dine out in New Canaan. This lack of functionality is the essence of Johnson’s self-proclaimed “International Style:” that architecture was about art and style, not function and social responsibility. His goal was to make things 15

FEATURES

as beautiful as he could. He once said in a 1999 interview with Esquire, “Comfort is not one of my interests.

You can feel comfortable in any environment that's beautiful.” +++ We were interested in Johnson’s politics and how they might have informed his work, including the Glass House. In his personal life, Johnson was said to present as openly gay or to the extent that one acceptably could during his lifetime, though his whiteness and expansive amounts of wealth insulated him from the prejudices most gay men faced. Johnson and David Whitney, the contemporary art curator and collector, began to live together peacefully in the Glass House in 1960; meanwhile, it was not until 1969 that the first brick was thrown at the Stonewall Inn, which many view as the beginning of the modern era for LGBTQ activism.

Furthermore, his homosexuality did not preclude other prejudices; he was a known racist and Nazi sympathizer. As two people of color, we felt slight discomfort when our guide showed us photos of Johnson, Whitney, their friends, and their collaborators—creative powerhouses like Andy Warhol, Lou Reed, and Jasper Johns, all white men—sitting in the residence in suits.

Even if we chose to ignore the faults of his practices and beliefs, his legacy exists in buildings that could not be so easily torn down. As Brown students, we pass under his creations everyday during our commutes around campus and find them integrated into our memories, not necessarily in a way that involves Johnson. He designed the List Art Center, a building that is controversial for Visual Art students at the university for its lack of windows (and interesting for us in its contrast to the Glass House), as well as the University’s Computing Lab, which housed the most complex computer on the East Coast at the time. It is significantly more aesthetically similar to the Glass House, with its prism-like, Modernist facade and a front covered completely in glass. Brown was also a significant part of Johnson’s life, given it was where he met Whitney. Thirty-four years his junior, the thenRISD student attended Johnson’s lecture at Brown in 1960, after which he introduced himself to the architect. A week following that, Johnson invited Whitney to New Canaan for a personal tour of the Glass House.

Their relationship began shortly after and lasted their entire lives, until they both died in 2005 (in a place none other than the Glass House).

Now, we walk around campus and try to synthesize our experience at the Glass House with the ways in which we view his creations at Brown. We can at least learn what an artist should not do from Johnson’s example. In a world marked by crisis, an artist should seek to be progressive and radical in their life practices and politics, just as they are in their work.The realms of the aesthetic and the ethical should not be viewed as separate, yet our everyday usage of architecture inevitably separates them, as we students enter and exit buildings for classes rarely properly contemplating their purposes and histories. Johnson’s presence on Brown’s campus is material, like it is at the Glass House, but at the same time forgotten and obscured.

JACOB ALABAB-MOSER B‘20, ALEX WESTFALL B‘20 wish they were two homeschooled fifth-graders with weekly excursions.

30 NOV 2018

ASK FOR SOMETHING SWEET

BY Star Su ILLUSTRATION Claribel Wu DESIGN Ella Rosenblatt

content warning: weight and eating issues Pie or cake? he asks.

Cake, you say. He raises his eyebrows.

The next afternoon, he comes into your room, breathless, bringing with him a package from his parents. When he’s done gutting it with the Swiss Army knife he always carries in his right pocket, there are two loaves of bread and a pumpkin pie. When the Saran wrap falls away, you have to remind yourself to smile. It doesn’t look like much—there’s a crack in the custard. You can tell he’s anxious; his brow is furrowed as he cuts you both a slice, the golden crumbs spilling onto your desk. He wants you to choose pie, to choose him. You suppose the love you ask from him is indistinguishable from pie. Humble, warm, a home that you fold yourself into.

The first bite is unassuming. But with the next forkful, you begin to taste the flesh of the pumpkin, the cinnamon and nutmeg melting warmly into you. You tell yourself to eat slowly because he can’t know that this is your first pie. You let him apologize for the crust, how it doesn’t quite melt perfectly on the tongue, how he always tells his dad to be liberal with the butter but maybe the crumb is dry because it was made three days ago. He tells you that this pie is made from a Cinderella pumpkin, and you imagine it golden, glassy.

In all the versions of Cinderella, the first time she asks for something, it’s for permission to go to the ball.

All her life, she has indulged others. The birds ask her to sing with them, the stepsisters ask her to embroider dresses, the stepmother asks her to sweep until there are ashes in her hair. But the moment that she wants something, she ceases to be palatable. When she asks to go the ball, her stepmother and sisters tear her dress and dreams to tatters. Cinderella is no longer so sweet when she has desires.

Another slice, he asks. You nod. +++ The grapefruit dawn streams in through the curtains of your childhood home. But, unlike before, it isn’t the warmth of caramelized sugar and flour that wakes you, but the muffled voices of your parents arguing. You already know that your father will pad downstairs in his slippers, softer than usual. You know that not long after your sister snuggles into your side of the bed to hold your hand, you will hear the thump of the flour bag, the crack of an egg, the chop chop chop of scallion being reduced into fragrant green slivers. When you were younger, you and your sister would tread down the stairs, careful to skip the fourth step which always creaked horrifically. When he saw you, he would smile with crow’s feet. Then, he would give both of you small pieces of the dough. You knew how to first twist the sticky dough into a snake, curl it into a snail, and roll into a pancake. He always let you put the misshapen pieces into the pan, and you would watch as they seared into translucence. You would stack the flakey disks on a plate, unchipped if you could find one, and take it to your mother. A peace offering.

Come here. You have to eat at least two, he says, flipping the pancakes with a graceful flick of his chopsticks. He doesn’t ever have to check if they’re ready.

No, you say, nibbling a cracker. Remember, I’m sick. You wonder what it is that makes Cinderella so appetizing.

Perhaps her beauty could be attributed to the absence of power. Cinderella is stripped of many things: her mother’s dress, her dignity, her place to sleep in the house. Cinderella never strips others of anything. She never asks for anything in return, preferring to sleep quietly in the ashes of the fireplace of her home. She lets her stepmother and stepsisters live without retribution. Even when Cinderella can do THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

something, she does nothing. It seems that the only change becoming a princess makes in her life is where she sleeps.

What, come on, your father says, taking back chopsticks that were about to deliver a crispy bite to you. But I don’t understand, you used to eat so many. So many.

He shakes his head.

I’m just sick, okay.

Okay. +++ Do you ever feel good about not eating when you’re sick, your father says.

No, not really, you say, watching him rain sesame seeds down on the steaming plate of pancakes.

But like you know, on a deeper level, sometimes you feel good, he says, looking into your face.

Mmm, you nod, both staring at the pancakes.

You wonder if there is a way perhaps to eat a pancake without eating a pancake. If you chew slowly enough on the first bite, eyes closed, the yeast and sugar will bloom spectacularly over your tongue into nothingness. Then, you can pretend it was the last bite and push your plate away and say you aren’t hungry anymore.

Or if you stare at pictures of yourself from one, two, three years ago, then every bite will curiously turn into dust. You have never been heavier than you are now. You can swallow and push the plate away. You aren’t hungry anymore.

Or if you start crying, your father will envelop you in a hug, and you will breathe in the dust of pancake batter, warm and floral. Then, you can let the stack become cold and dense, steeped in syrup, and say you aren’t hungry anymore.

Later, when you ask your father for the recipe, he writes to you in an email, detailing how the first time he had met your mother’s grandmother, she had taken him into her kitchen and showed him the proper way to make scallion pancakes. She held his hands and showed him how to fold the dough six times both for luck and for many wispy layers of dough. She showed him how to massage the dough with white pepper, olive oil, and slapping his wrist because don’t-you-dare-forget-the-sesame-seeds. If you love her, my great-grandmother said, this is what she loves. She made them every morning for my mother.

So you wondered why your father only made the scallion pancakes after he and your mother fought. You wondered why your mother never asked him to make them. You wondered why your mother never asked for something she loved so deeply from a person she loved so deeply. +++

to pick a crispy bit off the side of the pan. Meet me in the next life with one ear.

Here, try some, he says, tearing off a laced edge.

You let yourself smile, but it’s all wrong. The cake sticks to the roof your mouth, a damp lump, and you know without asking that he didn’t use the whole stick of butter. Ironically, fat doesn’t weigh flour and eggs down; it is what gives desserts their kindredness to air.

Pancakes are meant to taste like the clouds. He tries to tickle your belly, but this time you don’t laugh. +++ After pancakes every Sunday, one of your parents will take you to the farmer’s market.

Get whatever you want, your father says, handing you a fistful of cash.

Whatever I want, you repeat.

Yeah, why not? Get some of that bread you got last time, you know the ones with lots of olives and those herbs.

But, what about Mama— She’s not here, he says, waving his hand. You know what, if you find the bread lady, buy two. One for you, one for me.

This is how you end up holding a hokkaido squash, intercepted by the pumpkin lady. It is heavier than it looks, but you like the weight of it in your hands.

Isn’t she gorgeous, she nods at the blue squash in your hands. Roast them with a bit of salt and butter and mmmm, she says, rubbing the front of her apron, closing her eyes. Or wait, she says, her eyes widening and her crow’s feet deepening. Do you like pumpkin pie?

You wonder if this is what it feels like to have a fairy godmother.

Cinderella never asked for a fairy godmother to whisk her into a coach of pumpkin, never asked to bear the weight of glass slippers, never asked for a prince to fall in love with her. In everything she does, someone else is pushing: her body into the gown, her foot into the slipper, her lips onto the prince’s. Would she be so lovely if she had asked for the prince to fall in love with her? Would she be so endearing if she had asked for a fairy godmother to give her one pumpkin coach, six lizard footmen, and two glimmering horses? +++ On Sunday, the morning is pink, tinged with frost that has silenced the robins. The air is dense with something warm and bracing. You can’t quite pinpoint what your father has mixed into the batter today.

You want the second?

Of course.

Syrup?

Yes, please.

Tell me when.

Okay.

Keep going.

That’s good.

You take a bite. You let the tang of buttermilk, slight bite of salt, and fresh sweetness of maple syrup sear into you. You take another bite. Another. It’s pumpkin in the batter.

When Cinderella climbs into her pumpkin coach, all she knows for sure are the slippers on her feet. Her want is light enough to be carried on glass.

More? You nod, wondering if you will ever stop being hungry. Just one more bite.

What would you do if I had one ear, he asks, lifting one edge of the pancake with the spatula. It’s the third time he’s checked on its progress in the last minute and you enjoy seeing him flustered so much that you don’t tell him to stop. It is clear who didn’t make the pancakes in his house.

When he asked you what do you want for your birthday, you smiled. Pancakes, of course. Let me make them for you, he said. You nodded, okay, and gave him your father’s recipe.

Now, he’s asking you if you would still like him if he was missing an ear, while he ladles batter onto the cast iron. It sizzles in a way that you know means that the pan is too hot but you don’t say anything. You watch him fumble with the spatula as the batter blisters into STAR SU B’21 is seeking suggestions for what to do with the pumpkin on her windowsill. soft gold.

I don’t know what I’d do, you laugh, and reach out BODY

16

THE ABSENCE

BY Nicolaia Rips ILLUSTRATION Alex Westfall DESIGN Ella Rosenblatt

Margaret Boyle woke up and her left incisor was loose.

In her dream, she was crushed under a giant unspecified citrus fruit and she wondered if the looseness was a byproduct of that. There was something she found terrifying about oversized versions of controllable objects. A dark throb sounded from her tooth.

Margaret loved analyzing her dreams and frequently looked up their astrological significance on various homeopathic websites. Supposing a dentist’s visit was in order, she shook out her vertebrae and stomped into the kitchen.

Mrs. Boyle sat staring at the place on the wall where there should have been a window. Her coffee was slightly cold and she had run out of cream. There was enough cream to make the coffee a dissatisfying brown, not light enough to be beautiful and not dark enough to be rich. Mrs. Boyle’s back ached from sitting so straight but pain was not a meal to her. There was no window but there should have been. On the wall where there should have been a window there was wallpaper with pale yellow and pink flowers on it. They were unspecified flowers, more the idea of a flower than a flower. Overwhelmingly floral, thought Mrs. Boyle.

Her mug rattled as she stared..

“Mother?” said Margaret Boyle. “My tooth is loose.”

Mrs. Boyle was startled.

“What?”

“Morning,” Margaret Boyle said again, her tone impatient. “My left incisor is loose.”

This was confusing to Mrs. Boyle. She shook her head.

“What flowers are the ones in the window?”

“We don’t have a window, Mother.”

“Oh, I know that.”

Margaret Boyle tapped her tooth thoughtfully.

Her nail was keratin and her tooth was keratin and the two coming together outside of her body made her squeamish. Now that she thought of it, bones coming together inside her body made her squeamish too.

She became aware of how her humerus connected to her ulna. She became aware of how she didn’t feel any ownership over these bones. She became aware every act of care was just counteraction. Margaret felt very small in her body. She felt like a dried pea in a pot.

“Mother. I need to go to the dentist.”

“The flowers are unspecified flowers. They really are more the idea of a flower than a flower.”

Mrs. Boyle’s hand shook and she leaned off her chair as if the closer she got to the flowers in the not window the better she would understand them.

Margaret Boyle tried to relate. “I had a dream about unspecified citrus. It was really more the idea of citrus than a fruit.”

“That isn’t quite the same, is it now.”

Margaret Boyle literally couldn’t think of anything 17

LITERARY

more similar. Her mother was being deliberately obtuse. The entire conversation was a waste of her time because she could feel the bones that weren’t hers creaking and her left incisor was loose.

“I am going to the dentist.”

Spotting her black- and lime-striped duster on the back of the wooden chair, Margaret Boyle crossed the kitchen and began to tug at the duster. A corner of it was stuck beneath her mother and Margaret Boyle punctuated every word with a tug.

“Get. Up. You’re. Sitting. On. My. Coat!”

With a final yank the coat came free and Margaret Boyle exhaled for the first time since she woke up. She shrugged it on over her pajama set and headed out the door.

The faint voice of Mrs. Boyle trickled after her.

“Pick up some cream. We’re all out.”

The weather outside was perfect: gray and drab.

Where it’s calm under the winds and the skies are on the verge of breaking. Margaret Boyle believed she looked especially beautiful in this kind of weather.

For a time, she hovered on the sidewalk enjoying the almost rain and thinking of all the things she could define in the negative. All emotion resided in the absence of happiness. All cats are not dogs. Slim ankles began to move and the rest followed obediently. The more she moved the more malicious the sidewalk seemed to feel. Her tooth chanted, low and sweet and livid. Succulent succotash achy ache. Margaret Boyle realized she had left the house without any shoes on.

This wasn’t atypical; Margaret Boyle’s toes were long and lovely and she had a good relationship with them.

She didn’t like cooping them up. They served her well on hills and other inclined surfaces. She made a sharp left and arrived at the dentist’s office. A sour looking receptionist sat up.

“Do you have an appointment?” All the air in the room was sucked into the receptionist and filtered out through each pinched phrase. The office was warm, damp and dark and smelling of rancid hot dog water and Chanel No. 5.

“No.” Margaret Boyle hadn’t anticipated that the dentist might have other clients.

Terrible terrible.

On the marbled glass of the reception desk passed a shadow. Margaret Boyle supposed this was the dentist.

“Dentist,” She called after the shadow. “Dentist!

My tooth is loose.”

The receptionist let out a low sirocco. The papers on her desk whispered as darkness approached. This darkness was more the idea of the dentist than a dentist. Although, Margaret Boyle felt anyone would do in a pinch. The dentist beckoned her to a chair but she remained on her feet. It was all very sterile.

Her dentist took a puff from his cigarillo and flicked the embers onto the linoleum. Smoke stuck to the wall tops and corners. He coughed.

“Your hair looks thin.”

“That’s not the problem.”

“It could be a problem.”

Margaret Boyle fingered a lock. It did seem lighter than usual. Worrisome. The dentist wheezed though tombstone teeth. His face grew towards the floor and his hair grew towards the ceiling. Margaret Boyle had the urge to place one hand on his chin and one on his forehead and stretch like taffy.

“My tooth is loose.”

“Suppose I should take a look.” He poked her with the back of his cigarillo. “Sit.” She sat. He pushed the fingers of his right hand through her mouth and grabbed her tongue. The other hand mechanically brought the cigarillo to his pursed lips every few seconds. She could taste the rot of his skin.

“Gross.” He removed his hand from her mouth and shook off the slobber angrily. Thrusting a cup of blue fluid at her, he coughed, Pollacking her face with spittle. “Swirl.”

They sat in silence as she swirled and swirled and swirled and swirled.

The dentist moaned and furrowed his brow. It loomed, cliff-like, over his nose.

“Look, Margaret Boyle, I think I’m in love with you.”

“No.” “I am. I am in love with you, Margaret Boyle.”

“No, you’re not.”

“Yes, I am. See. You even wrote me a poem.”

He patted his coat pockets and fished out an oblong cigarette case. It was gunmetal grey and inscribed with the words “Satan was a Lesbian.” Inside was one cigarillo and one poem. With the other hand he pulled out a magnifying glass. The poem was written on a gum wrapper. He cleared his throat, peered through the glass and read it.

I kept my heart in a glass of wine but then he came and drank it his lovely lilac lips were stained but I kissed him anyway I stored my arms inside an oak armoire but he found them and claimed them and now my limbs once limp are flushed around his chest and though it burns to hold so tight I put them to the test when my eyes fade to dirt and all that is quantifiable is auctioned to the grass and worms between the earth and my love there will be nothing left “I wrote that?”

“No, I wrote that from your perspective.”

“I do not feel that way.”

She considered the statement to make sure it was true, although she regarded herself fickle enough that truth was personally immaterial. Margaret Boyle did feel strongly about how empty her feelings were towards the dentist.

“No,” she said deliberately. “I do not feel that way.”

“I know that, Margaret Boyle. This is how I think you should feel about me.”

“But I don’t.” Margaret Boyle felt the dentist was missing the point.

“Your lack of any kind of feeling towards me is a great barrier in our relationship.” The dentist felt Margaret Boyle was missing the point.

He seemed disappointed and his face sunk lower.

Maybe nobody had a point. Margaret Boyle was a kind soul or so she liked to think. She decided he was growing too long and dark for his own good.

“What’s your zodiac sign?” She asked.

“Gemini.” Said the dentist with a seed of hope.

“Elle says we’re not compatible.” The hope went to seed and with it the dentist grew and melted and grew until he was the floor until he was into the floor until he was a pool of milky black on the speckled slate in the boards in the building out of the building dark damp done. It left a tar-like residue on her toes as she left.

Margaret Boyle realized her left incisor was still loose as she scuttled out of the office. She supposed she’d just have to live with the looseness. It wasn’t really loose. It was just the idea of looseness anyway.

30 NOV 2018

FRIDAY 11.30

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Girls Night Out: Light Up Wine Bottles! // Brewed Awakenings CoffeeHouse (1395 Atwood Ave, Johnston) // 6-8PM

Prep yourself for the holiday season by putting a ton of glow-up lights in a wine bottle at one of those wine & painting venues frequented by soul-searching mothers. That isn’t a dig—we hope this ends by going to Barrington and launching your festive messages-in-a-bottle in the sea, to some distant shore, to some distant form of kinship and longing, the kind of companionship we’re all hoping is waiting for us out there... or, you know, some pizzazz for your mantle!

This is IBIZA USA Movie Premiere & After Party // Skyline at Waterplace (1 Finance Way) // 6PM-2AM // $35

This is IBIZA. But it’s also… really confusing. Apparently the production team behind this documentary about the Mediterranean island is a bunch of “local people.” Their website boasts: “Not only that, but they have a proven track record in shooting some quality film.” A promo of theirs earlier in the year got a genuine lol out of me. Even the website’s title puts a question mark next to, “A Documentary to Be Proud Of?” Anyway, the after party boasts three floors of DJs playing on “Hennessy Sound Design,” over 7 producers, and inexplicably, a roaring 20s theme. If nothing else, go for a truly genuine lol.

SATURDAY 12.1

Shedding Light on Xinjiang // Watson Institute (111 Thayer St) // 1-4PM

Described as “brainwashing,” “cultural genocide,” and even “re-education,” what really is the current state of affairs with regards to Uyghurs in China? What is the significance of recent events with regards to minority groups in China?” Professors from Georgetown, American, and Rowan Universities will attempt to address these questions at this Saturday’s panel on the state violence facing China’s Uyghur minority.

SUNDAY 12.2

Lasercutting Holiday Gifts! // AS220 (115 Empire St) // 1-4PM

This is our Marxist proposition: if every contemporary sculpture exhibition, engineering department, and co-working space is going to rave about laser-cutting as the new big thing, we need to seize the means of production before it gets truly laser-hot. We endorse, not giving your loved ones the afterproducts of this machine’s fiery eye, but like, but giving them a literal laser cutter instead. Teach them to fish, you feed them for a day. Give them a laser-cutter, they achieve classconsciousness!

MONDAY 12.3

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The Displaced Language of Mesopotamia // The Watson Institute (111 Thayer St) // 8AM-5PM until December 13

This ongoing exhibition from Kurdish artist Selahattin SEP focuses on how Mesopotamian women represented their symbolic relationship to nature in carpets, carving, and tattoos; the project is a part of SEP’s ongoing effort to use aesthetic practice as a way of inviting viewers to reflect on the violence inflicted on Kurdish people.

TUESDAY 12.4

Intro to Podcasting // AS220 Industries (131 Washington St) // 6-9PM

Be who you are and learn how to monetize the mass broadcasting of your speaking voice! Catch this LW there to put her Slavic Studies degree to work as she learns the ropes of her eventual, low-wage career as the fourth member of a certain maligned podcast concerned with the abjection of liberal bourgeois womanhood. Or maybe some Radiolab!

WEDNESDAY 10.5

Land Acknowledgement Workshop // Smith-Buonanno Hall (Pembroke campus, off of Meeting St) // 6-7PM

Brown University, Providence, the state, and all of New England all reside on occupied land, belonging to a wide range of Indigenous peoples. This workshop, led by Natives at Brown, will instruct participants on how to acknowledge that fact, specifically-attuned to the land you occupy, in documentation and in action.

Social Justice Holiday Open House // George Wiley Center (32 East Ave, Pawtucket) // 6-8PM

The George Wiley Center heads some of the most important anti-poverty organizing in the state, including recent pushes for utility justice, a cause that’s only going to become more urgent as the weather gets colder. All are welcome to join them and discuss ways to get involved across their multiple ongoing campaigns. Refreshments are provided, but bring food or (non-alcoholic) drinks to share!

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THURSDAY 10.6

UNLADYLIKE 2020: Screening and Community Conversation // Southside Cultural Center (393 Broad St) // 5:307:30PM This multimedia series aims to explore some of the country’s earliest feminist figures in honor of the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage. Here in Providence, creator Charlotte Mangin will present her research on two Rhode Islanders: Annie Smith Peck, an early mountaineer, Sisseretta Jones, one of the first Black female opera singers to headline Carnegie Hall.

Also, this means Elizabeth Warren CANNOT HAVE THIS as a slogan for her likely Democratic presidential bid. Do you hear us? It is CLAIMED!

the list :o

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