The College Hill Independent Vol. 36 Issue 3 by College Hill Independent

THE COLLEGE HILL A BROWN / RISD WEEKLY INDEPENDENT

36 • 03 16 FEB 2018

THE

INDY COVER

A BROWN / RISD WEEKLY VOLUME 36 / ISSUE 03 FEB 16 2018

HOT DOG Jeff Bonesteel-Guerin

NEWS

FEATURES

Week in Review: Kingdom Animalia Ivy Scott, Will Weatherly

Ring of Fire Lucas Smolcic Larson

Zoned Out Ivy Scott

Brutalist Blunders Ella Comberg

Life after Love WW

A Few Claims Made Very Precariously Roy Washburn

Sun Spots Wen Zhuang

NEWS Isabel DeBre Chris Packs METRO Harry August Jack Brook Saanya Jain Erin West ARTS Nora Gosselin Cate Turner Isabelle Rea METABOLICS Dominique Pariso Eve Zelickson

SCIENCE Liz Cory Tara Sharma TECH Paige Parsons Olivia Kan-Sperling OCCULT Zack Kligler Gabriela Naigeborin EPHEMERA Maya Bjornson

The Independent is printed by TCI Press in Seekonk, MA.

LITERARY Isabelle Doyle Fadwa Ahmed LIST Jane Argodale Alexis Gordon STAFF WRITERS Galadriel Brady Mica Chau Ella Comberg Mara Dolan Soraya Ferdman Liby Hays Anna Hundert Lillian Kirby Lucas Smolcic Larson Mariela Pichardo Ivy Scott Marly Toledano

The Cicadas Sarah Plummer & Ava Zeichner

FROM THE EDITORS I’ve been spending a lot of time in the Court House lately. It’s even more of a caricature of itself in real life as it is in the imagination. The security guards all wear cowboy boots; all the offices have shelves instead of walls (or windows), lined with thousands of physical files. (Surely, it doesn’t have to be this way. Computers exist, encryption exists.) Pleasant surprise: I am the plaintiff. Unpleasant and unsurprising, I’ve had a shitty landlord in my time. After a squabble involving a bike and an AC unit, my landlord took a lot of money out of my security deposit. And I, 1.5 years later, carrying an unrelenting grudge that most everyone said would relent, sued him. The assumption of the landlord, I assume, is that the student does not have the time and energy to read the whole law. The assumption holds halfway: I didn’t have the time, but I did have the energy and I did read the whole law. I am more petty than I am studious, and nothing gets me [going/off] like a good, long-term, strategy-heavy duel. The only physical papers in my backpack are several documents relating to my enemy and his whole family. ( What’s the point of the anonymous cloak of an LLC if you’re not going to use it, D? Say ‘hi’ to Larry and Eileen for me!) I am my own attorney (and prophet and God) and I will be delivering my statements in iambic pentameter. My trial is in one month, if anyone would like to see me go head-to-head with a frat-boy-gone-investment-companyfigurehead in small claims court. — FA

FEATURES Sheena Raza Faisal Ruby Aiyo Gerber Neidin Hernandez Paula Pacheco Soto

A Particular Diet Emma Kofman

EPHEMERA

WEEK IN REVIEW Julia Rock

Amoeba Records Jonah Max

LITERARY

ARTS

Accusative Case Jane Argodale

TECH

METRO

Sara Van Horn Kayli Wren Kion You Wen Zhuang COPY EDITORS Shuchi Agrawal Grace Berg Benjamin Bienstock Seamus Flynn Sasha Raman Caiya Sanchez-Strauss ILLUSTRATION EDITORS Eve O’Shea Claire Schlaikjer STAFF ILLUSTRATORS Julie Benbassat

Gone Fishin’ Zak Ziebell

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. 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. 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. SPRING 2017

Alexandra Hanesworth Kela Johnson Halle Krieger Sophia Meng Pia Mileaf-Patel Teri Minogue Ivan Rios-Fetchko Ella Rosenblatt Kelly Wang Dorothy Windham

X Zak Ziebell

ALUMNI RELATIONS Julia Tompkins

SENIOR EDITORS Jane Argodale Kelton Ellis Robin Manley Gabriel Matesanz Will Weatherly

MANAGING EDITORS Jonah Max Katrina Northrop Signe Swanson

BUSINESS MANAGER Maria Gonzalez

DESIGNERS Bethany Hung Amos Jackson Laura Kenney Katherine Sang Mariel Solomon Ella Rosenblatt

MVP Eliza Chen

WEB MANAGER Alyssa McGillvery

DESIGN EDITOR Eliza Chen

SOCIAL MEDIA Fadwa Ahmed Pia Mileaf-Patel

THEINDY.ORG — @THEINDY_TWEETS

-IS

BY Ivy Scott & Will Weatherly

Dontcha know: the 1996 film Fargo, in which otherwise ho-hum northern-Midwesterners perform senseless acts of violence, was originally going to be titled Brainerd, after Brainerd, Minnesota, where the film is primarily set and shot. That the Coen brothers instead titled their movie after a town that is barely featured is arguably their biggest point: that the name of the town is not all that important, and that evil lies dormant everywhere, even under 10 feet of icy Midwestern repression. But perhaps there is something specifically fishy about Brainerd, as evidenced last month at its 27th Annual Brainerd Jaycees $150,000 Ice Fishing Extravaganza. The competition, a charity event sponsoring local philanthropic causes, is advertised as the largest of its kind in the world. At 7 AM on the morning of January 27, 12,000 contestants lined up to claim one of 20,000 holes bored into the surface of Brainerd’s Gull Lake. With only 150 prize fish selected to reel in the big bucks, there’s a lot hanging on the success of anglers’ hooks. “We’re not only the biggest ice fishing contest in the world, we’re the best,” event chairman Shane Meyer told the Minneapolis Star Tribune. “We want there to be no question whatsoever by participants that the contest is legitimate and on the up-and-up.” But as reported by the Tribune this month, officials this year launched a “major investigation” to figure out if the winners’ ‘real catch’ was far less real than they claimed. The anglers in question, first-place winner Stephan Lyogky, his brother, third-place winner Ivan Lyogky, and their awkwardly worse relative, 98th-place winner Rostik Lyogky, were visiting the competition from their home in Ohio. Around half an hour after the start of the competition, Stephan and Ivan Lyogky were fishing together in the northwest corner of the lake when they caught their winning, matching pikes. Of the 150 prize fish, only three were northern pikes; other species caught included 135 tullibees, with 11 walleyes, and one perch. This single perch—a “whopper by Gull Lake standards” according to the Tribune—was Rostik’s. While organizers claimed they had “no proof that anyone cheated,” it did seem as if there were some slippery details in the Lyogkys’ account. “I was paying attention to the guy next to me who caught a pike at 10 feet [deep],” Stephen Lyogky told the Pine and Lakes Echo Journal. “I saw that and pulled up, and sure enough it was there.” This has all the features of a graceful evasion, given that Lyogky’s claim could apply to pretty much any fishing at all. How were officials supposed to drill down to the truth, especially in a sport where success seems either fortuitous or completely arbitrary? Last week, competition officials announced that all three Lyogkys had complied with polygraph tests; finding no deception, the investigation has been closed. Without further data, the Independent can only echo these findings. However, one is left wondering what a polygraph test about a northern pike entails; an interrogator slowly asking “One fish? Two fish? Red fish? Blue fish?” to the man in the hot seat, perhaps, ready to catch his deception hook, line, and sinker.

ILLUSTRATION BY Julie Benbassat

“It is the things we love most that destroy us,” wrote Suzanne Collins in the third book of the Hunger Games trilogy. However, it is not necessarily the angsty teen who is best able to relate to this line from Mockingjay, but a fellow bird: the woodpecker. The very activity for which they are named might be giving them serious brain damage. According to a study published by the journal PLOS One on February 2, an accumulation of the same protein linked to Alzheimer’s in humans is present in the brains of woodpeckers. The protein, tau, can disrupt human brain functions when it detaches from microtubules (structures that internally support nerve cells) and sticks to itself instead. Woodpeckers smash their skulls against trees, walls, and houses at approximately 15 miles per hour, using a force of 1,300 Gs. Considering that it can take only 60 Gs of force for a human to get a concussion, the Indy is hardly surprised that tau is taking up so much space in their tiny brains. What is surprising is that no one has noticed the build-up until now. For decades, woodpeckers have been the heroes of the helmet industry. Sports equipment manufacturers have funneled thousands of dollars into research on Picus viridis, Dendrocopos major, and many other similar species. Professional football, the crowning jewel of traditional American entertainment, relies on the woodpecker as a model for protective helmet design. The Indy has to ask: has the woodpecker let America down? “There have been all kinds of safety and technological advances in sports equipment based on the anatomic adaptations and biophysics of the woodpecker assuming they don’t get brain injury from pecking,” one author of the study, Peter Cummings, told the Boston Globe. “The weird thing is, nobody’s ever looked at a woodpecker brain to see if there is any damage.” But all is not lost for the woodpecker! Lead author of the study George Farah is convinced that the incessant pecking isn’t damaging woodpeckers nearly as much as it might damage the human brain. In the right amounts, tau protein actually stabilizes the brain. Farah believes that tau buildup might have a protective effect on the birds, whose benefits could in turn be applied to humans. “If pecking was going to cause brain injury, why would you still see this behaviour? Why would evolutionary adaptations stop at the brain?” The Indy suspects that Farah has a point—at least, we hope he does. Although, let’s be honest: if America has hand-picked the one animal known to run into buildings to protect the minds of its people, who’s really the birdbrain?

DESIGN BY Ella Rosenblatt

On the Hook

WEEK IN KINGDOM ANIMALIA

Birdbrains

-WW

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

WEEK IN REVIEW

E V

T I C G N V I A R IS

BY Lucas Smolcic Larson ILLUSTRATION BY Ella Rosenblatt DESIGN BY Amos Jackson

NOlympics LA and global resistance to the Olympic Games In 1932, while millions of unemployed Americans waited in breadlines, Los Angeles hosted the Olympics for the first time. Leading up to the event, protestors marched on the California state capital of Sacramento with signs reading “Groceries Not Games!”, demonstrating against the California Tenth Olympiad Bond Act. Passed by referendum in 1927, this bill provided $1 million of public funds (almost $18 million in today’s dollars) for the Games. The pet project of LA real estate baron William May Garland, the 1932 Olympics introduced elements now characteristic of the modern Games—the Olympic village, around-the-clock press coverage, and corporate sponsorship deals. That year, Time magazine heralded LA’s Olympics as “a gorgeous, unprecedented success.” The city was even able to pay back the bond and turn a modest profit, a feat not replicated again with the Summer Games until 1984. But the opportunity cost of the money spent on the Olympics was clear. The Sacramento protestors and backdrop of the Depression revealed the striking hypocrisy of channeling public money into Olympic mega-celebrations while city residents starved. Forty iterations of the Games later, this Olympic injustice has only worsened. Today, the International Olympic Committee (IOC), the Games’ governing body, requires that taxpayers foot the bill for the Olympic spectacle, while setting up its corporate sponsors to bring home billions. Meanwhile, it mandates a clean image and specific infrastructural investments from host cities, creating the conditions for gentrification, displacement of vulnerable communities, and repressive policing. Despite these effects, the IOC portrays its activities as

NEWS

purely about the benefits of sport and global togetherness. Activists in cities around the world aren’t buying it. In the face of Rule 50 of the Olympic Charter—specifically prohibiting any “kind of demonstration or political, religious, or racial propaganda” at Olympic sites—activists are using the Games as a platform to spotlight social justice issues. Activist pressure caused officials in Budapest, Rome, Hamburg, Krakow, Oslo, and Boston all to drop their bids for the 2024 Summer Games, awarded to Paris by the IOC last year. These groups turned public opinion against the Games by citing the enormous costs and detrimental legacies of past Olympics. The IOC reacted by voting to lock-in the remaining contenders—Paris and LA—by awarding the 2024 and 2028 Games simultaneously, forgoing another embarrassing bid process previously slated for 2019. On August 11, 2017, LA’s city council voted unanimously to accept the 2028 Summer Games, bringing the Olympics back to their city for a third time (LA also hosted in 1984). A pair of millionaires, LA Mayor Eric Garcetti and entertainment and sports executive Casey Wasserman, had driven LA’s bid. Opposite them, an offshoot of the local Democratic Socialists of America called NOlympics LA organized in protest of the bid months before its approval. The group now represents a coalition of almost 30 community organizations united in their opposition to the slated 2028 Summer Games. The group is gearing up for ten years of mobilization against the IOC as it operates today, learning and building from the anti-Olympics struggles in Chicago, London, Rio de

Janeiro, and Boston. They aim to use the Olympic platform to address the needs of LA’s residents, while spotlighting where the 2028 Games would harm the city. +++ Jonny Coleman, a NOlympics LA organizer, clarified that his group’s aims don’t involve doing away with international sporting events. “Our ultimate goal is to abolish the International Olympic Committee, dissolve it entirely and find a new way,” he told the Independent. The IOC is the root of the problems behind the Olympics, Coleman says. Incorporated in the tax-haven of Switzerland as a non-profit, the IOC is a private organization, unaccountable to any government. The body’s 100 members are disproportionately made up of royalty, CEOs, and millionaires. Its members are not paid, but bidding cities shower them with first-class plane tickets and dinners at five-star restaurants. IOC officials also have a history of accepting bribes from bid committees, illustrated in corruption allegations surrounding the London, Sochi, and Rio Games. The IOC touts the impact of the “Olympic Legacy” on host cities—in their definition the long-lasting benefits of the infrastructural investment, international attention, and economic opportunities the Games bring. The Olympics are immensely profitable, but not for cities and local populations. The main benefactors are the IOC itself and its corporate partners. Members of the Olympic Partner Program, currently 13 corporations including Coca-Cola and Procter & Gamble, pay hundreds of

FEBRUARY 16, 2018

millions to the IOC for the right to use the Olympic brand. NBC Universal paid $4.38 billion to the IOC for the right to broadcast the four Olympics between 2014 and 2020 on US TV, contributing to about 40 percent of the IOC's revenue for any one of these events. Olympic TV rights amounted to $4.1 billion in 2016, but the IOC only shared about 30 percent of this with the host city. It brought in $5.6 billion in the Olympic cycle ending that year, using ten percent for its operations and distributing the rest to National Olympic Committees and sports federations—not returning it to cities. Vancouver-based activist Am Johal summed the situation up neatly: “The Olympics are a corporate franchise that you buy with public money”—a public subsidy of private property. The host city contract dictates the sporting facilities, accommodation, and infrastructure that must be available for Olympic-goers. Cities cover the costs, often through public-private-partnerships. The IOC contract includes a taxpayer guarantee—that locks host cities into picking up the tab if the Games go over budget. They almost always do, with final costs reaching an average of 156 percent of the initial estimate, according to a 2016 Oxford University study. One notable exception to this pattern: the second time LA hosted the Olympics, in 1984. During that bid process, LA competed only with Tehran, which dropped out at the beginning of the Iranian Revolution. The IOC was forced to accept a deal in which LA taxpayers were not responsible for Olympic costs, which were instead covered by private investments. This was a one-time exception to the taxpayer guarantee. By signing the host city contract last year, LA has committed to covering any overruns of the $5.3 billion budget for the 2028 Games. +++ The NOlympics LA platform rests on the idea that 2028 Olympics represent a negligent use of public resources, given the city’s severe affordable housing shortage and rising rates of homelessness. Under Mayor Garcetti, the number of people living on the street surged 75 percent to reach almost 60,000, reported the LA Times this month. LA is one of the least affordable cities in the nation. Rents have risen with the city’s popularity while wages have remained stagnant or fallen. “We believe that resolving these crises as quickly and humanely as possible should be our city’s priority,” explains NOlympics LA in their analysis of LA’s Olympic bid. “For our city’s leaders and elected officials to waste this much money and energy on any other goal is unconscionable.” Besides diverting resources from marginalized communities in the host city, the Olympics have a track record of displacing low-income communities of color. The 2008 Beijing Games forcibly evicted or otherwise displaced 2 million people, including many low-paid migrant workers, according to a report from the Switzerland-based Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions. A similar dynamic in the build up to the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Games led a local coalition of social justice organizations against mega-event oriented development to nickname them “jogos da exclusão”—exclusion games. This moniker arose due to Olympic transportation and stadium projects that displaced entire favela communities while primarily benefiting the rich. Further, the Olympics empower local police forces to crack down on vulnerable communities. In LA, the 1984 Olympics contributed to the militarization of the city’s police force. Then, Police Chief Daryl Gates imprisoned thousands of people of color suspected of being gang members without due process in the “Olympic Gang Sweeps.” After the Games, the LAPD’s C.R.A.S.H. initiative resulted in a 33 percent increase in complaints of police brutality, a direct consequence of Olympic crackdowns and militarization. After the Brazilian military patrolled Rio’s streets during the 2016 Games, city officials increasingly called upon troops in 2017 to occupy favelas sheltering drug-traffickers, shutting down local schools and forcing residents to contend with tanks patrolling their streets.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

This precedent of diversion of resources, displacement, and militarization has led a range of activists mobilizing on behalf of marginalized communities to the NOlympics LA cause. Coleman said that his group’s outreach efforts have resulted in collaboration between social justice groups that traditionally remain separate, such as housing and homelessness advocates. “I think it's a really interesting kind of gateway,” he said, referring to how mobilizing against multifaceted Olympic effects involves a more holistic approach to fighting social inequities. Defenders of LA's bid claim existing sports stadiums will lessen the monetary and social costs of building new facilities. But NOlympics LA contends that renovations will still be necessary, worsening a decline in unionized construction projects and bringing a more precarious workforce to the city. This issue brings together labor rights activists, anti-displacement advocates, and those concerned about the diversion of public funds—creating opportunities for future collaboration. +++ The Olympics offer a platform and spotlight for local activists focused on the needs of specific communities. Theresa Williamson, Executive Director of the Rio de Janeirobased NGO Catalytic Communities (CatComm), aimed to leverage this by launching the community news site RioOnWatch.org to monitor the impact of the Rio 2016 Summer Games. CatComm works alongside community leaders in Rio’s favelas, majority Afro-Brazilian, informally constructed communities, to promote sustainable urban planning and fight the inaccurate portrayal of favelas as crime-ridden slums. Williamson told the Indy “one of the huge opportunities the Olympics provides to host city organizers [is] a permanent external spotlight for a long period of time that they can help direct to the issues that matter to them, assuming they're impacted by the Olympics.” RioOnWatch publishes articles from a network of favela journalists and international volunteers in English and Portuguese, adopting a “hyper-local” perspective on the news. The site was largely responsible for directing foreign coverage of Rio 2016 to favelas facing Olympic-motivated displacement and giving journalists an accurate vocabulary for describing these communities. Eight years later, RioOnWatch continues to report on favela issues. The site is a landmark for other antiOlympic groups. Williamson is currently engaging with activists in four cities, including LA, about translating the RioOnWatch model to other cities. She says she believes such a platform should be focused on a particular disenfranchised group. “Favelas gave us a really clear focus which is good,” she said, “We saw the universe of issues affecting them very broadly, so we reported on all sorts of things including transit, quilombos [Brazilian communities of ex-slaves], the IOC, Black Lives Matter, women's movements, gay rights, et cetera.” In LA, Coleman says his focus is on this kind of international cooperation and knowledge sharing. NOlympics LA is also in conversations with activists in Boston, London, Chicago, Korea, and Japan. “We're trying to get in really early in conversations in other cities, where bids are starting to form, specifically around 2026 and 2030. [Places] like Salt Lake City, Denver, Calgary,” Coleman told the Indy. With lots of time to prepare, NOlympics LA wants to influence other bid processes before they can be advanced. “We realize that in a lot of different ways that the Olympics are historically unpopular right now. By a lot of the metrics—these cities pushing out bids with different referendums—this is happening at a really high rate and still a lot of people don't really realize that because of this giant marketing machine,” said Coleman. +++ For a model of a large-scale victory against an Olympic bid, LA looked to Boston. The Boston 2024 bid formed quietly, backed by construction magnate John Fish and Boston Mayor Marty Walsh. In January 2015, the US

Olympic Committee (USOC) picked Boston’s bid to submit for the 2024 Games. Robin Jacks, co-founder of Occupy Boston, heard about the bid several months before when a community newspaper in Jamaica Plain, where she lived at the time, reported that the bid commission planned to use Franklin Park for several events. Upset by the possibility of this park being cordoned off for the Games and the bid’s lack of public input, Jacks helped create No Boston 2024 to oppose the bid. Her organization worked in tandem with No Boston Olympics, another anti-Olympics group led by three Bostonians with backgrounds in government and economics, to fight the bid. Jacks and No Boston 2024 campaigned effectively on social media, rallying others to the cause. She quickly found herself barraged with messages from other anti-Olympics activists with advice: Londoners describing gentrification and displacement and Chicago activists who followed IOC members around until they would accept a binder full of evidence against the Olympics. “It's not something that necessarily would have worked years ago, but we live in this modern world where everyone is connected digitally instantly, so it's easy for there to be this community of people who have beaten this back at some level in their own communities.” Jacks told the Indy. “It's this whole, weird, odd, motley group, and then the next Olympics rounds come along, and all these people find us or we find them. It keeps going and going.” No Boston 2024’s efforts and the bid’s mass unpopularity caused Mayor Walsh to officially drop it in July 2015. The USOC turned toward the only other city interested in hosting: Los Angeles. +++ Writing in his 2014 book, Activism and the Olympics, former professional soccer player-turned-academic Jules Boycoff explains, “It would be more correct to call anti-Olympic resistance an ‘event coalition’ than a social movement proper, since the activism is only scarcely sustained through time; protestors hobble on a shoestring budget from Olympic host city to host city.” He compares the cycle of Olympic bids and corresponding resistance movements to “an activist version of Whack-A-Mole.” But NOlympics LA’s coalition may be building toward something with more staying power. Coleman described his vision for the group’s work. “I think what this is probably going to formalize is a group that looks out for all these mega projects, all these lottery events—the World Cup, Amazon, whatever the next iteration of that is,” he said, “If we can't stop them in LA, but we can stop them in ten other cities, that's power. If they run out of cities, the model is broken. They have to reform.” The IOC has long operated as the unaccountable project of the global elite, leaving a path of destruction in its wake. But without a home, the Olympic model crumbles. This week, NOlympics LA released an open letter of solidarity with the No Tokyo and No Pyeongchang movements. US coverage of the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics, playing out at the time of this publication, has focused on Korean unity and athletic heroism—overlooking unprecedented levels of militarized security and the destruction of a 500-year-old virgin forest to make way for ski slopes. “This struggle against the Olympics is global,” writes NOlympics LA in their letter. “We say NO: NO to unhoused people swept or given one-way tickets out of host cities; NO to deforestation and gentrification to clear way for stadiums and arenas; NO to exploiting vulnerable young athletes subjected to systematic abuse.” LUCAS SMOLCIC LARSON B’19 doesn't hate the players, he just hates the games.

NEWS

A LOSS FOR WORDS Contemporary debates on free speech, political correctness, and identity politics have all taken up language as a site of contention. Figures like Canadian professor Jordan Peterson have propped themselves up as the targets of authoritarian witch hunts for their unwillingness to adhere to demands on their language. As laughable as Peterson is—who first gained attention for his refusal to use a student’s correct pronouns and now goes on media tours explaining that, just like lobster society, human society is hierarchical—he’s not alone in the practice of willfully using the wrong pronouns of trans and nonbinary people to make a point about his views on gender identity. The decision to use certain words or make changes to the language we speak has ideological significance. +++ There’s an allure in the popular urban myth that there are 100 Eskimo words for snow. I’ve heard it repeated by relatives, friends, and teachers, all in the same wideeyed tone of awe, as if the revelation were brand new and not something they had heard from ten other people. The simplicity of the idea—that a group of people living in an Arctic region spent so much time looking at and thinking about snow that it seeped into their language, and by extension their capacity to see and describe the world— also betrays its inadequacy. The languages of the Eskimo-Aleut family, not one but a group of related languages spoken throughout Arctic North America and eastern Siberia, have three word roots for snow. There’s snow on the ground, falling snow, and fallen snow. It’s more than English has for sure, but it’s not 100. The speakers of these languages may have a more robust vocabulary when it comes to snow, but it’s not such an overwhelmingly large part of what they speak of or think about. In the field of linguistics, the idea that a speaker’s language influences their worldview, is known as ‘linguistic relativity,’ or the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Another famous (and actually true) example backing this claim is the Australian aboriginal language Guugu Yimithirr, which makes exclusive use of cardinal directions rather than egocentric directions like left and right. If you were looking for something you’d dropped on the ground, for example, a speaker of Guugu Yimithirr might say “it’s just west of your foot.” Speakers of the language, as expected, keep better track of which way is north, south, east, and west, than people who are used to relying on egocentric directions. This definition of linguistic relativity is plausible. But the earliest proponents of linguistic relativity, like the linguist Benjamin Whorf, thought that the grammatical structure and lexicon of the language a person speaks actually limits their ability to have certain thoughts. There’s no real evidence that this is the case, and it’s not too difficult to imagine the danger of such a claim. Whorf’s work mostly centered around his anecdotal observations of indigenous American languages, and was the origin of the Eskimo myth. In the light of Whorf’s formulation of linguistic relativity, the myth reads not just as a sketchy bit of folklore, but something

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more perverse—the exotification of a group of people he considered beyond comprehension. Whorf is not only arguing that the contours of language may trace a particular culture, but also that these contours actively limit one’s capacity to think. Still, even if the language we speak doesn’t determine how we think outright, it does set the terms for how we articulate our thoughts. This is the basis of more recent studies on linguistic relativity. And anyone who speaks more than one language is familiar with the frustration of trying to express something in one language that just works so much better in another. What come to mind for me are the many ways prefixes can modify verbs in Czech. For example, the past participle šlo, went, can become přišlo, came; odešlo, left; našlo, found; and my personal favorite, došlo, which expresses the very moment you just reach your destination. Došlo is the very last step, your foot crossing the finish line, and your body breaking through the ribbon. To mi došlo, “it came to me,” expresses perfectly the feeling of just being able to realize something that had been slipping from your grasp, in a way that no translation can. In his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera contrasts the Latin root of the English word ‘compassion,’ meaning ‘with suffering,’ with the root in

Czech and other Slavic and Germanic languages. The Czech word soucit literally means ‘with feeling.’ Kundera argues that the Latin root ‘with suffering’ connotes something more like pity and condescension, while “to have compassion (co-feeling) means not only to be able to live with the others’ misfortune but also to feel with him any emotion—joy, anxiety, happiness, pain. This kind of compassion… therefore signifies the maximal capacity of affective imagination, the art of emotional telepathy. In the hierarchy of sentiments, then, it is supreme.” Kundera suggests that even the way our words are constructed can affect how we interpret the ideas and feelings we express. This suggestion is echoed in the essay, “Learning the Grammar of Animacy,” by the Native American biologist and writer Robin Wall Kimmerer. Kimmerer writes about the process of studying Potawotami, a language with an incredibly different grammatical structure and lexicon from English. While 30 percent of English words are verbs, 70 percent of Potawotami words are verbs. Kimmerer recounts her frustration upon learning a verb meaning “to be a bay,” until she realizes how it changes her conception of what would be a straightforward noun in English. Kimmerer writes, “When bay is a noun, it is defined by humans, trapped between its shores and contained by the word. But the verb wiikegama—to be a bay—releases the

FEBRUARY 16, 2018

BY Jane Argodale ILLUSTRATION BY Kela Johnson DESIGN BY Bethany Hung

Do we have to change our language before we can change our ideas?

water from bondage and lets it live. ‘To be a bay’ holds the wonder that, for this moment, the living water has decided to shelter itself between these shores, conversing with cedar roots and a flock of baby mergansers.” It’s a moment that illuminates how differently languages can describe the same phenomena, as well as an important insight for Kimmerer into a cosmology, and its means of expression, that colonialism and genocide sought to extinguish. There is a reason, after all, that one of the foremost tactics used to oppress groups of people is to suppress their language. Prison-like boarding schools that operated well into the 20th century in the United States forebade Native American children from speaking their languages and gave them new ‘Christian’ names. Most indigenous American languages are now endangered, often with just a handful of older speakers remaining. Many are already long extinct. The intimate link between language and culture is undeniable, and the stakes of its recognition are high. +++ I’m sitting with a group of fellow Czech students around a table at a bar, talking over our frustrations at how gendered the Czech language is. Every title has a masculine and feminine version to choose between—doktor or doktorka, profesor or profesorka, student or studentka. Adjectives are modified based on the gender of the noun they describe, and the past tense is formed with a past participle that is gender-inflected. A man says šel jsem, a woman says šla jsem, but in English both simply mean ‘I went.’ Though some headway has been made towards more neutral grammar in other gendered languages such as Swedish, doing so in Czech is especially tricky because there is already a third grammatical gender, neuter. However, the neuter gender is only used for inanimate objects, animals, and children. It’s the equivalent of the English ‘it.’ To use it for an adult human would be literally dehumanizing. At some point, as I’m expressing frustration about this feature of Czech, I say to my American friend, “I feel like having to announce my gender in every single sentence I speak makes me feel less comfortable about calling myself a woman.” She frowns for a moment and replies, “Oh. That’s interesting. I didn’t really think about it that way.” +++ My Czech friend refers to my friend Asel, who is about five feet tall, as ta malinka, an acceptable, even endearing term in Czech. But when he uses the rough English equivalent, “that cute little girl,” to refer to them, I wince but say nothing. I don’t really know how to explain how weird it sounds in English in a way that wouldn’t also make it sound like it was inappropriate in Czech. Why should someone’s perceived gender be one of the first things that comes to mind when you describe them? It seems so unimportant, but in Czech it’s a necessary step to talk about anyone, even if you’re not literally addressing someone as a girl or boy, man or woman.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

In one of my first Czech classes at Brown, another student and I repeatedly asked our professor, what about people who aren’t men or women? Is there any other way to talk about them? She paused briefly to think about it, then said, “I think in Czech you just have to pick one.” For nonbinary, genderqueer, and genderfluid Czech people that choice can feel limiting. In a blog post for the Prague-based trans advocacy group Trans*parent, Rad Bandit, a genderfluid trans activist, recounts the decision to change their first and last names to ones that weren't markedly feminine. (Women’s last names take a feminine ending in Czech.) In no uncertain terms, Bandit writes, “Language forms reality. And your name forms everyday life.” Bandit describes the name change as “a parting from the Czech language, whose rigidity creates an absurdly polarized world.” The desire to depart from the very language within which one is working speaks to how much of an obstacle language can be, even when it’s necessary. +++ In English, there exists an easy out from the choice between masculine and feminine pronouns: the singular ‘they,’ which has been in use for centuries. Singular ‘they’ has come under new scrutiny in recent years, however, in reaction to a growing movement in the Western world to recognize the range of gender identities outside of binary him/her, as a part of the larger LGBTQ rights movement that began in the last century. Unimaginative grammar prescriptivists and those bent on enforcing a gender binary to uphold their vision of society have often ended up on the same side of this controversy by different routes. In the first few weeks of high school, my English teacher handed out a sheet with a list of common errors in written English, and ways to fix them. Singular ‘they’ was listed alongside comma splices and run-on sentences, and the solution was to replace it with ‘he or she.’ Teacher’s pet that I was at the time, I obeyed this rule through all of freshman year. The New Yorker’s ‘Comma Queen,’ copy editor Mary Norris, has said that it is wrong to use singular ‘they’ in place of ‘he or she’ in sentences where the subject is unknown, while also saying that the use of ‘they’ as a singular personal pronoun when the subject is known and wants to use that pronoun is acceptable. Norris’s willingness to cede on the latter but not the former betrays a hesitance to fully recognize the possibility that exists beyond ‘he’ and ‘she.’ The gender binary is still the default, and anything outside of it becomes a glitch in the system. It’s not quite in line with the “there are only two genders” mantra of Internet edgelords, but it still suggests that anything else is a sort of mistake.

Google’s algorithm, the English translations become gendered based on frequency of usage in its database: She is a cook. He is an engineer. He is a doctor. She is a nurse. Out of more than 20 sentences, there is only one Google can’t choose a gender for: He-she is a police. As the list continues, the sentences move from professions to characteristics. He is a friend. She is a lover. He’s happy. She’s unhappy. He is hard working. She is lazy. The world becomes delineated into two types of people. Of course, it is still possible to do this in other ways in a gender neutral language like Turkish, but at least it’s avoidable on the grammatical level. Any assumptions about the subject’s gender fall on the listener, not on the language itself. And simply flipping the gender of the sentences in an effort to scrub out the misogyny doesn’t change the most basic problem with the translation. It adds information that was never available in the original sentence. This is exactly the sort of problem a generic singular ‘they’ solves in English. Since language can never change what’s already in our heads, it only solves the simplest of problems—the words themselves. But the change at least marks a desire to part with unwanted ideas and unnecessary dichotomies. +++ The process of coming to terms with my own nonbinary identity has also been a process of realizing how unrecognized I often feel by the language I hear in my everyday life. It’s strange to think that Czech, a language my ancestors have spoken for hundreds of years, doesn’t really have a good way to describe me. That English occasionally does doesn’t really redeem its own shortcomings. And of course, there’s no easy change of words or linguistic trick that’s going to make someone take me seriously when they don't want to. But there’s a reason that language is the site of so many ongoing public debates around gender identity. We hold language dear. The words we use ultimately do betray our inner views and the ideals we espouse. We can and should be working towards new ways of saying what we really mean. JANE ARGODALE B’18 thinks the Comma Queen should abdicate.

+++ In a viral Facebook post, the writer and University of Chicago PhD student Alex Shams posted a screenshot of a series of sentences translated from Turkish to English in Google Translate. There is only one gender-neutral third person singular pronoun in Turkish, o. But because of

FEATURES

A FUTURE AT ANY COST An interview with Brenda Clement BY Ivy Scott ILLUSTRATION BY Rémy Poisson DESIGN BY Bethany Hung

Brenda Clement is the director of HousingWorks RI, a research organization and think tank at Roger Williams University that explores housing options for Rhode Island residents at all socioeconomic levels, with a focus on affordable housing. HousingWorks aims to be a “discussion starter and thought leader on issues related to housing” by working to inform legislators and housing project developers of the challenges different communities face. HousingWorks’ annual publication, Housing Fact Book, provides extensive analysis of housing affordability in Rhode Island, and thus serves as a resource for policy makers and developers throughout the state. In conversation with the Independent, Ms. Clement offered her observations and predictions about Rhode Island’s housing crisis and the future of affordable housing in the state. The Independent: As rent and housing prices have risen, there has been a decrease in the number of families that can afford to live in Rhode Island. In 2017, one in three mortgage holders and one in two renters spent more than 30 percent of their income on housing in Rhode Island. Further down the income scale, this percentage grows even larger. The burden of high housing costs makes living in Rhode Island unfeasible for many low-income and disadvantaged people. What factors influence the increasingly expensive housing prices in Rhode Island? Brenda Clement: It’s been a long-term problem and there are multiple reasons for that. One is that the zoning regulations that are in place are not conducive for addressing and dealing with the current housing crisis. Also, as a state, we greatly underfund housing compared to some of our neighbors. Per capita, Rhode Island is well below the rest of New England. Compared to Massachusetts and Connecticut we are woefully behind. The lack of investment over a number of years has caught up with us… Production levels [of new housing] have been very low and housing supplies are very limited, which causes prices to go up. Income hasn’t gone up at the same level, and so people are paying more and more for their housing needs. The Indy: It’s well understood that multi-family housing is increasingly important in Rhode Island because of an aging population looking to grow old in their communities surrounded by their family. As the state with the fourth largest population of people 75 and older, the lack of appropriate housing has become an increasingly pressing issue. Municipalities are not interested in providing multifamily housing, regardless of the widespread demand for it. Where do you think this hesitancy comes from?

METRO

BC: There is certainly some NIMBY-ism [Not In My BackYard-ism] that communities have. I think communities have some legitimate concerns about affordable housing’s impact on community infrastructure, schools, and roads. But again, trying to find the appropriate places for development in communities is an important piece. Every town has a village center, an old gravesite, an old underutilized shopping district or other areas where it makes sense to encourage some growth and some density. But unfortunately in many instances, the community’s current zoning laws and regulatory laws make that kind of development difficult. The underlying problem isn’t necessarily the community; it’s old laws and regulations.

The Indy: In 2004, the Rhode Island state legislature passed a law entitled the Low and Moderate Income Housing Act, which mandates that ten percent of all available housing must be affordable for all communities in Rhode Island. While this bill was praised for its lofty goal at the time of its passage, its success has been limited. In Rhode Island, only 8.3 percent of housing is considered affordable housing, according to a study your organization conducted. And in many communities, this percentage is significantly lower. How do you see specific housing development laws, including the Low and Moderate Income Housing Act, impacting the housing crisis?

The Indy: According to a study HousingWorks conducted, it is necessary to build 3,500 new housing units per year until 2025 in order to meet Rhode Island’s growing housing demand. In addition, 81 percent of those units need to be multi-family units. However, in recent years, only 1,000 building permits have been issued per year, making Rhode Island the state with the least building permit activity per capita. This lack of permits is, in part, due to strict zoning regulations. According to a study done by the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, Rhode Island has the second most strict land use regulation in the country, preceded only by Hawaii. In her 2018-2019 budget, Governor Raimondo pledged $20,000 to the Municipal Zoning and Permitting Fund, which helps communities update zoning and land-use regulations, but many are concerned that this inadequately addresses the problem at hand. How do you see the issues around zoning barriers and land-use regulation being resolved?

BC: The legislature is currently reviewing the Low and Moderate Income Housing Act. And they are looking at that act to see if there are some changes that we could make to it that would add more incentive and more tools for cities and towns to address their ten percent goal. Also, I’m interested in looking more holistically at the real sticking points in the zoning laws. Do we look at trying to create multi-family zoning by right [without case-by-case approval]? Do we look at using tools that other communities have, such as transit-oriented development, where we’ve got development around rail stations or bus stops in a community? I think it makes sense to look at trying to attract housing in each of those areas.

BC: It depends on communities, but we need to be looking at where growth makes sense, and looking at where we can expedite processes to allow multi-family zoning. What a multi-family housing unit looks like depends on the community, too, and so trying to figure out what all of that is must be part of the state’s master plan. And right now that’s lacking. The last thing housing advocates and non-profit housing developments want to do is to build a project that becomes the poster child for bad development. We’re part of the community... so we’re building things to last. We’re building things that we want to be assets for the community, not detriments to the community. Trying to address the underlying regulatory and funding barriers are things that we need to work on together.

BC: We need housing production at all income levels. I agree with you that we need more at the affordable level, both for millenials and for seniors as they age. Those populations tend to have lower incomes, so [we need to be] trying to create a master plan and a master vision for the state about what type of housing we need, where it should be, and at what price points is pertinent. No surprise that the for-profit people aren’t building these if they don’t think there’s a market for them. But we as developers also have to provide the right incentive and the right market to interest them in building more affordable housing as well.

The Indy: Given the obvious need for affordable housing, it seems counterintuitive that the amount of luxury houses being built has increased. How does the increase in luxury housing being built impact the affordable housing crisis?

IVY SCOTT B’21 has had enough of the for-profit people.

FEBRUARY 16, 2018

DEAR INDY... BY WW ILLUSTRATION BYAlex Westfall DESIGN BY Katherine Sang

How do I escape the abyss of gay loneliness? Does anyone anywhere find queer love?

I am answering your question first, fellow queer Lonelyheart, as a way of saying that this state, ‘gay loneliness,’ has been my primary way of existing romantically for a long time, that I have never actually been in a relationship of any significant duration, and thus the idea of this lovely newspaper asking me to write as if I had any authority on matters of the heart is either patently absurd or remarkably innovative, or both. Like Elon Musk shooting a perfectly functional automobile into outer space. But while I share the instinct to describe being lonely this way, I don’t quite know what this description entails. For if ‘gay loneliness’ means ‘the loneliness held by queer people,’ then that is simply loneliness, and I could tell you to go, like, speed-date or something, and the answer would have as much (or as little) purchase for you as it would for anyone else. I’m reticent to believe this is the case. Rather, I’m inclined to say that gay loneliness has a specific ontological position, and it is exactly because this state is not contained by the word ‘loneliness’ that it is so lonely. It resists an expression that can be shared. Tracing the full legacy of the term—the queer experiences left unlived or unspoken during multiple generations of socially and politically enforced silence—is beyond my scope here. One of the most recent attempted definitions, in a HuffPost editorial on “the epidemic of gay loneliness” widely circulated last spring, contributed more to a narrow caricature of queerness than an explanation of how queerness can emerge—differently, queerly—in a social sphere. The article’s findings were predicated on accounts of how gay men “literally don’t know what they’re feeling” after years of being in the closet, claims buffered by spurious sociological studies on the higher rates of alcoholism, drug use, and anxiety among (again) gay men, as well as photos of men stuffing bills into each other’s shorts. “Our distance from the mainstream may be the source of some of what ails us,” the article ends, “but it is also the source of our wit, our resilience, our empathy, our superior talents for dressing and dancing and karaoke.” I don’t know about you, but I’m terrible at karaoke, and the idea of ‘accepting’ an emotionally stunted, pathologized queerness seems like a sorry path toward community. In fact, it is this overdetermination—within and against forms of queerness emerging from social forms dominated by cis, often white gay men—that I believe contributes most to the feeling that queer loneliness is unshakeable. Dating apps and queer clubs might create the impression that queer communities already exist in

these forms, and it is because you are the exception that you are lonely. Worse, you might believe that because you feel like an exception to the ways queer relationships ought to emerge, you have a troubled relationship to queerness itself, further impeding your belief that you deserve companionship. This is the ontological position I described earlier: the feeling that you can be queer or lonely, but not both. Which is why I’m here to tell you that while there are queer social traditions that you can tap into, so many communities in our lives—the personal ones, ones which can hear and recognize our loneliness before offering intimacy in turn—have to be made. Part of this comes when you can find your own expression of queer loneliness, one that you can share. Rather than hoping for solicitude down the line, you can start from where you are. Who knows? You might just find someone who tells you, “In fact, you do know what you feel. And I feel that way too.” And then you’ll have a companion, with whom you can start the process of feeling something else.

Why is expressing love for the first time so intimidating? How important is it to say the three words? Why do I feel like I’d be doing it more for myself than anyone (including my partner)? Contained in this question, I think, is the possibility that saying “I love you” doesn’t mean anything at all, and that it can be avoided entirely in favor of expressing any number of associated emotions. Which, in a sense, might be true—even once you say those words, you are far from done with describing what your partner means to you and what your hopes are for your future together. But I don’t think that this renders your desire to say it meaningless—in fact, I think it’s your desire to say “I love you” that is exactly what the phrase can mean. If you feel like telling your partner that you love them might make them specifically uncomfortable, then there are probably some conversations that you could have before this that could help you think through that feeling more deeply. I think it’s worth interrogating beforehand whether you’re using these words to express your own feelings, or to (I think, unfairly) prompt some expression on the part of your partner. If it’s the former, don’t hold back just because you’re dissatisfied with your feelings being only “for you.” Any relationship is just that: a relationship between two people with their own needs and wants, not an abstract cause or a greater good to serve. Communicating your feelings might help carve more space for your partner to do the same—especially those emotions that can’t begin to be contained in three little words.

I’m falling in love and it’s kind of boring?

Paradoxically, this is kind of an intriguing question(?), but only if I agree to take you at your word. If you find yourself bored by how you characterize the person you say you are ‘falling in love’ with, the answer is simple: you are doing this person a disservice, and you should take a hike. As an advice giver, however, I’m obliged to assume you are asking(?) in good faith. Let’s say, then, that you have a deep attraction to this person, but that after all the romantic walks on the beach/candlelit dinners/whatever it is that couples do (see question one), you are finding that intimacy is just that: intimacy. And because your question is just a sentence with a question mark on the end, I’m assuming you had thought it might be otherwise. I think that in wanting love for ourselves, and in having many forces tell us that we should want love for ourselves, the category of ‘love’ starts to carry a whole lot of things which it may not actually entail. There is the exhilaration you might have felt at the possibility of finding love, and the loneliness you feel when the possibility of love seemed far from your grasp. Any number of these feelings, among many others, might have been accompanied by a sense of possibility, a question of what those feelings might become if shared with a companion. These feelings were real, and they cannot be separated from the whole of your emotional life. But this may be why finding intimacy may seem somehow disconnected from the anticipation of intimacy, or why you may have felt like you have lost some form of excitement. It is the end of the life you spent wanting love. Buried in all these feelings was, perhaps, the hope that a loving partner might change what or how you feel about your life, and that your life might change in turn. And while adjusting to the openness required by sharing your life with another person might be a huge shift for you, part of the joy (and a healthy sense of security) that can emerge from love comes from someone loving you as you are, and in you doing the same. You and your partner will be there for each other through good and shitty days alike, but no matter how powerful your bond is, they will still arrive all the same. The grim reality of this might feel boring. By no measure does this devalue the bond itself. It might just mean that the excitement you seek, or what you want to feel about your life, may not be described by the word ‘love.’ What love can give you instead is a partner in figuring out what that feeling might be. I would advise you to ask yourself a question Cher posed 20 years ago: “Do you believe in life after love?” The answer may be fascinating.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

FEATURES

IN THE MEANTIME Providence public school students circumvent a doomed architecture

BY Ella Comberg ILLUSTRATION BY Dorothy Windham DESIGN BY Laura Kenney When Alice Rayner was a senior in high school, they wrote a blog post for “the Purple Pages,” a Tumblr account self-described as “the best blog from Classical High School eva.” The post took the form of a mock-interview with an unconventional subject: their high school’s despised building. Writing from the perspective of the building, Rayner explains why so many Classical students hate their high school's physical structure: “I exist merely to contain you, lock you in, control and confine you. How can I be anything for you but hideous?” Four years later, the assignment from their creative writing class is still floating around the internet. The post, entitled “It’s Like Sooo Ugly,” is practically the only writing online that examines the confining Brutalist architecture employed at Rhode Island’s top-ranked public high school. Situated at the intersection of Federal Hill, the West End, and Upper South Providence, Classical’s block-long building is replete with raw concrete facades, classrooms without windows, and cement plazas instead of green space. Violet Windham, a current senior, puts it simply: “The building makes it depressing to go to Classical.” But in a school district that Rayner describes as “preoccupied with order,” using an “unyielding, monolithic” form in order to corral students makes perfect sense. Indeed, the style, imposing yet aestheticized, can be found most frequently on university campuses across the country—Yale, Harvard, UCal, the lists goes on. But when it comes to secondary education, Classical is the only high school in the state that employs the distinctively modern style. Unlike these elite and well-endowed universities, Classical’s place in the Providence Public School district means that it doesn’t receive the same kind of constant maintenance that Brutalist buildings demand; so while Brown University’s List Art Center across town retains an unscathed concrete, Classical accumulates a dark grey patina that makes students cringe. +++ Classical students’ hatred for their building is far more than an aesthetic concern—the school is ugly and confining, but it’s also falling apart. Industrial trash cans line the halls whenever it rains to catch the inevitable leaks. Water fountains spout yellowed water every day. Bunsen burners leak gas into science classrooms. Madi Kilgore, a Classical senior, told the Independent that the bathroom at her school is always shut down because of flooding, “and if you’re lucky enough to get to use the bathroom, there’s no soap or toilet paper, or towels. The walls between the stalls are ripped out so there’s two toilets next to each other in a stall.” Consistently beating out wealthier suburban high schools to sit atop US News’ Best High Schools list, Classical requires students to take an entrance exam for admission; 75 percent of students are people of color and 63 percent are from low-income families. For these teenagers, who spend their days in constricting and crumbling classrooms, maintaining the school’s reputation is an uphill battle. Ceiling tiles fall on their heads, they shiver in under-heated classrooms, and even if they wanted to leave, they couldn’t—in true brutalist fashion,

METRO

the building's architects built very few exits. As Tati Hall, who attended the nearby Providence Career and Technical Academy, told the Indy, “so much pressure is put on the Classical students to be the best, but that facility is legit disgusting.” Inappropriate design and poor upkeep cause Classical’s unrelenting physical problems. Built in 1973, the building features a flat roof characteristic of the era’s modernism, impractical for New England winters. The concrete walls that were hailed for their simplicity and affordability in the 60's and 70's today make the building unbearably hot in the beginning and end of the school year, and unbearably cold during the winter months. A tunnel between the school’s main building and auditorium, once novel, is now another item on Classical’s laundry list of physical maladies, flooding almost monthly. Unable to withstand the slightest wear, Classical’s midcentury architecture and ongoing deterioration have begun to amalgamate into one unmanageable problem—a perfect storm of financial neglect and bad design culminates in teenagers traversing freezing cold cement tunnels. +++ Providence Mayor Jorge Elorza, who attended Classical in the nineties, is aware of its inherent faults. In August, he announced that he would borrow roughly $400 million for city school repairs over the next decade. Nearly every news article on the mayor’s commitment featured the same photo of brown liquid dripping from a ceiling tile at Classical. As the academic year began in September and students at Classical returned to their sweltering school, they wondered if they might be next on the city’s docket for repairs. With Mayor Elorza’s announcement came hope. The mayor’s plan for capital improvement in Providence is much needed, even beyond Classical. A 2017 report from the Rhode Island Department of Education found that of the city’s eight public high schools, five, including Classical, are in below average or poor condition, and only three were in good or average condition. The plight of Classical students is echoed across the city, oftentimes more urgently—at Hope High School on the East Side, an entire bathroom goes unused because of asbestos. In Massachusetts, school buildings don’t face the same kind of long-term neglect. There, the state legislature has invested public money in school facilities seven times in the past decade. Rhode Island, in contrast, hasn’t issued a bond for school building upgrades in over 20 years. The Ocean State is now playing catch-up to follow Massachusetts’ lead, with Governor Gina Raimondo committing to fund $1 billion worth of school facility improvements over the next decade. The money will take the form of generous reimbursements to cities and towns that front the money for repairs. Providence would receive a huge chunk, making Elorza’s plans possible. +++ The Providence Student Union (PSU), a youth-led student advocacy group, says that even if Providence schools see some of this state money, it will likely make little difference. Classical student by day and PSU organizer by night, Madi Kilgore argues that even if the roughly $400 million is approved, once “they spread

that across the schools, it’s not even going to fix them, it’s just going to wrap up some pipes and put a bandage on the schools.” That message rings particularly true at Classical, which, Kilgore told the Indy, “is just so beyond repair.” Providence schools much older than Classical that were built in other styles have been able to undergo renovations and function well. Take Providence’s Central High, for example: a Tudor revival building built in the forties that underwent major renovations in 2007 and is now in “good” condition, per the Department of Education’s standards. It would only take $8 million to keep Central running safely for the next five years, in contrast to Classical’s $28 million. Because Central employs a less radical architectural style, its structure is more appropriate for both the area’s climate and the strains brought on by a high school’s heavy use. Classical’s structure, on the other hand, is inherently prone to both flooding and leaks, which in turn create a snowballing financial burden. The building has got to go. Kilgore describes how on one occasion, a gas leak in Classical’s science department caused the whole school to evacuate. “It triggered the fire alarms and everyone had to leave school. It was snowing outside. And while we were sitting outside in the cold for two hours, everyone thought the school was going to burn down. But it’s brick and concrete. The only way you’re getting this school to crumble is with a sledgehammer at the wall.” Such is Classical’s paradox: too structurally sound to force the city into funding a new building, but susceptible to the kind of constant, minor damage that, when unrelenting, makes students feel like people in power—administrators at Classical and in the school district, politicians in city and state government—don’t care about them. +++ Classical desperately needs a new building, but such dramatic architectural upheaval could take years. With no legislation passed yet, just numbers floating around the capitol, the task of repairing Providence’s schools could easily outlive both Raimondo and Elorza’s terms. And a drawn-out political process means that current high school students will graduate before seeing any real changes. Tati Hall, the PSU’s Campaign Organizer, argues that because Elorza’s plans aren’t immediate, they will hurt current students even beyond high school: “All those students who are in high school now are going to grow up and be adults, and they’re going to have a tax increase.” At eighteen, Hall worries that “even if the $400 million passes, that’s going be on us in 10 years.” For now, students wait to see what the state will come up with. But they’re not waiting quietly. Hall, Kilgore, and dozens of other teenagers work tirelessly at the PSU—some of them after school, others full time—to create a student-centered alternative to state-driven action. Where the Rhode Island Department of Education aims for “warm, safe, and dry” schools, the PSU demands “safe, comfortable, and healthy” buildings in Article 13 of their Student Bill of Rights (SBR). This subtle difference in language is telling. Organizers at the PSU, who attend public schools across the district, expect more than the bare minimum from the buildings where they’re mandated to spend thousands of hours a year (the school district’s official motto is “every child, in school, every day, on time.”) Article 13 of the SBR, known as “Fix Our Schools,”

FEBRUARY 16, 2018

wraps up the district’s architectural afflictions into one neat package. Pleas for clean bathrooms and clean water, temperature control and natural light, all constitute one article of the twenty-two article-long bill. When understood in the context of the SBR, where they’re given a name and an article number, Classical’s architectural and condition problems begin to feel more manageable. Maxx Diensthuber, who attends E-cubed Academy in Smith Hill and runs the PSU’s training programs, says that this is part of the organization’s power; it’s helped him “give a name” to the problems he has faced in Providence schools. “Once you know something is real, it gives you power to fight back against it,” Diensthuber told the Indy. The comprehensive nature of the SBR also means that other issues, like clean tap water, which are not directly related to construction but are nonetheless relevant to the school’s physical condition, are given attention. As Kilgore explains of Classical, “going to the bubbler and getting a drink, you see dirty water. If the water isn’t brown-looking, it just tastes nasty. And people still drink it, because there’s nothing else to drink.” Classical’s water problem is not anomalous. At some Providence schools, like West Broadway Middle School a few blocks away, the lead content in water fountains has reached 38 parts-per-billion; the EPA marks 5 parts-perbillion as hazardous. Superintendent Christopher Maher attempted to address the issue—which is caused by the buildings’ aging pipes—by mandating that schools put a watercooler in the cafeteria. But at Classical, it’s usually empty by second period. “So lunch comes and the milk is expired, and the water jug is empty, so what are you gonna drink?” Kilgore wonders. +++ As students continue to drink dirty water, the PSU is pushing legislators for more long-term solutions than individual water coolers. Tati Hall explains the PSU’s advocacy plan—Agua Action—to address the water component of Article 13: “We want to go to the statehouse and set up a lemonade stand and ask folks in power, would you drink this? Would you let your kids drink this?” The lemonade stand idea is derived from the water

the bubbler’s spout, so tainted that it can look yellow at times. The PSU organizers who work on “Fix Our Schools” say they thought school construction reform was so important because it was so visible, from the color of the water to the facade of a building. Providence Career and Technical Academy (PCTA), which sits almost immediately next to Classical, illustrates well the power of a visibly new building. Built in 2009, the city invested $72 million in state-of-the-art, sustainable architecture for its career prep institute. With glass-tiled walls and dramatic modern light fixtures, PCTA looks more like a building at a well-endowed university building than a public school in a financially troubled city. And students love the building. Tati Hall, who attended PCTA for three years, says they didn’t realize what a luxury it was to go there until they were sent to Central: “I think [PCTA students] have more opportunities than any school in Providence because of all the access to technology. If you need to get something done, there are like 12 different tech areas to back you up and you’re going to get all the tools you need.” A gleaming, modernized building like PCTA’s would revolutionize Classical students’ education. The PSU says that in order to build another structure like that, and to really get to the heart of the issues that Fix Our Schools addresses (dirty water, leaky ceilings, structural deficiency), Raimondo needs to commit to $3 billion over the coming decade, not just the $1 billion she says she’s aiming for. The PSU’s number is derived the RI School Buildings Task Force’s recommendation that the state commit $2.2 billion to repairs over the coming decade. More money at the state level means more money for Providence, which puts more significant, long-term repairs on the table. +++

The PSU organizers are hopeful that the money will pass at the state level and work its way back to Providence schools, but they know that it could be years before they see tangible changes. As state monetary policy becomes a perpetual waiting game, students find that the PSU is both an avenue for activism and a physical space for coping. If Classical stands a brutal behemoth on one side of Westminster Street, the PSU’s offices sit immediately opposite the street in a reused 19th-century office building—a place where they can learn how to advocate for the causes they care about most, in a building where they like to spend time. The PSU is radical but not unique in its approach to activism, nor in its location on the strip of Westminster just west of I-95. Other organizations like Youth Pride RI and New Urban Arts have taken root on the same block, forming tangible alternative spaces close to, but visually distinct from, Classical’s rotting concrete plazas. New Urban Arts’ big-windowed studio provides programming to over 400 high school students from all over the city, who work in various media studios or study in a designated quiet room. The PSU’s headquarters down the street are similarly comfortable, furnished with used couches, student artwork, and whiteboards planning upcoming campaigns. Tati Hall lies on pillows on the floor as they explain the PSU’s Fix Our Schools campaign. They get up to turn off the overhead fluorescent light, lighting the room with a small floor lamp. The mood of the room becomes palpably different with the change. They explain how in classrooms with no windows, using a small lamp like this makes all the difference: “the fact that we don’t have access to natural light, just fluorescent lighting, definitely has an effect on the way a student is focusing.” This is the ethos of the PSU; to demand basic changes that drastically improve student experience. After turning on the lamp, Hall explains what PSU has done for them: “I’ve learned how to get respect from folks who otherwise wouldn’t have respected me, or would have thought of me as small. I’ve learned how to really project my powers.” For now, they’re using that power to get one message across, loud and clear: “If you’re going force me to be in a building for 8 hours, it’s going to be a nice building and that’s that.” ELLA COMBERG B’20 is rooting for the Classical Purples.

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METRO

BLENDER BY Jonah Max DESIGN BY Katherine Sang

I. Forest The peat bogs and flooded fens of Northern Rhode Island are rich entanglements, marshy lands where matter collides with a vicious alacrity. Under our feet and along the moist banks of the lake, communities of testate amoebae, single-cell pseudopods, congregate and coalesce. Lapping in the folds of the wind-rippled water, these brainless organisms set themselves to the various tasks of their brief life—consuming, excreting, reproducing. And yet, amid these chores, the amoeba finds time for a single, microscopic flourish—constructing an elaborate geometrical shell which will drape around its translucent body. To accomplish this architectural feat, its porous body secretes pleats of silicon to which remnants of its own excrement, the bog’s micro-debris, and particles of dust attach themselves. In this way, the amoeba’s crown serves as a register of both its internal activities and the surrounding environs. These shells, however, are not merely biological records, but richly textured adornments, replete with baroque curves and artful protrusions. The Nebela ansata often has a smoothed crown with spindly hooks extending from its long neck; whereas the Arcella’s bulbous shell will more likely have a studded perimeter and generous opening; and the Heleopera petricola, though similar to the Nebela ansata, chooses to top its shell with a few pointy shards from diatom shells. The complexity and variety of these structures have drawn the fascination of zoologists for decades. In a short paper from 1937, biologist H.S. Jennings gives a detailed account of the “fibrous-appearing seams” that form “a raised network on the inner surface of the shell and divide the shell into areas which resemble separate plates.” In Jennings’ description, as the smoothed outer casing breaks and fractures, we sense a creeping vertigo: the eye plunges through translucent accretions of silicon and filth, an embedded network of elaborate texture. Rather than tracing these folded layers, however, Jennings quickly turns to the more “clearly defined structures” of the shell’s “toothed opening”—finding these rigid peaks and valleys more appropriate material for scientific inquiry than the overlapping encasements above. This privileging of stable and linear structures (seen physically in the rigidity of the teeth and conceptually in the strictures of an invented lineage) that Jennings and his contemporaries fostered, as well as its ties to their study of eugenics, is in part responsible for the persistent taxonomic errors which have largely defined scientists’ interactions with the amoeba. That is, in an effort to order this field of seemingly endless diversity and complexity, Jennings and his cadre devised systems of inheritance that sought to bring a sort of artificial consistency and predictability to these manifold creatures. While this work, which centered around the inheritance of “teeth,” was at best inconclusive, it laid the groundwork for larger organizational systems (carried out through scientific papers, atlases, and committees) which ultimately folded the diverse polyphyletic amoebae into the single order, Arcellinda—a gesture which destabilized the taxonomy as a whole. Forests, however, offer the possibility of a different sort of fold for the amoeba. Writing on her time hiking in the Santa Cruz greenbelt, Donna Haraway speaks of a desire to walk “where the clean lines between traditional

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and modern, organic and technological, human and nonhuman give way to the infoldings of the flesh that powerful figures such as the cyborgs and dogs [she knows] both signify and enact.” Though hardly considered exceptional, these “powerful figures” draw their strength from flouting precisely the sort of myopic taxonomies Jennings sought to impose, and also bring into question many of the foundational dualisms which these taxonomies rest upon—the organic and inorganic, the machinic and human. On labyrinthine walks through the aspens of southern Colorado, my parents’ dog cannot be seen without her bone—a piece of treated, twisted rawhide upon which her saliva mixes with the compounds of almost-meat. And in rural Oregon my grandmother’s dog seems attached to her hip, which now houses a swiveling metallic ball and rod where bone and ligament once were. Much like the testate amoeba’s translucent shell, at once biotic and inorganic, these entangled beings complicate any notion of a “smooth outer casing,” an unalloyed substance in which to wrap oneself. Rather, they at once fluidly and chaotically extend beyond and contract within, to borrow a phrase from Haraway, “that mundane space we call our body.” As these familial creatures suggest, however, this radical potentiality of bodily form does not exclude the possibility of bodies being historical, raced, gendered, or organized. They do, nevertheless, call forth the need for new taxonomies that can both account for the complexity of matter and set soft boundaries on what could seem like a limitless capacity for extension. That is, a system that operates in a sort of middle ground, where formal differences of kind can still be established yet which remain faithful to the entanglements and intra-actions of matter. Returning to the forest, Eduardo Kohn charts out a similar middle ground of form as existing between conceptual “pattern production” and explicitly material processes. For Kohn, form comes to the world as a tendency of matter emerging from its own complexity, rather than something imposed from without. This patterning and propagation of matter can operate in spaces and temporalities that do not lend themselves to human cognition. As an example, Kohn offers the whirlpools of the Amazonian headwaters, where vortices emerge and collapse faster than the human eye can capture them. All of this must feel close at hand for the amoebae as well, who spend their lives constructing their dazzling encasements without the cognitive ability to understand what they have done. Form is something indifferent.

While Jennings was writing his text on the amoebae’s teeth, another study was being conducted on the shell’s formation, ultimately finding that its form was governed by surface tension. Amoebae execute a molecular search to determine the thinnest layer of dust possible to drape around their bodies.

II. Lab The Prince Lab at Brown is bounded by anterooms and vestibules. Tucked away yet elevated on the second floor of the engineering building, it is accessible only through backdoors, winding staircases, or an exterior fire escape. Inside of the lab, its baroque, labyrinthine quality lingers, unwilling to let its occupants freely traverse the expansive floor. Makeshift walls of pinewood and plastic, buttressed by stubby metal beams, turn inward, guiding bodies and making alcoves of the lab’s workspaces. Even these curvilinear interior zones provide little sense of directionality—disused combustion engines rest alongside intelligent lathes, digital laser cutters share electrical outlets with rusty rotary grinders. This swirling supply of objects refutes any linear history, accreting circuitously, bifurcating at every turn. The whittling knives which were once used to scrape excess metal from bolts and cogs now find purpose detailing 3D prints, replacing the plastic X-ACTO blades which now rest in a steel cupboard. Outmoded woodworking vices serve to clench digital cables between their plates, preventing them from being carelessly yanked. Amid this encircling chaos, this swerving entropy of technics, I began sketching models of testate amoeba on

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Bio/digital computation and flucuations of form

the lab’s computer-aided design system, appropriately titled Blender. The structures, particularly in their digital incarnation, had captivated me with their smoothed walls, their minimalist sheen—biological creations of pure exteriority. In their simplicity, I hoped, I would capture a distillment of form, its most rudimentary articulation. To remain faithful to their origins, the sketches were aided both by historical lithographs and recent nanophotography of the shells which I had uploaded to the computer. These renderings stood semi-translucently behind my cursor, a ghostly frame upon which I could trace the curving appendages and delicate terminals of the corona. And yet, once I began to print the models, any scaffolding or structural support quickly dissipated. As the extruder frantically folded lines of plastic filament upon itself, the interiors and exteriors that I carefully calculated in the program began to blur. Even the filament itself— derived from an alloy of organic and inorganic material— appeared as a sort of blending. Occasionally, it would slightly droop over its own hardened sides; at other times it would cave in on itself—the extruder always oscillating rapidly to compensate for these ebbs and flows. In Robert Smithson’s Quick Millions he describes plastic itself as an oscillating material, existing between “a solid specific and a glittering generality,” both “real and/or unreal, according to your mood.” In a 3D printer, however, plastics fluctuate not just with mood, but with time and temperature—glossy strings of smoking fiber harden quite literally into a “solid specific” as molds cool and become real. The printer addresses this material change by internally issuing occasional delays, where the extruder either retracts or relocates itself temporarily, waiting for a particular portion to ossify before applying more filament. Despite this capacity for change that both Smithson and my printer located within plastic, it may still seem more than a little ironic that the fixed model would strike one as somehow less formally coherent, less closed off than their digital doppelgängers. Computer systems have long been viewed as sites of radical mutability and boundless creativity. On my computer screen, I can scale, crop, and re-proportion the shells—possibilities that are more or less denied in its plastic incarnation. This irony, the openness of the specific and actual object, however, is something that Brian Massumi also locates in contrast to the digital. To Massumi, the digital is open only once it is no longer digital. Using the example of hypertext—which he sees as a more or less totalitarian regime, leading its user between two precisely predetermined locations—Massumi argues that it finds its détournement, its openness, once the link

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comes into contact with a human user, an analog meeting which creates possibilities unforeseen by any pre-programming done by the machine. Setting aside the rather generous reading of hypertext’s affective capacities here, Massumi’s argument fails to address the fact that these shells, even in their printed or “analog” form, feel unable to shake their explicitly digital nature, that their final form was designed, and thus necessarily pre-programmed. Drafted on a powerful desktop computer, the models were then compressed onto an external disk, only to be loaded and translated once again onto the printer’s chip, where they were read as mathematical relations dictated by a series of 0s and 1s. Even the physical extruder itself operates through binaries (EXTRUDE, DO-NOT-EXTRUDE) when releasing filament. More than their digital design and fabrication, however, the structures themselves felt eerily digital, as if they were native to the computer. This mark of the digital can be traced back even to the living amoebae, where the coronas were developed in utter thoughtlessness, a programmed response to specific properties (temperature, surface tension, presence of silicon, and concentration of biomaterial). That is, the amoebae, much like microscopic computers, design these structures in accordance to the binaries of their environment—their quivering bodies “read” their surroundings and “write” a proportional response. This thoughtless nature of the algorithmic, which could even be seen as the defining characteristic of the digital, is precisely the property I wanted to have structuring these amoeba shells. I had wanted to find some utterly pure calculation that would give rise to an equally pure form—something devoid of texture, edge, turbulence. And yet what emerged were muddled mounds, densely ribbed and visibly inconsistent. What these inconsistencies emerged from, however, was not simply— as Massumi sees it—the incapacity of the calculated or digital to give rise to form, but rather, as the printing process exposed, these differences or folds emerged from

within the system of calculation itself. In a more cosmic tone, Chapter 5 of Gilles Deleuze’s Difference & Repetition opens with this remark: “God makes the world by calculating, but his calculations never work out exactly, and this inexactitude or injustice in the result, this irreducible inequality, forms the condition of the world. The world 'happens' while God calculates; if the calculation were exact, there would be no world. The world can be regarded as a 'remainder', and the real in the world understood in terms of fractional or even incommensurable numbers.” Floating point errors and imprecise measurements abound in computer systems yet are often covered up with temporary patches and persistent averaging. 3D printers, however, rely on such a vast quantity of calculations, which have to be dealt with in realtime, that they find themselves incapable of hiding their mistakes. Rather, filament pours out too fast or slow, end-lines are missed, and gaps emerge. Much like the God of Deleuze, 3D printer calculations never work out exactly, producing objects with disparate textures and qualities, even though they are drawn from precisely the same model and fabricated in precisely the same manner. It is this inexactitude, as Deleuze points out, that difference is established and “the given is given.” Even the most precise computation is not immune to difference and individualization. Even the digital has a fold. JONAH MAX B’18 is in bad form.

TECH

A CONDITIONAL ATTITUDE WRITTEN AND DESIGNED BY Roy Washburn

Everyone’s getting rid of all the orifices. Neuter-attack on the orifice, the little outpoint for communications. No more ear holes so no more sound goop. Cameras, but no eye holes. No sight goop. Neutering the orifices by slamming holes square pegs into wrong holes. Everything’s future, which is cool I suppose, but I get no relief when I can’t pick my nose.

At night, the lights turn on in the building downtown that is the closest this place will ever get to an iceberg. Dirty, taciturn, and faceted, it does not host Textron, the military contractor next door, but something equally frightening: International Finance. I guess all money is essentially fake, but I am a child of the twentieth century, and [and/hence], a child of finances. My mom used to work at a company called Bear Stearns. My dad used to work at a company called WorldCom. This is short for World’s Computer. When it was still incorporated, WorldCom did things like making sure everyone at the company who occupied the same level of company-prestige also occupied the same class of rolly-chair. Occupation, and a mechanism of privileging: this is a kind of Information Technology. I work at the library, and I move around information at my job. Clicking and scratching from one end of the desk to the other, quid pro rolly-chair, I run through a set of allowances and disavowals. I maneuver some binaries that are really tastefully limiting, and this rubs me the right way; for instance, rubbing books on magnets makes them go ON or OFF. Also, data can be entered CORRECTLY, or NOT, and do I hear hell if I do something at the wrong end of that one. It is my general inference that, despite what you might expect, information and technology are functionally opposites. One of them is a fact and one of them is a movement, and these things are just tectonically incomparable. They are just equal but separate: perhaps non-polar, and simply, categories.

There is a category for everything these days including: Soups Stews Beverages & a single slice of pizza. For these categories (of: heat-holders), the organizing principle is, “how fast does the birth of the micro-waves make this thing HOT?” These are good categories because they make all entries act the same when they’re zapped. They make them act: just normal. My job includes counting, and categories. My job being: something I just have to do. In the world of categories, me as a human being is being in my human category, and 1. My need to do my job is center-of-all-categories, and this is a capitalist framework. “Gail, I had a dream last night I was late for work. My all of me, screeching black rubber as I wore down the Moving walkway with my boots as I was so hot, so Late for work.” –today at work. The thing about using a computer is that it makes your brain act normal. Massages same oils into the brain—same oils—so it acts same: smack-dab normal, as if everyone does the same job. The same job is like making categories. In the car, someone’s job is having the AUX cord. This is the line-in to the sound system. One person controls this line of the orifices, Holds this job of phenomenon-maintenance, of the line (I am suspicious, in a suspiciously-framed mind-of-mine...) into the WorldCom.

A rearrangement of capitals Is a poetic device Right, to sidestep The commodity Of easy reliefs. Becomes clear that (CAPITALS / noncapitals / CAPTIAL:capital) Belief in odd logic is, functionally, a resistance.

The destruction of owning stuff can happen through a minute and acute awareness. Not accurate, but every observation takes up a lot of the available space. Spread out awareness of, for example, the building-principles of things, will destroy the lowly object, I think, or at least a levity towards exactitude will; sometimes this practice taps on each individual toe, and sometimes it’s a bit more of a rarefied Lego-block potential. Potentiality is indifference to current states of coming. It is a soft pillowing-into the thing that is not quite known. The pursuit of culmination, in these terms, is really a bit feckless. I can come lots of times. Last night I came ten times. I have this really tiny thing that has a propeller on the end of it or I guess it feels like that. In the category framework that weighs irregularly. I mean, discontrolled, I generate coming, on and on again, and economically it just does not make sense. And I come on, come in, and, brutally, the observation of illogic turns me on, so, and so on. And later on, it comes on my debit card. Literality in the literature ecosystem forms all-fingery like love.

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Lancaster does not like to be literal. She is always one consistent step up the metaphoric ladder. One row of knitting completed past the cast-on. This makes it a tactile treat to read out of her. The one-step away is consistent and sugary, finger-spun sugar wheels, and I mange it at a regular pace. Deaf James is always quite literal, this makes it a treat to read out of him. The wood-grain of the world is ten thousand times microscopic. If you are one sugar-step away, it is difficult to theorize what the wood-grain detail would be like, in sweetnesses and reads, because it would not be true, it would be virtual. One step away, you always read in circular currents that are good to the mouth, like Portuguese bread. If you are literal, the wood-grain is factum-one. Is so true that you can rub in the Danish oil with your own broad thumb. Facts are not categories. Consistently the world will be first spelled, then lacquered together.

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THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

EPHEMERA

SUN-LESS SUNSET On the Collected and the Collective BY Wen Zhuang ILLUSTRATION BY Kalina Winters DESIGN BY Amos Jackson

“One day, I’ll have to put it all alone at the beginning of the film. He told that if they don’t see happiness in the picture, at least they would see black.” – Chris Marker, Sans Soleil Minutes into Chris Marker’s 1982 film Sans Soleil (Sunless), we hear the film's narrator, Sandra Krasna, reciting someone else’s lines, with a message that carries three perspectives: the speakers', the addressee's, and some unnamed audience's. The picture that “he” was referring to is one of three Nordic children, crisp Icelandic air breezing through their thin blond hair, frolicking across an open grassland, their eye contact zoning in and out of focus before the viewer. This image is shown for not much longer than two or three seconds, with the rest of the section narrated against a black screen—the black that was promised to those who could find no happiness in the empty screen. The placeless, drawn-out narration simultaneously confuses the viewer and holds the viewer hostage before the screen, as if nothing might symbolize everything, or at least the possibility of imagining everything. The scenes come at us unceremoniously, sometimes pushing us towards ASMR bliss, other times towards bad posture and irritation. We find ourselves seated on a bus, looking out towards Japan, South America, and anywhere in between, being told stories that could have only occured on the other side of the world. Marker situates us within a certain frame of mind but refuses to fix a dominant interpretation, continually opening back up to a blank screen, a sense of sheer openness borne out of rupture and incongruity. If we didn’t find happiness by looking at the three Nordic children or at a previous

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image of Japanese masked dancers, at least we would see a blank screen, a site for projection. If we didn’t find happiness while looking at the flat grasslands of Iceland or while gawking at lovers on a bench, at least we’d be met with an empty stage, a meaningless color where we might indulge ourselves in what we felt happy with or, at the very least, the absence of anything at all. This black screen, for the moments it appears, offers itself as a canvas on which viewers may take up the task of illustrating what they want to see, guided by the narration and visuals provided before and after these moments of black. Viewer A might draw a snail—one eye three inches lower than the other, skin all patchy—a snail that made them happy. Viewer B might envision a puddle or a light shining through a window. Marker’s job here is to introduce a space of indeterminacy. Some of the most pronounced images we see early in the film—a still shot of a megaphone, followed by a pair of hands—imply a sense of both direction and purpose, as if one is being invited to some grand political project. A sort of call for utopia, or a radical new blankness that is nevertheless generative. The viewer situates their role against the backdrop and the images speak: “Follow me! Come, follow me…” +++ Stepping into Penelope Umbrico’s installation Suns from Sunsets on Flickr brings the viewer to a wall overcrowded with sunsets, low-resolution mass-reproductions clumsily plastered to a gallery wall. What had once been a tastefully sparse gallery setting is now saturated, overflowing with cheap printouts, peeling at the edges. It’s as if Umbrico has answered Marker’s call to fill the

blank space, the space once sunless, all too thoroughly. In place of a generative openness, we arrive at the generic, the cliche, the tired and exhausted. Too much sun; too much clarity. While Marker’s blank screen appears to us with no content, Umbrico’s wall of sunsets inundates us with too much. The reaction to both of these extremes is determined by how the viewer inserts themself into the work, though neither Marker nor Umbrico offers specific guidance on how one must navigate the film and the photographs. Initially, it is tempting to situate the explorations of Umbrico against those of Marker: Umbrico offers us a lot, in crystal clear depiction; Marker offers us everything, but with no clarity. In offering us a lot, Umbrico strips her photographs completely of individual nuance. Marker, though offering us plenty of space to personalize and to generate, suspends us within a singular collective event. There is a nearly 30-year generational gap between Marker, who worked in the 1970s, and Umbrico, who worked in the early 2000s. This makes us consider: have we exhausted that radical emptiness? Is any personal memory, any individual experience, an exclusive instant of history, impossible? Marker subjects each viewer to a collective experience by presenting an unyielding idea of what his own memories constitute. We’re all held within a similar experience, and we cannot insert our own experiences into the void of the screen. However, in Umbrico’s work, there is an evident desire to add more. Umbrico refuses emptiness, filling up the wall corner to corner—and yet, each passing spectator feels the need to take their own photograph, thus adding to the digital commons that Umbrico initially drew from. There is a feeling that this number is not enough, as if this composite image of human happiness and a common natural phenomenon is never enough to make one realize the futility of any individualizing act. Even if you are alone, you can turn the camera on yourself. Even if the sunset you witnessed yesterday cannot be found on the wall, you have an opportunity tomorrow at 5:18 PM to capture the sunset again. Both artists present a breakthrough in the politics of the collective. While the two artists have undeniably different visions—Marker presents the details of individual experience, and Umbrico shows us the impossibility of individuality—in both works, we begin and end on a blank slate. Our individual sketches melt into one another and we are back where we began, with the sunrise and the sunset beginning and concluding each day. It would be negligent to speak on the works of both these artists without situating their works within their respective political and situational timeframes. Marker was a part of the Left Bank film movement, a collection of French New Wave filmmakers whose work focused primarily on people and their immediate political, social, physical environment. Realizing the broad and difficult task of recording and representing humanity, the group of filmmakers focused largely on themselves and their personal recollections, and through this, they encouraged their viewers to undergo a similar process. The political and societal unrest present in his era, namely during the 1960s, led Marker and colleagues to uphold a sense of

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individuality, and use a singular voice to speak against the events happening around them. Umbrico’s work came at a time when the method of viewing media was changing at a drastic pace. The insurgence of media sharing sites like Flickr, Youtube, Instagram and Twitter, would have been an unimaginable future for the artists of Marker’s time, as it allowed each individual to shine light on their personal experience in a collective manner. Umbrico seems to be positing two questions: what do you know? And, what do I know? In Umbrico’s work, it is no longer a matter of giving and receiving between artist and viewer, but rather of a collective experience. This collective effort loses the singular within the universal and comes not to a solution, but to a process of solving. Drawing on visuals and emotions that we are all hyper-accustomed to and using a repetitive aesthetic experience, Umbrico flattens out the individual experience and situates it on the same plane as the collective experience. Through both of these works, ideas of kitsch, popularity, and stereotypes might appear anew as not something from which we should shy away, but something we should accept. We stare up, together, at these numerous suns all setting collectively, and are showered by what we expect each day at 5:18 PM—this light erases all I’s and You’s and collects only We’s. When we’re shown the image of “happiness” as the three Icelandic children, we are included in the present collective happiness, whether or not we connect to the image provided. When we pose before the backdrop of 541,795, or 2,303,057, or even 30,240,577 suns (from sunsets on Flickr), we are included in a collective process of documenting ourselves and this event. How long have we been existing on this flattened landscape? Was it new with Marker? With Umbrico? Have we, since then, developed a stronger collective consciousness? Sans Soleil ends where it starts: with the sun setting, a sun-less scene, a volcano covering the view of an entire town, dark hugging all that exists within it. Walking away, we each hold our own vacuous image of the Icelandic children, of green pastures, and of a bright-lit sky.

WEN ZHUANG RISD ’19 suggests running uphill while the sun is setting.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

ARTS

CARNIVORE Sometimes I lie on the bed and my body lists towards your softer side and I pretend that it is your magnetism and not gravity that is pulling me towards you. We are lying in bed but are two different bodies, each with their own needs, and so we bought two twin mattresses and one king-sized sheet. Your hand is pulling me closer and there is something about your touch mixed with my skin cells being dragged away with the rising post-shower water that calms me. A dissolving outer layer that I am shedding and it is getting everywhere and all over you. You can’t see it but maybe you feel it. There are chattering voices all around us that night, striating the air. The signs come slowly, slower than I’d expected. It is first the whispers, which themselves are first only at night. And then, not only at home, but also on skin, out and around, the whispers writing themselves onto me. Crawling voices and toes and paws on my shoulder blades, in the valleys of my collarbones. I am convinced you can hear them on me everywhere—rustling, gnawing. I apply concealer. You kiss my neck and when you pull away your mouth is flesh colored. When I first notice them, I’m making you a cake. The signs crystallize into a diamond and cut a hole into the bottom of a bag of flour. There are teeth marks forced through the paper sack; they’ve made paste in their mouths, mixing raw flour with spit. I skim a cup of flour from the top, hoping it’s not diseased or poisoned. I feel your forehead that night, check for fevers, restless eyelids. I throw the rest of the bag out while you aren’t looking. They are small and sweet and dead and smell like nothing yet because they are still so fresh. If you look at them without your glasses on they are just small grey clouds that moved too close to the ground and got caught. My droplets of skin condensed and rained down into dust. I tell myself that if I just blew on them, they’d float away. So I decide to anchor them down. “Will you come home with me? I’m scared of being alone again tonight.” My arm is stretched around your shoulders; my body is humming. You pick up on my vibrations but not on the words my fingers are carving into your arm as we try to walk together but jerk disjointedly around. “Will you watch me sleep? Make your eyes bright and erase all the smudges?” “Babe, you’re hurting me.” Your shoulder rips away. I am sitting in front of one, looking straight into its half-closed eyes and acutely angled and backwards neck. And I swear it smiles at me. With its teeth and chin. I stretch out my finger to see if it’s as soft as it looks. Touching the mouse now, as it twists in the trap, pacing my index finger along the bridge of its nose, fluffing the fur up one way and smoothing it back down the other. I reach over to the next trap and am comforting two now and I am sobbing. This one is different though, cold and stiff, its fur matted with blood. Asleep and dreaming, there’s technology to keep fingernails from growing, to siphon that life energy from hands and transform it into something close to immortality. When you are eighteen, choose a nail shape and it’s yours for life. Intellectuals are impractical—their hands for something other than labor, they cut nails triangular and long. No longer asleep, I startle awake to a snapping sound and brace myself to hear shrieks. But instead, there is only silence mixed with your light snoring and I can’t make out the grey that is writhing behind the grainy static air. You roll towards me and your features are all mashed up and trying to move but I can’t see a face in them, let alone yours. No longer fully sleeping, I dream that the traps are all empty. I wake up and this is not the case. Soon there’s nothing sad about them except I still don’t know what to do with their bodies. They are just

LITERARY

BY Emma Kofman ILLUSTRATION BY Claire Schlaikjer DESIGN BY Ella Rosenblatt

sleeping dead babies. I first put them in my sock drawer, wrapped in striped fuzz, to insulate them as they hibernate for winter. But then there were smells, reminders of something more sinister than sleep; so the stuffed socks went into the freezer and did their best to keep them warm and laundry-scented as the temperatures dipped below freezing. I was glad for the first time that there were many. To share warmth. We’re in a big, bright room that’s all frosted glass and sterile countertops and orderly cages. “We are here to buy a snake,” we tell the caged mice. There’s a surprisingly good variety—candy ones, improbable and sour sweet, some like whips, darting around and licking the fake rocks, others Zen garden keepers, shaping the sand beneath them. And then we see it, wrapped around a log, green and yellow and killer. “We are here today to give new meaning to bodies…” The mice stop running in wheels and drinking drops from metal tubes mixed with gravity and look up at me. The surrogate sacrificial lambs ready for the slaughter. “…To repurpose.” The snake is in a cardboard carrier and hissing in the backseat. We didn’t buy a cage. We watch it take its first laps around the kitchen tiles, proud at this new thing we are already so good at. We didn’t buy any food either. We wake up and it is filled with mice. Just body after body lined up and compressing up against the scales, straining them until they are about to fly off in glittering razor-edged flecks. The mice are all oriented differently within the lining of the snake and I can make out in some places only a foot, in others, snout and whiskers, tail. All the parts artistically jumbled into a composite still life. We notice the snake isn’t moving but rigid and dead from its digestive exertions. I do not eat for three days after this, feeling myself as full as the snake. On the fourth day I am finally hungry and it is like those babies you hear about—the ones who try and eat the breast right off the mother. The lone survivor and I are staring at each other. The mouse misses its mother and we mourn her. I tell him, “There are ways of being alone in this world.” I learn mice can chew through concrete, can climb up walls with their nails and teeth as grip. Our bed no longer an island, we sleep between the frictionless walls of the bathtub. The next night, as I slide down into the tub you realize I wasn’t just being spontaneous. You stop staying over. The snake starts to smell, goes into the freezer. Full and ready for winter. Maybe come spring it will give birth to something. The mice already inside are caked in translucent crystals. I try eating everything. Emptying the house to starve the last one out, to fill myself up. The lone survivor is taunting me, is likely the reincarnation of Houdini. I go to sleep with baited traps, wake up to empty ones. I am feeding him still and I suppose this makes him my pet. We are cohabitating. I booby trap the bathroom save for a path from tub to toilet and toilet to sink. I get a medley of traps, some

live ones that are opaque boxes. As long I don’t open the box and cut my nose off then I will never know what’s inside—if it’s empty or if there is something rotting within. It stops eating the cheese, peanut butter, olives, its tastes refining. I try new foods, hoping it’ll slip up, apply too much pressure or move too slowly. Hoping it will keep eating something other than me. I fall asleep wondering if teeth strong enough to move through concrete could gnaw through bone. The fridge is empty now, the freezer still full. I use my nail like a melon baller on the frozen mice, carve out chunks of icy fat and fur and bait the traps with them. I start counting down until Houdini’s hunger turns inward, cannibalistic. If you run your fingertips over your teeth, they too feel like a trap. He will not eat his kin. When days later the mouse flesh has shifted into puddles and remains undisturbed, I try using the snake. It looks like a beef Wellington and I cut cross-sections of it and lay them on top of the snap traps. The thin disguise is enough and Houdini’s appetite takes over. In a week the freezer is empty too, the snake entirely consumed. I wonder how he has made space within himself for such accumulation. In my dreams I roll over onto my side and you are back in the tub with me, and I am grateful. I puncture you accidentally, with a toothy kiss. You begin to deflate, sinking beneath my arms and crumpling inwards. I grasp at anything, at all of you. The only thing within reach is a tuft of hair. It rips out of your head and is suddenly light, detached from the weight of you. I wake up and Houdini is dead fur in my hands. No bulging eyes, nothing noticeable except for a temperature difference. I have wanted nothing but this separation, and yet. I am staring at my palms and trying to transfer the warmth from the rest of my body into them. Make my hands a black hole for heat and have them boil. Houdini stays cold. I bring him to the radiator, and lay him on top of it like a chestnut or an egg. I don’t know what else to do. I turn it on high, wait for him to reanimate. He is already there and on his way back.

FEBRUARY 16, 2018

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT