kitsch Magazine: Fall 2016

kitsch pop culture, politics, college, etc.

vol. 15 no. 1

Aurora Rojer Co-editor-in-chief Zooming In Editor

Maura Thomas Art Editor Lead Copy Editor Jagravi Dave Co-editor-in-chief Zooming Out Editor

Matthew Pegan Assistant Zooming Out Editor

maura

Jael Goldfine Watch & Listen Editor

Brendan Murphy Assistant Zooming In Editor

Melvin Li Fiction & Poetry Editor Managing Editor Natsuko Suzuki Design Editor

Zoe Ferguson Bite Size Editor Amy Wood Layout Editor

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advisor

koch rsity unive micha, el cornell english

letter from the editors At our first editors’ meeting, we had the happy realization that this was the thirteenth year of kitsch—and so our theme “13” was born.

The theme, 13, inspired interpretations ranging from José Armando’s analysis of superstitions (“My Belief is Their Superstition”), to Fauna, Elise, and Annika’s takes on puberty and adolescence (“Shaving Off Gender Norms,” “Thirteen and Thriving,” and “What It Means To Be Thirteen”), to Agrippa and Melvin’s explorations of video games (“Thirteen and Online,” and “Leaving the Vault”). Of course, some of the articles branched out beyond “13”—for example, Adam’s revealing take on the irony of two of Cornell’s benefactors’ legacies (“Embracing Goldwin Smith”). His piece deals with cultural discrimination, both past and present, a conversation which took on a frightening realism given the context of November 2016.

Close to layout week, the United States elected Donald Trump to be the next president. We had watched his campaign and saw the way that he changed the expected and accepted political discourse. The (liberal) media assured us that a Donald Trump presidency would never happen—yet here we are.

But yes—we are here. Thirteen years ago, the founders of kitsch, Katie and Samantha, created (in their words) “this locus of counter-culture” where we, and all the writers, editors, and artists that came before us, found a space. While we were creating this issue, the media around us was saturated with toxic political rhetoric, and so we made the decision to not contribute to this pollution. Naturally, the political issues at stake during this campaign did find their way in, for example in Jael’s criticism of white feminism (“White Girls Watching Lena”) and Stephen’s retrospective on his conservative Catholic school (“How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love God”), and yet the majority of these pieces are personal, introspective, and distinctly apolitical. It in this defiant apoliticality that we make our strongest statement: we as people, we as cultures and counter-cultures, do and will continue to exist. This is kitsch.

Here’s to another 13 years.

aurora and jagravi

In This Issue...

On the Plaza 6

I Still Haven’t Grown into My Name 7 Don’t Call Me Kitsch-Mael 8 Emoji Unease 9 Every Line Spoken by Cho Chang 10 What it Means to Be Thirteen 11 Thirteen and Thriving: A Tale of Two Tweens 12 Ben Affleck: Villain or Victim?

13 Many Miles to Go for Public Service 14 Naked Frisbee 16 Referendum Red 18 My Mom, the Ghostbuster 20 Great Sexpectations 22 Embracing Goldwin Smith 24 Finding Yourself In College 26 Origin Stories 28 My Belief is Their Superstition Leaving the Vault How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love God Thirteen and Online Vampires, Werewolves, and... the Economy?

Shaving Off Gender Norms Being Habesha in a Black and White World Commodifying the Human Experience

30 32 34 36 38 40 42 44

Hey There Nostalgia White Girls Watching Lena Watching Television as Text Art in the Internet Age

45 46 48 50

A Night at Mrs. Georgia’s Geneva The Scarred Land

52 54 54

6 • Bite Size

Bite Size • 7

I Still Haven’t Grown into My Name

my body? mature. my name? adult. me? overgrown child.

by Julia Shebek art by Aurora Rojer

My name is Julia Camille Shebek, and this is a problem.

Julia Camille Shebek is a really fantastic name. My parents nailed it. The problem is, I haven’t exactly hit the target they gave me with that name—that target being maturity.

Just take a moment to imagine someone named Julia Camille Shebek. You may be imagining a brilliant scientist, or a queen, or someone who brings her three perfect children to her awards ceremonies to meet her good friend Meryl Streep.

Now imagine a raccoon in a potato sack. I’m somewhere in between.

I can write a kickass essay on the role of gender-bending in Shakespeare’s comedies, but book smarts are not the same thing as practical street smarts. The truth is, street smarts matter more, because they’re visible to everyone all the time. Sure, an employer might like my GPA, but if I come in for a 10 a.m. job interview two minutes late with spaghetti stains on my dress, I’m not going to get the job.

I go to Cornell, but I also drink milkshakes for dinner.

Adults are too responsible to make those choices.

The only people who eat milkshakes for dinner are teenagers whose parents left them home alone for a night and cartoon characters with names like Slop or Ducky Crag.

In many ways, I’m basically a child—still lazy and completely unmotivated to take care of things like a normal adult would, filling

real tasks with temporary solutions. For example, earlier this week, a terrifying demon-bug showed up in my room, and after whacking it with a shoe, I decided I was too busy to clean up its tiny lifeless corpse. Instead, I used the shoe to point out to myself where the dead bug was. That way, I could find it later when I was more inclined to be productive and clean its many legs off of my floor.

What I’m doing now is filler, a replacement for what I should be doing.

When I drink a milkshake for dinner, it’s a substitute for an actual meal. When I artfully arrange my shoe, it’s a replacement for real cleaning. All of my procrastination and laziness is nothing more than stalling before the inevitable day when I finally live up to my name and come up with the solution to an easily fixable problem.

At 19, you’re supposed to be able to fend for yourself, and I cannot. I expected college to be a big, transformative journey where, by graduation, I would know how to pay taxes and have a long-term relationship. Yet, here I stand.

But at the moment when I realize that Cheeto casserole and milkshakes are not acceptable substitutes for dinner, everything will change. As soon as I realize that my life would be much better if I stop using temporary solutions, Child Me will be swallowed up by the sheer glorious power of my maturity. At long last, Adult Me—the real Julia Camille Shebek—will finally prevail. 

8 • Bite Size

Don’t Call Me Kitsch-mael on identity crisis and misspelled names

by Carina Chien

If you’ve ever walked into a Starbucks, dead from exams and homework assignments, you’ll automatically feel at home in that community of languishing souls. Even as Ithaca’s water supply diminishes, you’ll notice them drowning their sorrows and ability to sleep in a cup of coffee that’s suspiciously never empty. But screw the environment as long as it’s for the aesthetic of tragedy which Starbucks generously provides. Basically a second home, it’s also a safe place to chill. It’s where some of us live, morning and night. It’s a good place to meet up with people. But just like parents who confuse you with your siblings, Starbucks never seems to get your name quite right.

Sometimes it’s hilarious, and sometimes we accept this fact with dramatically cynical resignation. More often than not, though, some lurking sensation of frustration does creep up. But why do we get upset in the first place?

After all, it’s usually clear enough which coffee is whose.

The spelling error may register as indifference from society. Anyone who spells your name incorrectly, be it a publisher, a professor, your parents, or the barista, can serve as a casual reminder that you are unknown and unrecognized. Misspelled names get to the core of personal identity for what I categorize as four separate reasons, each of which revolves around insecurities of identity.

Reason 1: The Coffee-Induced Identity Crisis

You might acknowledge that your name can belong to other people, but you’ll also recognize that your name can be spelled a variety of different ways. Chances are you’ll insist that your name, spelled exactly the way it is, belongs explicitly to you. The way you see it, differently spelled versions of your name are completely different names. If you walk out of Starbucks thinking, “I don’t even look like a [insert misspelled name here],” then this is you.

Version 1: Amie is a professional masseuse, paid modestly on account of her seriousness, which customers complain is distracting from a total Zen experience. She’s a gruff 47-year-old woman who was a heavyweight wrestling champ in her prime. Amie, with her strangely charming unibrow, her quirky frown, and her robust frame, is never amused. She is a ballet enthusiast and enjoys cuddling with her pet corgi on the weekends.

Version 2: Aimee is the epitome of sophistication and always takes her coffee black. She speaks French, Italian, and German, and has lived in Europe for five months doing a cultural study. Her favorite artist is Henri Matisse, and she’s super chic on account of the fact that she wears sunglasses all the time, even in the winter.

Version 3: Amy is a preppy, saccharine, hard-working student who smiles a little too much in a way that’s just a bit off. She’s probably the kind of person who walks into glass windows and doors, and most people might think she had been dropped down the stairs when she was a kid—they’d be right. Being a student, Amy isn’t a real person yet and thinks that college is basically the real world.

Reason 2: The War Flashbacks

If you were ever an Icky Vicky, an Ewis Lewis, or a Kansas Candace, then name errors are a great source of your Paranoid Touchiness About Spelling Disorder. In this case, Starbucks is just another tormentor from your past. Your name, essentially a presentation of your identity, is rejected in this situation. Negative recognition creates more intense feelings of insignificance that carry undercurrents of deprecation. You’ll vehemently insist that Vicky is not your name, but Starbucks is relentless and, like an unhelpful psychiatrist, your coffee will subject you to childhood trauma while you drink its therapy.

Reason 3: The Grammarian

The Grammarian might just hate spelling errors and think of the names of people as subject to the rules of grammar. Do you get offended when anyone’s name, not just your own, is misspelled? Do you then continue to rail on about the degenerative “culture of autocorrect” that Starbucks facilitates? If yes, this is you.

In an age when Kanye and Kim can name their child “North West,” and Spike Lee can name his kid “Satchel,” the Grammarian suffers a traumatic amount of eye-twitching— maybe from the coffee, maybe from the misspelled name, maybe from her dismal outlook towards the future.

Reason 4: It’s Just the Morning Honestly, you might actually just hate everything because it’s the morning—everything except for the actual coffee.

Anything could set you off.

Names function as an important source of recognition, and the corporate coffee psychiatrist emerges triumphant by forcing the individual to confront her simultaneous selfconfidence and insecurity in her own identity. It’s no wonder, then, that coffee and coffee shops are so often associated with feelings of profundity. Got a problem? Just order a pumpkin spice latte from your fairy god-therapist. 

Bite Size • 9

Emoji Unease

what gets lost in pictorial communication

by Keyra Navas

art by Maura Thomas

Using the restroom is not a solitary ritual for me—that is to say, like many of my fellow youths, I sit on the throne with my cellphone in hand. Surprisingly, I don’t really engage with my phone at other times of the day; but during trips to the restroom, my phone becomes more appealing. And as I seek brief entertainment through my cellular device, I impulsively choose to go on Tinder. I enjoy browsing other singles’ photos, but more importantly, I get a kick out of people’s bios.

I’ve enjoyed seeing “I can cook minute rice in 58 seconds” or “I’m on here because I got kicked out of Christian Mingle.”

But then the enjoyment ends when I come across a description that is constructed only with emoji. I don’t expect others to experience my worry, but I do want others to recognize that verbal elaboration is nearing obsolescence in day-today messaging.

I recall a time I matched with a seemingly agreeable young man who, unfortunately, by the end of our conversation perceived me as an emotionless being. The conversation started with the usual exchanges of “Hey” and “How’s it going?” It made its way to a discussion of our educational pursuits and aspirations. I did not find his constant use of emoji striking, considering that everyone else takes the same textual approach, but he admitted that the lack of them in my messages was strange. At first, he asked me if I was okay.

I responded by affirming that everything was fine and asked why he believed something could possibly be wrong with me. Then came the million-dollar response: “Well, you’re not using emoji, so I took that as you being upset about something or perhaps being disengaged with our conversation.”

Unfortunately, this charmer was not the first person to think that there was something wrong with me. I have

even had friends recommend that I send “goofier” responses.

At points, I have succumbed to the social pressure of using emoji in order to seem inviting and interested.

It seems that pictograms have replaced the formerly reassuring “LOL” and “haha.” These social security mechanisms ultimately become safety blankets. They make it easier to take back audacious, even aggressive responses. For instance, I have witnessed people send a clearly insulting message and attach the eggplant emoji afterwards. Somehow, the addition of an emoji helps make insults more passive-aggressive when they might otherwise be straightforward messages of confrontation.

It is undeniable that emoji are spirited, symbolic, and succinct. What is questionable is their apparent use to replace any need to elaborate or personalize emotional states. Emoji use can require artistic as well as linguistic dexterity, but these shortcuts become a problem when I ask my 14-yearold cousin to describe to me how she feels and she sends me an emoji instead of words because, she says, it’s easier.

My intent is not to advocate for the extermination of the famous poop swirl, but rather to reveal the reality that there is an overwhelming self-consciousness and pressure to entertain our message recipients in order to be appreciated, to be “understood.”

Developing abstractions through old-fashioned word usage requires the writer to understand exactly what message they want to convey. No, texting does not have to be a prim-and-proper, emotionally laborious task. If we get in the habit of expanding on our opinions, feelings, and activities by replacing an emoji with a phrase or even a simple word, it would not feel like such a tedious undertaking. 

10 • Bite Size

Every Line Spoken

by Cho Chang in all 8 of the Harry Potter Films Compiled by Jael Goldfine

art by Zoe Ferguson

“Two pumpkin pasties, please? Thank you.”

“Harry, erm, watch yourself on the stairs, it’s a bit icy at the top.”

“Yes?” “Sorry, I didn’t catch that.”

“Oh, erm, Harry, I’m sorry but someone’s already asked me. And, well, I’ve said I’ll go with him.“ “Harry!! I really am...sorry!”

“It’s Professor Trelawney!”

“Expelliarmus!”

“Yeah, I’m okay. Anyways, it’s worth it. It’s just, learning all this, makes me wonder if he’d known it...”

“You’re a really good teacher, Harry. I’ve never been able to stun anything before!”

“Mistletoe.”

“What are nargles?”

“Harry...”

“Yes, but Luna, it’s lost! For centuries now.

There isn’t a person alive today who’s seen it. It’s a sort of crown, you know, like a tiara.” 

Bite Size • 11

What it Means to Be Thirteen in the age of the selfie

by Annika Bjerke

art by Maura Thomas

Since the introduction of Facebook in 2004, the past 12 years have been a whirlwind of social media. You have the popular platforms—Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter—as well as the alternative—Tumblr—where, according to my thirteenyear-old sister Lilly, confused pre-teens develop their “aesthetic.” My first tryst with social media occurred when I joined Facebook at the ripe age of 13, a fact I only recently discovered thanks to Facebook’s Memories feature. Honestly, I only made a Facebook account so that I could keep up with my friends on Farmville. No one at age 13 was posting photos of themselves, and if they were, they were the kind you took on the Photo Booth application of a MacBook in the Apple Store.

But times have changed since I was a thirteen-yearold in 2010. The modern thirteen-year-old is a new breed. I talked to my younger sister, Lilly, to gauge the gap between existing in adolescence then and now, and to measure how social media has changed what it means to come of age.

I started by asking Lilly some simple questions, comparing them to what my own answers would have been at her age. On paper, Lilly is quite similar to 13-year-old me: her favorite song is “Send My Love” by Adele, a popular pop song of the day. Mine—and I’m not ashamed to admit it— was “Dynamite” by Taio Cruz. Her favorite movie is Divergent, while mine was Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows; both are popular series that take place in alternative universes, albeit one dystopian and the other magical (and, can I just say, better).

The most significant difference between me and Lilly is the fact that she has more profiles on more forms of social media than I did. She’s more logged-in, yes, but she’s also logged into platforms that didn’t even exist when I was 13—among them Instagram, Snapchat, and musical.ly. Lilly’s favorite form of social media is Instagram. I am nearly 20, and Instagram is my favorite form as well. Maybe I’m stagnant or maybe thirteen-year-olds are maturing at an alarmingly rapid rate; either way, I can see her tapping into a consuming form of self-portrayal at an early age.

I imagine Lilly is a prototypical, modern thirteenyear-old on Instagram, posting pictures of stuffed animals, pet cats, and the occasional blurry selfie.

Discovering this in our interview revealed nothing new or surprising about my sister. Things got more interesting when our conversation quickly moved to the interactive (or perhaps not-so-interactive) aspect of Instagram: the followers. This is where I began to notice the consuming nature of social

media—a stark difference from my days on Farmville.

According to Lilly, there is a whole science behind followers. When Lilly meets someone new—boom: she gains a new follower. Every new social interaction is rewarded by the instant gratification of a number bump for her “followingto-follower” ratio. This revelation had me thinking: are we instinctively dehumanizing people we meet and containing them into the tiny box of numbers found in the corners of our Instagram pages? When did the meaning behind the word “follower” change?

My one certainty is that the meaning of “follower” has indeed changed over time. A follower was once defined as a person devoted to another’s ideals or cause. When I was 13, follower had a negative connotation. It meant someone who couldn’t think for themselves, someone who wanted to be like someone else. A follower was a copycat.

Nowadays, and I can even admit this is true for me, a follower is synonymous with a virtual number, rarely accompanied by a face. In fact, when I type the word “follower” into Google, the top suggested search is “follower Instagram,” followed closely by “follower Facebook.”

Lilly told me, “On Instagram I don’t have that many followers. When I look at other people’s Instagram accounts, there are so many people who seem like they have more friends because they have more followers, so they seem cooler.”

Gone are the days when actual, physical followers—and I mean devotees—changed the world with their ardent beliefs. Or at least, gone are the days when we associated these people with the word “follower.” The word “follower” has been turned into something new. Online, more followers prove to everyone that you are someone worth following. Now, there is the impression of a correlation between virtual followers and real-life popularity.

What does this change mean for the modern, average thirteen-year-old? This is a lot of pressure for a near-twenty-year-old, let alone a pre-teen.

It’s easy to say that social media is superficial and distracting; and while I do think both of these are true, that isn’t my point, nor is it what I gathered from talking to my sister. What I suggest is that we are so intrinsically surrounded by this form of connection that it has changed what it means to be 13, to look 13, and to act 13. Nowadays, at this critical point in your development as a teenager, you are cultivating—along with your own identity—an audience of which you are hyper-aware at all times. Having learned this new vocabulary at 13, can you ever really shake it? 

12 • Bite Size

Thirteen and Thriving a tale of two tweens

by Elise Cording

art by Maura Thomas

The subtleties of human contact have never been better contemplated than they were in the tumultuous days of middle school. A potato chip shared during recess could be a token of utmost romantic attraction, a brief moment of eye contact from across the room a declaration of love, and physical contact the pinnacle of relationship success.

My first relationship, attempted with a fellow painfully shy sixth-grader, progressed over the steamy networks of Gmail chat. We emailed and chatted every day after school, avoiding each other completely during the school day. After a few weeks of this, our respective groups of friends pushed us toward each other at lunch. In a grand romantic climax, he asked me if I liked sushi. I responded, “Yes,” which he definitely already knew from our extensive email conversations about food.

Both blushing, we walked away. It was thrilling.

Yet the most important part of any middle school relationship was undoubtedly the school dances. Gossip Girllevel drama was nearly constant in the month foreshadowing a dance, swirling from the nonstop “who’s asking who?” conversations that infiltrated daily life.

The week before each dance, I was on edge every moment, waiting to see if he would stumble over to me with the momentum of his friends’ shoves and pop the question.

The first time those precious stammered words left his

mouth, they were so quiet I wanted to make sure I wasn’t imagining them. I nervously asked, “What?” forcing him to repeat, “Will you go to the dance with me?”

The poor guy—it was hard enough for him to blurt it out the first time.

All the struggles of asking, preparing, and deciding what to wear were just the beginning. These rituals preceded the most exciting two hours there ever were: the glorious night of the dance, when everyone had a reasonable excuse to make physical contact with his or her partner. Even during the awkward day dances, in the bright hours of 4 to 6 p.m., the dimly lit cafeteria became a haven of opportunity for fervent pre-teens gathering up the nerve to speak to their online loves.

Everything came to a head that night. The anxiety of avoiding each other every day, the uncomfortable public encounters forced by all of our friends—it was all worth it when “Halo” by Beyoncé came on and we found each other in the dark, crowded room.

A mumbled proposal to dance had hardly left his mouth when we tentatively organized our bodies into position, my fingertips on his shoulders and his hands hovering around my waist. Three feet apart without speaking or making eye contact, just swaying in the warmth between us, I couldn’t help but think, Man, thank God for middle school. 

Bite Size • 13

Villain or Victim? after 13 years, Ben Affleck returns as the world’s worst superhero

by Laura Kern

art by Aurora Rojer

In his 2013 Oscars acceptance speech, Ben Affleck choked up thanking his wife and children. His tears charmed the world as viewers dabbed at their eyes like proud grandmothers. In the 15 years between his two Oscar wins—the first in 1998 for Best Screenplay for Good Will Hunting, and the second for Best Picture for Argo—audiences watched Affleck grow up, get married, and have children, all while balancing a seemingly successful movie career. His career seemed to have come full-circle.

But Affleck’s career came to a monumental moment once again in 2016, when he took on the coveted role of Bruce Wayne in Zack Snyder’s Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice. Rotten Tomatoes panned the movie, calling it “tiresome,” “nonsensical,” and overall “disappointing.” Affleck’s performance as Batman also drew personal jabs: David Edelstein wrote in Vulture that Affleck seemed “weighty,” one of many insults toward Batman’s fuller figure, and that his face resembled a “sour gargoyle.” Harsh.

This is not Affleck’s first time at the superhero franchise rodeo. Thirteen years ago, he played comic book crusader Matt Murdock in Marvel’s Daredevil, coincidentally considered one of the worst Marvel movies of all time. Ben Affleck seems like the common denominator, then, between these superhuman failures.

Though Affleck is generally hailed as a talented actor, DC’s Batman v. Superman drew attention to some of his worst filmographic slip-ups, including the comically dreadful Gigli (2003) and the TV movie The Leisure Class, which he also executive-produced. The latter remarkably received a 0% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, rarer even than a perfect 100%. Could Oscar winner Ben Affleck really be responsible for the failure of both of his superhero films?

Considering the finer production details of these movies, the answer appears to be “No.” For starters, both films suffered from the effects of notoriously unskilled directors: Mark Steven Johnson wrote and direct-

ed DC’s Daredevil, as well as Ghost Rider (2007), another failed Marvel adaptation starring Nicolas Cage as the skeletal antihero. Similarly, Batman v. Superman director Zack Snyder is known for his career as a director of unexceptional superhero films like Watchmen (2009) and the most recent Superman reboot, Man of Steel (2013). Both directors continued their respective franchises, largely excluding Affleck from later movies, with similarly limited success: Johnson’s 2005 Daredevil spinoff Elektra was slammed even harder than Daredevil itself, and Snyder produced this summer’s shamefully disappointing Suicide Squad.

If that doesn’t convince you that Affleck is not to blame, just take a look at the costuming. Edelstein’s “weighty” comment related mostly to Batman’s bulky new suit—the hero’s classic cowl was so ill-fitted that it turned Affleck’s dimpled chin into a Play-Doh factory. And Daredevil’s red leather getup—complete with scarlet go-go boots and a long zipper up the front—made him look more like a dominatrix than a superhero. No actor could fill those costumes and retain any level of dignity. Affleck was damned from the first fittings.

But why does it even matter whether Affleck is at fault?

Truthfully, as a die-hard Marvel fan, I breathed a sigh of relief when Batman v. Superman took a box-office tumble; I munched gleefully on buttery popcorn as Suicide Squad hammered the last nail into DC’s coffin. I should be thanking Ben Affleck for his contribution to these critical failures, but I hesitate.

As a young girl who idolized comic book superheroes in the early 2000s, I felt the sting of each disappointing adaptation, especially Daredevil. I cannot help but imagine current audiences feeling the similar sting of DC’s failures. It seems easy to place this onus on Affleck as the most obvious connection, but blaming a single actor for the destruction of a cinematic empire is more than unfair. Though Affleck may have indisputably terrible taste in roles, his inclusion did not cause these superhuman catastrophes: even without Affleck, Daredevil and Batman v. Superman were destined to fail. Affleck was not responsible for my disappointment 13 years ago, and he is not responsible for it today—he was only a victim of the times. Celebrities: they’re just like us. 

14 • Zooming In

Many Miles to Go for Public Service why spring break just won’t cut it

by Chris Skawski art by Jonny Collazo

Cornell University, a land grant college, is tasked with disseminating the knowledge it accumulates to the community that surrounds it. It has a state-mandated duty to employ its vast resources and research in order to implement community-centered programs. It accomplishes this primarily through its series of Cooperative Extension offices, located in over 50 counties across New York State.

Cornell students, however, are under no such obligation.

“Why send so many people

abroad to do superficial work when they could be applying their talents to communities closer to home?”

Cornell Cooperative Extension of Tompkins County occupies a long, low, gray building at the north end of the Fall Creek neighborhood. Between the hours of 8:30 a.m. and 4:30 p.m. every day, the parking lot fills and empties as employees come and go. Long after the last full-time employee clocks out, however, the parking lot continues to fill and empty as people come, sometimes with children, to some of the many courses taught out of the building’s classrooms.

Offering instruction in everything from environmental science to nutritional cooking, CCE of Tompkins County attempts to live up to Cornell’s land grant charter. Passed in 1862 (and accessible via the Cornell website), this law allowed for public lands to be used for colleges and universities, provided that they “promote the liberal and practical education” of the local population. CCE also partners with local

youth clubs and community resources to produce fundraisers, fairs, livestock shows, children’s camps, and after-school programs.

The employees of CCE are full-time. They live and work in the community in which their chosen CCE office is located. CCE is involved with just about everything pertaining to quality of life and has offices in over fifty counties in New York. Traditional agriculture classes are almost absent from CCE NYC, but, as shown in a recent article written for the department’s site by Melissa Cheri, alternative agriculture and cutting-edge science increase productivity in urban centers.

One of the most noteworthy contributions to local development made by Cornell is its commitment to 4-H programs.

4-H, a nationwide organization that focuses on positive youth development and outdoor education, received federal funding to be established at the land grant colleges in each state.

For New York, that means Cornell. Many thousands of kids take part in Cornell-sponsored camp, club, and outreach activities.

And the benefits are clear. Tompkins County CCE puts out a yearly statement reporting the clubs, services, programs, and classes offered, and the community-based initiatives that make up CCE’s mandate. By providing programs that the county then does not have to pay for, CCE saved Tompkins County around $400,000 in 2014; this is not an insignificant sum at the local level, to say nothing of the human impact of outreach, mentorship, and education programs offered yearly to Tompkins County youth.

14,000 undergraduates grace Cornell’s halls every year.

According to the Public Service Center of Cornell, over 7,000 students and alumni volunteer in community organizing programs each year. This is not a small number, but it’s still just a fraction of the Cornell community. Even worse, in 2012, a mere 69 Cornell students took a federal work-study job at CCE, working from six to 20 hours a week during the course of their Cornell careers.

Zooming In • 15

Meanwhile, Associations for the International Exchange of Students in Economics and Commerce (AIESEC) and Alternative Spring Break programs have no shortage of applicants. Their quarter cards show up everywhere, and their (particularly AIESEC Cornell’s) chalking can be found most places on North Campus. They have a huge base of support in Cornell’s Public Service Center, and members participate in service learning across the globe in a variety of programs.

Just the “Volunteer Abroad” section of the AIESEC contains enough options to make one’s head spin, offering everything from literacy programs to home-building to elder care to environmental conservation. Every field of public service is open to Cornell students, at home and abroad, during breaks.

Those who decide to do a trip like this over spring break give up that week in late March which could have been spent on trips with friends out of town or country. But is one week really enough to improve literacy in a country where you may not even speak the native language; or to build a home when you have no prior construction experience? How much impact one can really make in those seven days is not entirely clear.

For this reason, organizations such as AIESEC can appear somehow fake, or at least misguided in aim. Why send so many people abroad to do superficial work when they could be applying their talents to communities closer to home?

Maybe a trip to a foreign country looks better on a resume, or seems more fun to college students. Perhaps a week of “making a difference” constitutes a satisfying and socially valuable detour on the road to career-hood. Or perhaps people

“The trouble is that

these programs end.

They allow us to spend our time, think our job done, and go home. ” simply want to make a difference when they can. But the idea of being able to make a quick difference before returning to one’s real life is itself a damaging one.

It can be comforting to donate or to volunteer for a week, to own a socially-conscious laptop sticker, to fly halfway around the world to “improve literacy rates,” to spend all day thinking about how much more money Cornell could be giving to 4-H programs. The unfortunate bottom line is that the real work of public service is long and slow and unglamorous. The trouble with spring break trips or AIESEC or even Into the Streets is that these programs end. They allow us to spend our time, think our job done, and go home. And that can be dangerous. Absolutely we should volunteer, or “voluntour,” or do what we can. But we should never think that the work has been completed. After all, there were 70 Cooperative Extension work-study positions available in Tompkins County. 

16 • Zooming In

Naked Frisbee the state of top freedom at Cornell

by Angaelica LaPasta art by Aurora Rojer

Before I moved into Risley Hall, my Freshman year at Cornell, I had no idea that I had any desire to be casually topless. As a child, I ran around the house, the beach, and the pool topless. When I grew up a little and being topless in public stopped being acceptable, I never questioned it. My brothers and every other male I knew could take their top off at will and I could not. It didn’t bother me, because that was just the way it was. When I came to Risley, I was exposed to a culture that questioned this social norm for the very first time. In Risley, I call women being topless normal. Outside of Risley, I call women being topless top freedom.

According to gotopless.org, top freedom is legal in America in 33 out of 50 states and is considered acceptable in cultures all over the world. For example, public nudity is normal and legal in Germany and many people, both male and female, forgo clothing in parks, the beach, and their yards. Despite the existence of top freedom in theory, within most of America many women are still arrested or even taken to the hospital for psychiatric evaluation by the police for being topless, as happened to Holly Van Voast in 2013 in New York City. This police practice has since been amended in New York City after a command to stop arresting topless

women was given to all 34,000 NYPD officers, according to The New York Times. Just last year in Canada, a country that has universal top freedom, an eight-year-old girl was forced to leave a public pool because she was not wearing a top, according to the Guelph Mercury Tribune.

My Risley-inspired interest in top freedom led me to do some research on Cornell’s public nudity policies. Cornell is very vague on the subject of top freedom and nudity in general on campus. The full rule on nudity from Cornell’s Campus Code of Conduct states that it is prohibited “To intentionally (1) expose a private or intimate part of one’s body in a lewd manner or (2) commit any other lewd act in a public place.” This rule seems to allow top freedom, which is great; however, it fails to specify what a “private or intimate part of one’s body” is, and what is actually allowed in terms of nudity in public altogether. This leaves the legality of public nudity up to the interpretation of the Cornell University Police Department. Depending on the rule enforcer’s definition of the word “lewd,” someone exercising their right to top freedom could be in big trouble. Most people at Cornell are probably not even aware of this rule, but I wasn’t about to leave it untested.

Although from my research it seemed top freedom

Zooming In • 17

“Although I’m used to being casual about nudity when surrounded by my accepting, non-conforming friends, to come out and do it on the Arts Quad felt very different.” should be allowed in Cornell, as I learned from the experience of many women in places where top freedom is legal, that doesn’t mean the right to top freedom will be respected. So, my friend and I decided to take the issue of the normalization of women’s nudity into our own hands: we planned a topless Frisbee game on the Arts Quad. I decided that the game would be open to those who weren’t comfortable playing topless, as well as to those interested in trying it out. We also wanted allies to attend, so we invited some men to join us, to enjoy the freedom they already had and to juxtapose the arbitrary differentiation between men’s and women’s nudity.

We told a group of our friends about what we wanted to do, and wound up with about ten people and two Frisbees on an overcast Saturday afternoon.

I was really scared to take my shirt off when it came down to it. Although I’m used to being casual about nudity when surrounded by my accepting, non-conforming friends, to come out and do it on the Arts Quad felt very different.

When we arrived on the quad, it was cloudy and raining, but we knew the weather was going to turn soon (there hasn’t been a Saturday above 65 since), and this was our last chance for a while. We began by simply playing Frisbee, but soon huddled up to discuss: “Should we just do it?;” “Yeah, why not? We don’t need an excuse;” “But it’s raining so it might seem weird;” “Let’s just do it.”

And we did. It was incredibly freeing to feel the cool breeze against my sweaty upper body. I realized that I hadn’t felt this sensation since I was a little kid—since my body had transformed into a sexual object. And, best of all, no one stopped us. We played an intense game of ultimate Frisbee as strangers passed by and gawked. Some averted their eyes, while others said “Jesus! Jesus!” or other exclamations of surprise. Nobody called the cops. Nobody stopped us. It was fantastic, but unfortunately not the reality for most females who try to take advantage of top freedom.

So why isn’t it normal here? Why is top freedom the domain of hippies and weirdos like my friends in Risley? If half the population can run around a college campus topless, why should it be so strange that the other half would do so as well? In Cornell’s Campus Code of Conduct, the policy on nudity in public is vague enough to be interpreted in favor of top freedom. In my experience, there were no negative

repercussions for being topless on campus. I see at least one and usually many more male-bodied students running (literally running) around campus topless on any given day.

Other than in the late hours of crazed college weekend or in Risley, I have never seen a female-bodied person topless on Cornell’s campus.

What I feel most fervently about in regards to this cause is that top freedom should not be treated as something weird.

I don’t want it to turn heads. I want top freedom to be normal and fine. The only way that top freedom can become normal is when females take advantage of the freedom we already have. The battle of legalizing top freedom in most of the United States is (mostly) won, but the war of normalizing top freedom is yet to be fought. I urge men to foster awareness about top freedom and realize the freedom they have. But most of all, I want women to know how freeing and fantastic it is to be topless in public. Half of the people who read this article most likely already know this, and the other half probably don’t. So, next time the weather is nice, look for some people playing Frisbee topless and maybe join us, bare-chested or not, to help normalize top freedom. 

18 • Zooming In

Referendum Red

reclaiming that time of the month

by Jessie Brofsky art by Tatiana Malkin

I was 15 when I first got my period, and I thought I was cursed. I cried myself to sleep that night, knowing every month I would feel like a brick had been shoved into my abdomen.

Thus was my introduction to menstruation, and I never spoke about it. Out of an almost paralytic self-consciousness, I find I can’t even buy tampons or pads at drug stores. Instead, I ask my mom to send them to me in care packages within the confines of a safely neutral shipping box. I say this because I am ashamed. And I am ashamed to be ashamed.

What is so unfortunate is that the majority of people who menstruate have similar experiences. There is no clear origin story for the menstrual taboo, but this narrative has been normalized. It’s a cycle passed from mother to daughter in a careful hush, fluctuating between shame and ignorance in a culture of concealment. When we get our periods, the first thing we’re taught is to clean it up, cover the mess, forget. We speak in hushed tones, slip tampons up our sleeves, exchange menstrual products out of sight. There is this notion that our feminine culture depends on clean, pure portrayals of the self.

But as Chris Bobel, associate professor of women’s studies at UMass Boston, says, “we work hard on femininity,” and we

“What might be better for people who menstruate might also be better for the planet.” don’t wake up like this; instead, “we make ourselves.” Periods represent the “unruly body,” what cannot be contained or controlled. The silence is a means to preserve the feminine image—at whatever cost. And typically when periods appear in the media, it is as a punch line against women, often in the form of a PMS joke, or in some way reinforcing the idea that periods are embarrassing. However, in a few narratives—such as the YouTube video, “First Moon Party,” and Judy Blume’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret—there exist relics of a time when periods signified a transition to womanhood and something to aspire to.

This past year, many public figures have been vocal about periods in an attempt to challenge the stigma. NPR even called 2015 the, “ Year of the Period.” Rupi Kaur wrote alongside her visual series, “period.,” that, “we menstruate and they see it as dirty. Attention seeking. Sick. A burden. As if this process is less natural than breathing. As if it is not a bridge between this universe and the last. As if this process is not love. Labour. Life. Selfless and strikingly beautiful.” This past year, 14 states have lifted the luxury tax on tampons.

And then, earlier this year, the students at Brown University voted to provide free pads and tampons and make them available in bathrooms. Cornell has since followed suit with the Student Assembly Referendum 30, which proclaims pads and tampons are to be free in all of Cornell’s bathrooms.

Although the referendum passed, many students and faculty on campus were confused and even outraged by this. Why did everyone have to pay for something that only benefited half of the population? Why would they need to have feminine hygiene products in the men’s bathrooms?

Why do we have to fix a system that isn’t broken?

To begin, the system is already unfair. Abigail Jones writes in her article, “The Fight to End Period Shaming Is Going Mainstream,” in Newsweek, “men can walk into any bathroom and access all of the supplies they need to care for themselves: toilet paper, soap, paper towels, even seat covers.

Women, however, cannot. In most schools, girls have to trek to the nurse’s office to ask for a pad or tampon, as if menstruating is an illness rather than a natural function.” The products to be stocked in Cornell bathrooms aren’t just for women.

They’re for anyone with periods—including trans-gender people—and the products must be stocked in all bathrooms.

There’s already enough for people who menstruate to worry about: the inconvenience, the pain, the hassle, the mess.

This referendum in its generation of dialogue has exposed students’ vast ignorance to the components of menstruation— only to be solved by menstrual health education.

One of the “cons” comments listed on the referendum by a student reads, “tampons and pads are not necessary. While they are the menstrual product of choice for most women, there are other reusable options that are far less expensive.

A menstrual cup, for example, costs around $35 and can last ten years.” While this is a fair point, I don’t think the function of the free pads and tampons is to take care of all menstrual needs. Rather, I think they will mostly be for emergency situations, and it seems unreasonable for the bathrooms

Zooming In • 19 to be stocked with $35 reusable cups that are likely to be thrown out after one use.

Tampons and pads are primarily the, “menstrual product[s] of choice,” because of their mainstream advertisements in the form of sanitized commercials with mysterious blue liquid. While cups would be cheaper if we used them as they were intended, I don’t think this is realistic.

I’ve found that most people haven’t even heard of menstrual cups, or cloth pads, or sea sponges. People who menstruate have been essentially hardwired to dispose quickly of all their used hygiene products because they don’t want to face what their bodies have dispelled. Chris Bobel talks about our, “power of discourse,” and how our trivial linguistic differences contribute to making menstrual fluids into something gross. We call it blood even though it is uterine lining tinged with blood—and it is neither dirty nor clean.

Our use of language weaponizes and contaminates periods, turning the thought of reusing products into confrontation we aren’t psychologically prepared for.

This fearful and disgusted attitude towards periods causes us to ignore a slew of problems with the current popular products. Not only can tampons harm us by causing toxic shock syndrome and be full of carcinogens and pesticides, but there is also a serious waste component from pads and tampons. As a student commented in the forum, a single woman will go through 17,000 menstrual products in her lifetime, and over 20 million of these products are disposed in landfills annually.

And it’s not just their disposal we have to consider. Bethany Jorgensen, a Cornell PhD student in Natural Resources, says, “it is important to consider their environmental impacts starting from their production, packaging and shipping; including their impacts on the person using them; and then what happens to them after they are used and discarded. Just because a tampon is 100% organic cotton doesn’t mean it is low environmental impact—cotton is a very water-intense crop and tends to require a lot of pesticides (even if they are organic ones). The nice thing about cotton is that at least it biodegrades, whereas the plastics in a lot of tampons and pads will persist on and on wherever it ends up in the environment.”

Sometimes it isn’t even possible for us to know what is in our tampons, which means we cannot possibly know its exact environmental impact. The FDA does not make tampon companies list the ingredients of their products. Chris Bobel says, “we don’t have good, reliable data that tells us the things we’re putting inside our body, in the most absorbent part of our body, for days at a time, for 40 years, are safe or not. It’s symptomatic of the silence around menstruation.”

We not only don’t know what we are putting into our bodies but we also don’t know what is being produced and thrown

away–and this impacts everyone. In this way, it seems that the two causes—feminine hygiene and environmental concerns—have the potential to fit together perfectly. What might be better for people who menstruate might also be better for the planet.

Socioeconomic status and race also tie into the taboo.

Chris Bobel says that for black women there is even more potential risk associated with speaking about periods because they are already viewed by society as hypersexual, animalistic beings. It also targets people of low socioeconomic status as they cannot afford the products to cover up periods and have to alter their lifestyles to escape the shame of exposure.

In her article, “The Case for Free Tampons,” Jessica Valenti writes, “I was lucky. For too many girls, the products that mark ‘becoming a woman’ are luxuries, not givens. And for young women worldwide, getting your period means new expenses, days away from school and risking regular infections. All because too many governments don’t recognize feminine hygiene as a health issue.” This isn’t just a women’s issue or a Trans issue or a race issue or an environmental issue or an SES issue–it’s the intersectionality of these identities. Cornell Senior Hannah Harris says, “when people can feel free to express their thoughts, education will increase, accessibility will increase and women as a whole will feel comfortable in their own skin.” I am proud that Cornell can be a voice for so many who can’t speak up.

I don’t think the answer to the period taboo is in the product, but the product’s problems are embedded in larger issues of silence and the need for an attitudinal change.

According to Chris Bobel, “we socially construct and reconstruct what menstruation means. We have the power to reframe it.” We must remember that periods are a vital sign. They indicate what is happening in our bodies and reflect our health much like a heartbeat does. It can attest to things like recovery from illness; I celebrated my friend’s period like it was magic after she missed it for two years as she struggled with anorexia.

It has even been the subject of art. Photographer Jen Lewis uses menstrual fluids as the subject of her collection, “Beauty in Blood.” It is obvious too in Rupi Kaur’s writing that there is something poetic about it. I don’t see how it can’t be seen as something beautiful.

The SA Referendum 30 isn’t just about Cornell students and faculty and women—it’s about equality, for everyone everywhere fighting stigma. It’s about finding certain aspects of the counter-narrative within Anita Diamont’s The Red Tent, where periods become an opportunity for rest, spirituality, and community. Maybe the discussion from this referendum will get us closer to feeling like we can live in a world like this, bonding beneath the new moon over a mutual biological phenomenon, in awe of something our bodies do to create everything else. 

20 • Zooming In

My Mom, the Ghostbuster

growing up visiting haunted houses

by Hannah Subega art by Aurora Rojer

You would think that the typical honeymoon would be spent somewhere tropical, romantic, or at the very least, comfortable. So a bedroom in a supposedly haunted, centuriesold Scottish castle doesn’t really scream “honeymoon suite.”

Alas, this was where my mother dragged my father after their wedding, and it was a blast, at least according to her.

Though she is a bit of a kook, my mom is indeed a lovely human being. During the day, she dedicates her career to assuaging people’s problems through marriage and family therapy, and at night she is available without fail to send paragraphs of advice over text to her homesick or worried college children. Her truly unique devotion to people is one of her defining qualities.

Another is her (obsessive) love of folklore, nineteenth century history, and the afterlife.

You could say that much of my young life was spent with said afterlife. I was born into a house with more Civil War ambrotypes on the walls than family photos. I have memories of coming home after preschool to eat lunch in front of a horror movie. And when I turned six and my brother Spencer was eight, my mother dearest decided it was an appropriate time to grant us the same treat that she granted my father; she began taking us to haunted houses. Over the span of twelve years, as I grew from a toddler to an adolescent and then to an adult, I’ve been from Louisiana to Pennsylvania to New York and more to spend the night in “haunted” bed-and-breakfasts.

The first house I visited is in Casper, Wyoming. It’s said to be haunted by several spirits, including its original owners, Mr. and Mrs. White, who finalized the building of the house in 1940. When Mrs. White passed away, a new couple dolled it up into a bed-and-breakfast. The husband, who allegedly disbelieved in ghosts before living in the house, is now a paranormal investigator. When we arrived at the house, my mom felt someone lie next to her in bed despite my father being in the adjacent room with my brother and me. And when she fell asleep, she experienced a horrifyingly vivid dream of a man trying to “merge into her body.” She woke up screaming and sweating, petrified to her core. Evidently, she was still shaken up some hours later, because my dad heard her in the bathroom several times during the night. Some time later, we discovered that women who stay in that room often have the same “dream” of a man walking to and from the sink. Perhaps a scarier discovery was that my mother claimed she hadn’t gotten up at all that night. Cue scary organ music.

And despite this, she was jealous some years later when my dad and I heard a storm in a Gettysburg inn not too far away from the battlefield itself, and felt the bed shake from thunder. Except this storm had never happened; it had been completely still and dry outside. Mom excitedly pondered whether it could have been cannonfire from one hundred fifty years ago.

“I was born into a house with more Civil War ambrotypes on the walls than family photos.”

Zooming In • 21

Mom remains excited and engaged on all of these trips. She signs us up for tours, encourages us to listen to other ghosthunter hobbyists’ stories, and stays up until the wee hours of the morning to learn about EMS detectors or research the history of the stuffy, humid rooms we’re staying in. During breakfast one morning at a haunted inn, my mom told me an experience of hers that had happened the night before. As she explained, she’d been in her room, opening dresser drawers to check out the toys that visitors left for Jeremy, the nine-year-old ghost who roamed the house.

While she was perusing the knick-knacks and plushies, she heard a high-pitched giggle near her ear. She immediately spun her head toward my brother Spencer, who looked her straight in the eye and said without prompt, “I heard that too.”

A little bit later, she heard the sink turn on in the bathroom. When she went to go check it out, the water turned off.

After hearing her story, I gave her a desperately worried look, to which she smiled and laughed.

Smiles like those encourage me to change my negative, apprehensive attitude into one of fun, excitement, and appreciation for the p e c u l i a r, the

unexplainable. As she’s taught me, when you really open yourself up to scary things–when you’re willing to make fun of a situation–you let the fun and curiosity run wild.

A more run-of-the-mill mother might claim that fun pretty much plateaus after a summer spent in a resort, or with her kids away at sleepaway camp. My mom says fun doesn’t peak until you’ve been on a Gettysburg graveyard

tour; until you’ve crawled up to the attic of a dead axemurderer; or until you’ve laughed at the pitiful situation of sleeping in a dusty, creaky house where things go bump in the night.

It’s certainly one of the purest forms of fun to get an adrenaline rush as you enter the house you “have” to sleep in. It’s an adventure of its own form to stay up past midnight as an eight-year-old and play with spiritdetecting gadgets. Taking them on vacation is not a typical method of “spoiling” your children, but I can certainly say that my experiences have taught me more about o p e n -

mindedness, adventure, and engaged experience. How many kids get to eat a traditional New England dinner in a tavern with hoop-skirted waitresses?

I am thankful for my mom for allowing me to not know the answer to some things. All Ivy League students are familiar with the competition associated with “success” that breeds on campus.

We are hard studiers and truth-seekers. We are quite accustomed to reaching the “goal” of knowing every answer to every question, to proving

our points with evidence and empiricism. This is especially true in science fields, where it’s almost impossible to approach a scientific question–and carry out an experiment–with a completely open mind, a mind that is “okay” with getting suboptimal results. Among the many important life lessons that my mother has gracefully taught me, perhaps one of the most enduring is the notion that it’s okay to experience things for what they are… even if they’re more paranormal than “normal.” 

22 • Zooming In

Great Sexpectations disparities in sex education and freshman year

by Anna Lee

art by Zach Rouse

At Speak About It!, an activist-performance that seeks to educate students and prevent sexual violence, hundreds of freshmen sat in Bailey Hall listening to sex-themed music before the show. I looked out at my new classmates— some on their phones, some talking to people in their rows, others sitting silently. In the performance, the actors talked candidly about sex and “hooking up” and illustrated situations through monologues and college-themed vignettes. It was engaging, but as I watched rows of people turn to one another and laugh, there was an overwhelming sense of performance—not onstage, but in the audience. I kept wondering how much information was actually getting through, and how anyone could understand the complexities of consent when they didn’t know all that much about sex in the first place. How can you learn when you want to seem like you already know everything?

During orientation and throughout the rest of college, there’s a burden weighing on many students: the “obviouslywe’re-all-bangin’-24/7” burden. And with it comes the assumption that everybody knows what’s up—meaning there are some things that you must know if you’re a freshman in college, like the fact that you can get STDs from oral sex, etc.

But that’s the thing: everybody’s definition of “what’s up” is different. One of the great things about Cornell is its diversity—but when it comes to sex, we seem to forget that we all come from different places.

I received my formative sex education at an Episcopal school in the East Village in New York City. My sex education stood out as a rigidly outdated and Christian ordeal in the middle of a very liberated neighborhood—the place that inspired Rent and is home to such staples as St. Mark’s Place and the Coyote Ugly Saloon. While in some apartment down the block, somebody was taking their clothes off, twenty uniformed 13-year-olds sat in a classroom, listening to the Head

of School talk about sex.

“We think sex is good,” I remember our principal saying, catching everyone off guard, like he knew we were expecting him to tell us to abstain or die. He continued: “Sex is good.

When it’s in a long-term, loving, monogamous relationship.”

This phrase, “long-term, loving, monogamous relationship,” and the monotone in which he delivered it, has stuck with me. I decided to see if any of my friends had similar experiences with their sex education.

At dinner one night, I asked everyone at the table what their sex education was like. My friends offered stories of their education at public and private schools in New York City: HB: We played a game where we all started with a single color of M&M’s… and you trade them, and at the end you have all the different colors of M&M’s and each color corresponds to a different STD, so it’s like, when you have sex with someone, you’re getting all the STDs from all the people that they’ve ever had sex with.

Anon: It’s like Pokémon.

HB: You had to be okay with having sex with all the people that they had had sex with…we’re in sixth grade, and they’re telling [us] [we] need to be considering who [our] partners are. They weren’t overtly telling you not to have sex, but you’re a kid so they’re taking your super malleable ideas of what sex is and [exploiting that].

Late one night in my friend Mason’s room, I asked her and our friends Maya and Helena to tell me more about their sex education. Maya, who grew up in Brooklyn, said she never actually had sex ed in school: Anna Lee: At middle school? Was it a religious school? Public? And there was no health class?

MM: I feel like it’s difficult to believe, but I have never had a sex education class… the only sex ed I can remember anyone

“What gets lost in the traditional narrative of sex education is the knowledge of how to make sex safe, fun, and pleasurable— the way it should be. ”

Zooming In • 23

actually giving me was my parents gave me an American Girl book about my body.

AL: Your Body and You? MM: Yeah. And it mentioned sex once. And then I was like, “Oh, sex!” and then I think I probably like, Googled it…My dad’s a teacher, and so I always would go to the library at his school and they had a bunch of sex ed books and I’d take out the books and just never return them.

AL: So you stole the sex books from the library?

MM: Yeah, I pretty much stole my sex education.

Mason is baffled. She then gives an account of the most positive (and creative) sex education I’ve ever heard.

ML: My sex ed in middle school was so extensive…[They taught me] I could have sex in the apocalypse with Saran Wrap and a rubber band and I’d be totally safe!

AL: Are you serious?

ML: Yeah! They showed us how to make condoms and stuff if you didn’t have a condom, but then they were like, “This is not an effective method,” and they had a question box and they had everyone put questions in, and the questions were like, “What is a rainbow party?” so this teacher had to be like, “Well, that’s when everyone gets a different type of lipstick…”

I remember my health teacher putting her fist into a condom like, “Don’t let them tell you it’s too small!”

Throughout my interview process, I was most struck by the class activities I heard about. A girl named Suzy in my Intro to Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies class told me that when she was in seventh grade, the health teacher

at her New York public school instructed the students to sign letters to themselves pledging abstinence until marriage. I heard several variations on the M&M’s game: an activity in which students chewed gum, spit it into a cup of water, and then one student was asked to drink it; a game in which one student put glitter on her hands and then everyone shook hands, so at the end everybody had glittery hands. The goal of these games, much like that of many sex education programs in the United States, is to warn rather than to inform.

As middle schoolers and high schoolers, many of us didn’t have access to information from reliable sources.

Many of us were taught abstinence-only sex education while others didn’t have formal sex education at all, perhaps because the majority of states don’t mandate that it be taught in schools. What gets lost in the traditional narrative of sex education is the knowledge of how to make sex safe, fun, and pleasurable—the way it should be. Large turnouts at sexpositive educational events like I Love Female Orgasm show that students are looking for the kind of information they didn’t get before coming to college. At the I Love Female Orgasm event, I saw boys in the row behind me taking three full pages of notes, ready to take what they learned into the world (and the bedroom). If the same transparency and openness to learning applied to freshman learning about sex and consent, we’d all be meeting each other on a more equal playing field, so we could play the field—and feel safe and happy while doing it. 

24 • Zooming In

Embracing Goldwin Smith

the paradox of klarman hall’s history

When I returned to Cornell this past spring semester, the landscape of Central Campus had been noticeably altered.

The construction site that had been an evolving but constant presence since the beginning of my freshman year had finally given way to a finished building. Klarman Hall now stood as a new and conspicuous architectural presence on East Avenue.

Klarman Hall was the first new building dedicated to the humanities to be built at Cornell in 110 years; the last humanities building constructed before it was Goldwin Smith Hall in 1905. Upon completion of construction, Klarman Hall was, as Simon Wheeler wrote in the Ithaca Journal,

by Adam Davis

art by Daniel Toretsky

The namesake of Klarman Hall, Seth Klarman, happens to be Jewish. Klarman earned his bachelor’s degree from Cornell in 1979, and then went on to earn an MBA from Harvard; he currently manages the Boston-based hedge fund Baupost— an occupation that Smith likely would have referred to as “cruel usuring,” indicative of a “preoccupation with moneymaking.” The lead gift for the construction of Klarman Hall came from The Klarman Family Foundation, Seth Klarman’s philanthropic foundation which, according to Forbes, had approximately $350 million in assets as of the most recent public filing. In addition to its support for the construction of a new humanities building at Cornell and other causes,

“The Smith-Klarman complex that now stands on Central Campus is, metaphorically, an embrace between a proud Jew and an unabashed anti-Semite.” “connected to and surrounded on three sides by Goldwin Smith.” The two buildings are locked in an embrace. Given that both buildings house various humanities departments, it seems rather fitting that there should be some sort of rich symbolism in the construction of the new building and its union with the old. It’s perhaps just as fitting that this symbolism should come in the form of irony.

The namesake of Goldwin Smith Hall was, as the Dictionary of Canadian Biography summarizes, a “writer, journalist, and controversialist.” He was also a virulent anti-Semite who decried, in his essay entitled “The Jewish Question,” the Jewish population’s “peculiar character and habits” and “preoccupation with money-making”; and described Jews as “parasites” and “cruel usurers, eating the people as it were bread.” On the topic of the violent, anti-Semitic pogroms undertaken by Christian peasants in Eastern Europe, Smith opined in that same essay: “My contention is that the blame rests mainly, not on Christian bigotry, but on the situation created by the wandering and separatist habits of the Jews.”

The Jewish victims (and Smith did attribute an exaggerated popular view of Jewish victimhood to a Jewish-dominated press) had simply gotten what was coming to them for their “wealth,” “ascendancy,” and—in a victim-blaming trope that has survived into the present day—“the fine dresses of [Jewish] women.”

the foundation “maintains an unwavering commitment to demonstrating Jewish values and supporting the Jewish people and the State of Israel.”

The Smith-Klarman complex that now stands on Central Campus is, metaphorically, an embrace between a proud Jew and an unabashed anti-Semite. But is it possible that the two have more in common than a plot of land adjacent to the Arts Quad? Goldwin Smith’s anti-Semitism was not, after all, the eliminationist anti-Semitism of Nazis, or even the religiousbased anti-Semitism of Europe in the Middle Ages. Smith was a liberal and, as a commemorative bench outside of his namesake building will remind you, is noted for saying, “Above all nations is humanity.” And yet his universalism seems to have come up short in its confrontation with the “Jewish question” that plagued him and so many of his contemporary thinkers. Instead of seeing an acceptance of the different cultural and religious practices of the Jewish people as the logical extension of a universal embrace of humanity, Smith chose to juxtapose his own liberal universalism with the supposed backwardness and tribalism of the Jews. This is the paradox of Goldwin Smith’s thought, a paradox inadvertently hinted at in the placing of that quote on the bench outside his namesake building: yes, universal humanity is great, but to have it, you must first “fix” those elements of society that do not conform to your conception of what is modern.

Zooming In • 25

What, then, is Smith’s answer to the Jewish question? As Professors Glenn Altschuler and Isaac Kramnick summarize, his answer is a choice between “assimilation” and “repatriation to Palestine.” There could be no space, in Smith’s conception of the world, for Jewish Otherness within the context of other nations. The Jews either had to forgo their publicly expressed cultural differences—private practices could presumably still be protected by a liberal conception of freedom of religion— or settle in a Zionist state in Palestine. There, Jewish practices and identity could be the basis of a nation rather than the forces denigrating the internal unity of other nations. In this latter option, Goldwin Smith’s beliefs seem to be in harmony with The Klarman Family Foundation’s assertion that “Israel is the one Jewish state.” Indeed, it’s hard to imagine that this 19th-century anti-Semite would object to the support for the Jewish state that has become so standard among modern Jewish organizations.

But the fact remains that most of the world’s Jews don’t live in that “one Jewish state,” and the vast majority of these non-Israelis live in the United States. What, then, of Smith’s call for assimilation? Have we American Jews performed this task satisfactorily by the standards of Goldwin Smith?

One way to imagine the reaction of Goldwin Smith, if we were to resurrect him and give him a look at Cornell University in 2016, is shock and horror. As of 2015, Cornell Hillel estimated that 22% of Cornell undergrads are Jewish.

Moreover, in addition to a Hillel chapter, the university is home to a Chabad chapter, a Jewish Living Center, a kosher dining hall, three historically Jewish fraternities, two historically Jewish sororities, and a Jewish Studies minor. And yet isn’t this Jewish presence and success within an American university system, established well before the great wave of Ashkenazi immigration during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a fine example of the assimilation that Smith valued so highly? On the one hand, this population, these organizations, and this new humanities building all exist to prove Smith’s conception of Jewish “backwardness” wrong.

But on the other hand, they exist as a shining example of a Jewish identity that, while maintaining institutions of cultural and religious autonomy, has been more or less comfortably incorporated into the dominant society. The modern day heirs to Smith’s brand of political and social thought, concerned as they may be with maintaining the apparently universal

freedoms of Western liberal democracies, can now turn their attention away from the Jews. They are now free to look toward other potential threats to the foundations of society: newer-comers, with more foreign cultures and religions, and darker skin tones.

The Jewish American community, in its ascendance throughout the 20th century and especially after World War II, never undermined this persistent call from society’s powerful voices for homogeneity as a basis for social order. This isn’t to say that Jewish Americans never participated in movements that challenged the established order—Jewish participation in the radical anarchist and socialist movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and in the Civil Rights and New Left movements that took root in later decades, was notably high. But in a modernday America where Jews as a group have found relative economic success and social acceptance, anxieties about refugees carrying dangerous ideologies, backwards religions, and nonassimilating cultures persist; the targets have merely changed.

The institutions of the American Jewish community, led and influenced by men like Seth Klarman, never evolved to challenge these attitudes and ideologies, whether their individual members and leaders wished to or not. The role of the organized Jewish American community is to preserve Jewish identity and protect its place in American society.

For better or worse, it doesn’t consist of institutions made to tear down Goldwin Smith Hall, but of institutions made to erect Seth Klarman Hall alongside it.

The paradox of Goldwin Smith’s thought—“Above all nations is humanity”—is that his universalism led to a particular bigotry against those he saw as outside of modern society. The paradox of the success of the modern Jewish community, symbolized by Klarman Hall’s embrace of Goldwin Smith Hall, is that it is a success that a 19th-century anti-Semite, with his constant concern for the separatism and backwardness of the Jewish people, would likely not have found unpalatable; it is a success which does not negate the basis of his thought. 

26 • Zooming In

Finding Yourself in College fostering identity through exploration

by Shaila Humane art by Francesca Hodge

During the first few days in college, 3,000 disoriented students make a mad rush to find their footing after being plucked from a comfortable, settled home and plunged into a sudden unknown.

Everything we’ve ever known has suddenly been taken from us—our familiar surroundings, our friends, our family, our routine. This sudden change often causes questions of identity and sparks the need to understand who we are as individuals.

Humans like order. That’s why we recognize patterns that aren’t there and why we subconsciously label, stereotype and categorize people—it gives our brains a false sense of control over the crazy world we live in. Having some concrete grasp on our identity satisfies our need for order; it helps us feel in control. If we don’t know who we are, or if our identity is threatened, we feel alarmed, disoriented, and unsettled (cue existential crisis).

Throughout life, we often identify with things and possessions around us, and then are distressed when they are taken away. For most students, their hometown, family, and routine have been fully entwined with their identity, and so the sudden loss of these causes confusion and damages their idea of who they are.

College, as we are told over and over again, is the place where you are supposed to find yourself. But this implies that there is some sort of set-in-stone “you” that you need to find.

It implies that “you,” your identity, is constant and defined. But

that’s just not true. Defining ourselves does not mean looking for something that is already in existence, unchanging, and waiting to be discovered; but rather, creating something new. Identity is fluid; it’s shaped over time by experience and actions.

“Instead of finding yourself, college is the place to foster yourself.”

Generating identity through “finding” often results in association with external, material things, which can limit your individuality and creativity. Group identity and social comparison are two of the most common external forms of defining identity. Group identity means defining yourself through association with other people or groups (e.g. I work for ABC Corporation. I am married to Jim and have two kids).

Evolutionarily, humans have grown to naturally try to conform to society, to fit in, because it is beneficial for the human race to form communities. However, this progress in evolution has unwanted side effects that can hold us back today.

Belonging to groups is a normal part of life, but when you begin to define yourself solely by a group identity, you limit your growth. Limiting yourself in this way encourages

Zooming In • 27 conformity and often results in blind obedience—for example, sacrificing some of your values and beliefs for those of the group, or conforming to stereotypes and customs of the group that you would not adopt under other circumstances.

Those who challenge the status quo, who stand out, and step outside of the box without fear of rejection from society, are the ones who often succeed. Defining yourself through group identity puts labels on your selfhood that hold you back, prevent growth, and limit you to a box defined by those labels.

By defining our individual identities through social comparison, we begin to value status symbols, which can often cause feelings of inadequacy or unmerited superiority.

When individuals define success in relation to these status symbols, any failure can result in a blow to personal sense of self.

Leaving our homes has freed us from most of these external factors in defining identity. Here at Cornell, no one knows (or cares) what you got on your SAT, or that you won your high school science fair. You no longer live with your family, and you’ve had to leave many of your possessions behind. This means that we have the opportunity to foster

“Finding yourself implies that there is some sort of set-instone ‘you’ that you need to find” and create new individual identities. We can generate these identities through exploration, through experimenting with different ideas and world views, and through finding things that work and things that don’t. College allows us the freedom to explore, which is the best and only way to truly foster identity .

In his book Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life, William Deresiewicz writes, “To find yourself, you first must free yourself. You won’t be able to recognize the things you really care about until you have released your grip on all the things that you’ve been taught to care about.” We have been given an opportunity, whether we like it or not. We’re forced to take a step back, free ourselves from most of the external things we’ve known, and say, “Whoa, who am I really, if not just some human body that eats, sleeps, breathes, and takes up space?

And who do I want to be?” It’s an opportunity to take time to reflect and explore life, instead of floating through existence.

Without fostering our identities, we cannot live up to our true potential and we slide into instability. If we fill our definitions of identity with possessions, people, and status symbols instead of meaning and introspection, one day this façade will fall and leave us shattered. Knowing who we are, and how and why we got there, protects us from the future. It makes us resilient. A chance like this doesn’t come often—we better take advantage of it. 

28 • Zooming In

Origin Stories

an interview with kitsch founders Katie Jentleson and Samantha Henig

by Aurora Rojer and Jagravi Dave

Aurora and Jagravi: Hi! Katie: Hi! Sam: Katie? Hi! Katie: Hi! We never see each other anymore, this is nice!

Sam: How’s it going?

Aurora: Pretty good! We’re in layout week now, so things are definitely heating up.

Katie: Oh nice, where do you guys do that now?

Jagravi: In the basement of Willard Straight.

Sam: Damn, they didn’t burn that place down once we left?

Aurora: Not yet…

Jagravi: So why did you guys start kitsch?

Sam: So we got to Cornell and we were looking at all of the publications. We knew we wanted to write good feature journalism, and there wasn’t really a place to do that. There was really only the Sun or lit mags, and neither were what we wanted.

Katie: Then I had knee surgery over winter break and you visited me.

Sam: Oh yeah, I forgot about that!

Katie: Yeah, and we decided to start our own publication then. We also both come from a really strong journalism background. Our high school, Montgomery Blair in Silver Spring, Maryland, has

a really excellent and nationally-ranked journalism program run by this really old-school reporter guy who was super strict but a really amazing teacher. He really trusted young people to take on responsibilities. So we had just come out of this training in high school where we saw what we could do as young writers, and we wanted to keep doing it. We didn’t really have any goals beyond creating that outlet. But then kitsch became this locus of counter-culture where you would just hole up in Willard Straight all night to put together something awesome. We got all of our friends involved and it just became something more. It was a community, a culture.

Aurora: That’s awesome. How many people did you have working on it?

Sam: We had about 12 to 25 people usually, I’d say. Some were really loyal and hardworking, you know, and others were just sort of in and out.

Katie: By the time we left, it was a more clear system with a full editorial board, more of a hierarchy. When we started, it was just kind of us in charge and then everyone else and we all did everything. We used to have really irreverent covers. Our first one we outed Denice Cassaro. She was this lady who— Aurora: Oh yeah, we know Denice well. At least, her emails.

Jagravi: Yup, she’s still here.

Katie: No way, she’s been there for thirteen years or more! That’s wild.

Sam: But anyway! By the end of our time there, we had a staff with illustrators, photographers, and it started to look like a full publication with real organization and staff we could count on to create all types of content.

Zooming Out • 29

“We got all of our friends involved and kitsch just became something more. It was a community, a culture.”

Katie: We did a lot of the art ourselves at first.

Sam: Oh man, in the beginning we had a contributor page with photos, but we didn’t put our own photos on the letterfrom-the-editors page because we were being modest. But then in the center of the contributor page was a photo of our friend Jonah and he was posing in this really authoritarian manner, with his arms crossed—it looked like it was his thing. After the magazine was printed people kept coming up to him like “Oh man! You founded that magazine!” So after that, we put our pictures too.

Katie: For a second I thought you were going to talk about our hate mail story. But that’s a boring one I guess.

Jagravi: What?! No, what’s the hate mail story?

Katie: So we got a hate letter from this one girl. She wasn’t a part of kitsch but probably should have been, which is I think why she hated us. But she called us Ugg-wearing, Lost-inTranslation-watching poseurs. She was a hipster. I guess we were too, but she was more authentic.

Sam: And she called us poseurs! Which is such an awesome insult, because you can’t deny it.

Katie: She was friends [with]—or was?—an architecture student.

And they were definitely way “cooler” than us. And they actually started their own rival magazine called Awkward. It was launched our senior year but it definitely only lasted a couple issues. It died before we graduated.

Sam: When we were trying to come up with a tagline for kitsch, we considered using “Ugg-wearing-Lost-in-Translation-watchingvinyl-listening poseurs.”

Katie: It was a funny little feud. But I think most people didn’t really care about us.

lege and a lot of jobs I applied to found kitsch really impressive.

Jagravi: It’s cool to see people really care and get invested.

Katie: Yeah we cared a lot about the magazine. But we tried to make meetings fun and have fun launch parties and stuff, which is something I still care about, even in more corporate settings.

Aurora: Where did the gnome come from?

Sam: Oh haha it’s so “13!” It was a Bat Mitzvah present! The weirdest Bat Mitzvah present ever, from Peter Preziosi[?]. At first I was like “...okay” but then it really grew on me, and I brought it to college and we would bring him when we tabled for kitsch and stuff, and he just became our mascot. I even thought about bringing him to work and having him sit in my cubicle, but I haven’t made the move yet. It might be because I really like having him at home.

Jagravi: What do you guys do now, now that you’re grown-ups?

Katie: I’m a curator for High Museum in Atlanta for Folk and Self-Taught Art. Sam: I work at the New York Times. I’ve been here for five years running an audio group that does podcasts and other audio initiatives.

Aurora: Wow, that’s great.

Katie: It’s funny, I feel like I don’t remember anything from college except for kitsch. When I tell people about my college years I’m like “basically the whole time I was working on a magazine.” That was like the college experience for me.

Sam: No, I think we were pretty well-received.

Sam: Yeah we’re both so thrilled that it’s still going and still vibrant.

Katie: Yeah that’s true. We got funding from different humanities departments and got a good reaction from a lot of faculty and students. Also I went into journalism after col-

Aurora and Jagravi: *blushing* Well thank you so much! And thanks for chatting with us. Happy 13th birthday to your baby who is now our baby. 

30 • Zooming Out

My Belief is Their Superstition rethinking belief systems

by José Armando Fernández Guerrero art by Tatiana Malkin and Maura Thomas

“Hazte pa’alla.” “¿Mande?” “¡Que pongas los pies pa’ acá y la cabeza lejos de la puerta!”

For some reason, my child self found pride in annoying his elders. In this scenario–a hallmark of my life as a little rascal—my mother commanded me to tuck myself in bed with my head as far as possible from the door. I was three or four and asked why she insisted on this. “Sino no vaya a ser que se meta un ratero,” she would always answer. If not, perhaps a thief will creep into the room. Seems legit, right?

She was my mother, so I eventually obeyed. Her word was final regardless of the explanation. With enough repetition, her explanation actually became completely logical to me.

And thus, I internalized this thought-process over the next 17 years.

Let’s fast-forward. Now I am 21, no longer living in Mexico, and the final word is now mine. I realize that several of my habits are just unusual to others. Similarly, many of the new behaviors I encountered were strange to me. Dinner is not at 10pm, meat isn’t in every meal (no, chicken does not count as meat), and people can wear sweatpants and a T-shirt to class.

Admittedly, these are rather superficial habits, because they

do not interfere directly with one’s logical thought-process.

Superstitions, on the other hand, are habits that have more control over our actions and our way of making sense of the world.

This semester, I realized once more the far-reaching degree of control my own upbringing has had on my understanding of the world. In my new room, I daringly decided to sleep with my head closer to the door, so I would be closer to the window with a nice view. I dismissed my mother’s advice and I slept perfectly fine. My mother is antiquated; why does she hold onto this belief?

The following morning, I went downstairs, had breakfast, got ready and picked up my wallet. But I could not find any cash in it… What the fuck? Where’s my money? I’m not the kind to lose money, or anything, really... Then it hit me. I left my door unlocked at night and someone must have come in. ¡Un ratero! A thief! It’s true! I’m never sleeping in that Godforsaken position again! ¡Un puto ratero entró a mi cuarto!

Which one of my trusted housemates is an unscrupulous thief? Needless to say, I remember nothing from lecture that day.

A few days passed, and I locked my door constantly. It wasn’t until my house’s first meeting that the mystery was revealed. When our house Treasurer began “Thank you for those who paid the activity fee…” Bam! That’s where the money went! The deposit, which I had paid long ago, added up exactly to the cash I thought was stolen. Never had I felt so relieved that I was wrong.

Zooming Out • 31

“This experience makes me wonder now: how many more beliefs, including my religion, can be reduced to illogical habits of the mind passed on through the generations?”

Needless to say, I had instinctively jumped to the conclusion that a thief was responsible because of the position I’d slept in the night before. My mother’s advice, which one would objectively deem as superstition, was deeply rooted in my thought-process, but all I needed was a situation to apply it to. The word superstition has its roots in the Latin word for “prophecy” or “foretelling,” and indeed my superstition was a self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s an example of a belief I have inherited and ingrained into my psyche. This experience makes me wonder now: how many more beliefs, including my religion, can be reduced to illogical habits of the mind passed on through the generations? How often do I hypocritically dismiss someone else’s beliefs as superstitions?

Over the summer, I read Alma Gottlieb’s The Afterlife Is Where We Come From: The Culture of Infancy in West Africa, which discussed child rearing practices among the Beng people. They believe babies come from a timeless, omniscient spirit world; upon arriving to this physical world they begin to “forget” and narrow their knowledge systems to adapt themselves to our limited life form. They see life as a cycle; the closer to the beginning or the end of it one is, the more susceptible (even willing) one’s spirit is to return to the spirit world. I could imagine the functional purpose of this superstition as being the compulsion for child-rearers to take extra care of infants. However, in viewing the Beng belief this way, I am giving it no synchronic value. I instead reduce their belief to a set of illogical connections (or superstitions) which happen to work well for them.

Though I dismissed the Beng’s beliefs, I did not hold my superstition to the same standard. Only after I found where my money went did I consider how ethnocentric and imperialistic my thought process had been towards the belief of the Beng. Of course their belief system is a superstition while my European-rooted religion and habits are fully fledged. Why couldn’t my thought process have been the other way around, or at least grant both equal legitimacy?

My belief too was an illogical connection with a functional purpose—a precautionary measurement against thieves.

In 1925, anthropologist Bronislaw Malinoswki wrote “As long as savage creeds have been regarded as idle superstitions, as make-believe, as childish or diseased fancies, or at best crude philosophic speculations, it was difficult to understand why the savage clung to them so obstinately, so faithfully. But once we see that every canon of the savage’s belief is a live force to him, that his doctrine is the very cement of social fabric—for all his morality is derived from it, all his social cohesion and his mental composure—it is easy to understand that he cannot afford to be tolerant.” Malinowski was one of the first figures to write

about the difficulty we have to connect to other’s beliefs and the ease with which we dismiss them. He urged us to see another group’s beliefs as their life force to legitimize its need in their society. His writing in anthropological thought still otherized the “savage,” which would be avoided today.

But what if we otherize ourselves too? Anthropology seeks to study culture from an objective standpoint but also make sense of it from a subjective analysis. It is the subjectivity that I, and many others, still need to exercise. In putting ourselves truly into someone else’s shoes, we can realize that many of our beliefs are arbitrary but that every culture has them to some degree. Perhaps some of these habits of mind promote a functional moral system or protect us from potential danger, but even Western religions also have some unexplainable arbitrariness we take for granted.

Retrospectively, I could have asked around for the money and have been reminded I had used it, but this choice was obscured by what I had been imbued in me as a child. My logical thought process did not kick in because my cultural habits took precedence. I cannot emphasize how relieved I was that my belief was not true, but is this usually the case?

How often do these cultural habits of mind obscure and control our understanding? Perhaps many more of my beliefs are merely superstitions. I’m trying now to be open to this possibility; only that way can I behave objectively to both myself and others. 

32 • Zooming Out

Leaving the Vault

townie-gownie relations in a mutie-normie roleplaying game

by Melvin Li art by Fauna Mahootian & Melvin Li

The year is 2161. It has been close to a century since the United States, Soviet Union, China, and other global powers have extinguished almost all life on Earth after a two hour nuclear exchange on October 23, 2077. North America is a lifeless, radiated desert filled with bands of bloodthirsty raiders and hordes of ravenous mutants. The most dangerous threat in the American wasteland, Super Mutants, or Muties, are green mutated humans who stand over 10 feet tall and have access to miniguns, plasma rifles, flamethrowers, and more lovely goodies as they scour the land in search of unmutated humans, or Normies, to convert. The only places where pre-war America is known to continue are the vaults— hi-tech underground shelters filled with the descendants of those privileged enough to escape nuclear destruction. Then one day on December 5, Vault 13 is unsealed in the ruins

of southern California and a 20-year-old man steps into the sunlight for the first time in his life.

This, as many of you geeky gamers out there know, is an approximate summary of the beginning of Fallout. Now what does a 1997 turn-based role-playing game featuring races called “Muties” and “Normies” have to do with you? More than you might think, especially if you’re currently enrolled in a university or have graduated from one. You don’t have to be an English major to notice the striking parallels between the Fallout setting and popular media tropes of rambunctious, ivory tower party animals facing off against tired townies who just want to sleep. As college enrollment rates continue to rise and as the costs of getting a college education continue to grow alongside worsening American wealth inequality, the age-old relationship between townies

and their academic “gownie” companions will only become more important. I won’t bore you with an in-depth analysis of a video game plot line, but all college students, particularly those in nationally renowned college towns such as Ithaca, have much to learn from town-gown relations and the story of Vault 13.

The word “townie” used to refer to native, lifelong residents of a town as opposed to university students, and dates back to 1827. Yet the notion of a divide between revered, sacred, and scholarly knowledge and the ordinary, uneducated masses dates back to the foundation of Plato’s Academy—the first institution of higher learning in the western world— in 387 BCE, outside the city walls of Athens. Though the Academy was an exclusive institution and was not open to the public, it did not charge membership fees during Plato’s time—in contrast to the notorious tuition hikes of American colleges today. The world’s first university was founded in Bologna centuries later, in 1088, and drew reference to the Latin phrase universitas magistrorum et scholarium for “community of teachers and scholars.” “Community,” the rough translation of universitas, seems a very innocuous term, but beneath this benign label a whole new can of worms was opened—a closeknit in-group of scholars and their students was created in opposition to the non-academics who made up the vast majority of the world’s population. With the birth of the first universities came the birth of the first metaphorical vaults, made of paper, ink, and a whole lot of ivory.

Whereas the vaults in Fallout were physical shelters separating a tiny portion of the American population from a horrifying world filled with radiation and ravenous mutants, the world’s first universities were only bubbles in an ideological sense. No rural, isolated campuses protected 12th century university scholars and students from the rest of the world. In Fallout terms, the first vaults in Europe were all open. Life in medieval universities would seem very alien to the modern day campus student. Walter Rüegg’s first volume of A History of the University in Europe paints a picture of a time when universities were not physical locations but simply collections of scholars and students. With no physical campuses, classes were held wherever there was room, such as in local homes, churches, or buildings rented from the host town. As there were no dorms and other facilities, students and faculty all lodged in taverns or whatever local housing was available. All of this meant that instead of complete isolation between 12th century townies and gownies, they were in fact often in very close contact with each other and forced to share

Zooming Out • 33 the same restricted space. If you think that the stereotypical Ugg-wearing, latte-drinking, Macbook-using, black leggingsboasting, Under Armour-beanie sporting millennial college student attracts attention in downtown Ithaca, try being a foreign-born, Latin-speaking, clerical student in full robes instead.

The idea of a 12th century university student struggling to write a paper in Latin while crammed into an upstairs room of a dirty and noisy inn is very funny, but not farfetched.

Conflict between students and their neighbors was often inevitable in such frustratingly close proximities. Although there were few physical barriers between medieval townies and gownies, the fact that medieval universities were funded mostly by the Catholic Church and were subject to Canon law meant that students and scholars had little use for their hosts’ towns and laws. In those days, the idea of a rent war was something akin to a university threatening to rent lecture halls at a different location, causing the current landlord to lose money—a far cry from college town landlords competing for the most profits from students today.

The Western-style university, envisioned as a sanctuary for holy knowledge and those who teach it, has a long history of conflict with the harsh realities of the outside world. One of the most violent explosions of town-gown tensions occurred during the St. Scholastica Day Riot at Oxford University on February 10, 1355. Two scholars at the Swyndolnestok Tavern didn’t enjoy the wine they were served and beat up the

“The Western-style university, envisioned as a sanctuary for holy knowledge and those who teach it, has a long history of conflict with the harsh realities of the outside world.” taverner. When the mayor of Oxford asked the chancellor of the University to arrest the scholars, over 200 students rallied around their instructors and helped them assault the mayor and drive away locals who defended him. In retaliation, local townspeople stormed the University on the following day and attacked exercising scholars with bows and arrows. The locals later sacked 14 lecture halls, scalping scholars, carrying off books and other exotic treasures, and temporarily driving the rest of the University out of town. For the 63 scholars and 30 locals killed, little was done to improve town-gown relations at Oxford. King Edward III sided with the University, and a restored charter granted scholars immunity from any crimes they had committed during the two-day riot. The Mayor of Oxford and his councilors were ordered to observe an annual penance on February 10 and march bareheaded

through the streets, paying a fine of one penny per scholar killed to the University. This ritual was repeated until 1825, when the mayor refused to take part.

We have obviously come a long way from the days of scholar scalping and legal impunity for students. The ageold tensions between class-attending and paper-writing college students and their real world neighbors, however, shows no sign of disappearing, although it has improved dramatically since the Middle Ages. Town-gown relations, at least in theory, are beneficial for both parties—the university receives services and resources from the town while the town receives profit and renown because of the university’s presence. Yet ideological and cultural differences between townies and gownies, as well as many other factors, including student-driven gentrification or “studentification,” often continue to be sources of tension between colleges and their local communities. All over the world, all through history, the university has mostly remained the same: a select group of highly specialized individuals who often hold significantly different views of the world than those not sealed away in them. Sounds awfully like a group of technologically advanced vault-dwellers who mean well by trying to prepare for the future but really have no idea what the wasteland is like outside of pre-war commercials and holotapes.

In Fallout, the point of the game is to go home to Vault 13—to return to the paradise you were forced to leave, to reenter the shelter you spent your whole life in. After over a year of quests, including finding a new water purification chip for your vault and destroying the source of the deadly Super Mutants, you are able to do just that. But in one of the greatest endings in video game history, you are not allowed back into the vault you just saved. You left the vault with a pistol and a knife, and you came back with power armor and a turbo plasma rifle. In a year of outside travels, you have learned more about the world than you had in a lifetime of vault training and simulations. You have learned much, too much in fact, and by eliminating all threats to Vault 13, you have become the greatest threat to it. You are a hero…and you have to leave. As we gownies all prepare to leave our universities and college towns one day, we should keep in mind that many of life’s greatest prizes wait for us outside the vault. 

34 • Zooming Out

How I Learned To Stop Worrying & Love God my millennial christian education

by Stephen Meisel

art by Fauna Mahootian

On Wednesdays, my high school’s cafeteria also functioned as a chapel. On one particular Wednesday, when I was about 13, the administration informed us that this week, our chapel period would function a bit differently: in fact, it was quite the special occasion. This week, they said, our Chapel would be used to spread the Word of God at a prime upload speed. A camera and audio crew were hired.

An Atlanta preacher was enlisted. It was going to be a live-streamed prayer broadcasted across the world, given by the kindergarten through 12th grade of King’s Ridge Christian School. In the meantime, the preacher had been given instructions to mention the school’s budding Capital Campaign in worldwide Internet prayer.

I suppose someone in the King’s Ridge Christian School marketing department considered the PrayerCast a good idea. Even as a 13-year-old high school freshman, I could

a grip on morals. Twenty-first century Christianity had to meet 21st-century education, and hopefully somewhere in the middle.

Unfortunately, this combination often led to certain snafus. The decision to give personal laptops to high school students—intended as an aid to learning—resulted in computers mostly being used for Flash games and Facebook, occasionally porn. Evolution was taught begrudgingly, alongside Creationism, with the help of iPads. The principal offered incentives to the kids who followed him on Twitter.

I found myself somewhere in the middle of this setup.

I had attended King’s Ridge since the second grade, shortly after my family moved down to Atlanta in 2001. Founded just a year earlier by a group of North Georgia oligarchs, the school had sprung out of a perceived lack of quality sites for Christian education in the suburbs north of Atlanta. Gradually,

“After all, schools need money. And how was this money going to materialize if not with the help of God, not to mention the financial savvy of the Holy Spirit?” surmise that. I could even understand why my school, after incurring a mountain of debt, decided to buttress the livestreamed event with pleas for donations. After all, schools need money. And how was this money going to materialize if not with the help of God, not to mention the financial savvy of the Holy Spirit? It did not occur to anyone that querying a deity for non-profit revenue would have ramifications. But this style of oversight was typical of my school in those years. Its wealthy and highly conservative demographic had demanded it keep up with this chaotic age while maintaining

as a grand exodus of family-oriented yuppies flowed down South from the Northeast in the early 2000s, King’s Ridge attracted more attention and flourished. However, like most private schools in the area, it eventually became known around town as just another gated community of wealthy white people who paid for good grades. And given that the suburb was overwhelmingly white and wealthy, this didn’t strike anyone as anomalous.

By the time of the PrayerCast, my school had become to me a frustrating but fascinating farce. I had begun to realize

Zooming Out • 35

that, throughout my tenure there, I had been sold a wealth of half-baked ideas. Sure, as a little second-grader I could recite Bible verses by heart for a piece of candy or a pat on the back.

But ever since my Christian sex ed class in the sixth grade,

innocuous. Another approach to high-tech mission work.

Although Jesus could never have planned for such a thing, the sentiment was inoffensive and bland enough to satisfy everyone. Of course, the whole need to broadcast a mass of

“My own place in the nexus of Jesus Christ and the new millennium was highly dubious” where I was taught that deflowered women were like used chewing gum, I began to give up on the idea of learning any valuable life lessons from Evangelists. Megachurches and youth pastors weren’t for me. Neither were missions to build orphanages in Swaziland, despite how happy my classmates looked high-fiving Swazi kids in their profile pictures.

My own place in the nexus of Jesus Christ and the new millennium was highly dubious. I had prayed, sincerely, maybe only a few times in my life. I played bass for my school’s Christian rock band, but mostly so I could back Jesus tunes with funk licks. Outside of class I didn’t go to church unless I was forced. It wasn’t that I didn’t think about God; I thought about Him often, but I simply could not understand certain inconsistencies. For example, why did God need to be explained to me in theology class as “the ultimate referee” and heaven as “the ultimate touchdown?” Metaphysically, I was banging my head against the wall.

The added conservatism of the Bible Belt didn’t help my greasy teenage malaise. It is no coincidence that the trinity of crosses, patient on the side of the highway, came between billboards for ammunition and Chick-Fil-A. The large church signs that questioned in stark typeface, “Where will you spend eternity?” definitely had an ulterior motive. Those pesky pro-lifers just wouldn’t stop showing you photos of aborted fetuses. So, in all honesty, I wasn’t surprised by the announcement of the PrayerCast. The whole thing felt

schoolchildren praying seemed rather strange—but then again, look where I live.

Soon PrayerCast day arrived. Students entered the cafeteria-chapel on schedule. The AV crew had set up their equipment and waited for the primary subjects of the broadcast to take their seats. They gave the students their instructions: when this camera light turns green, look like you’re praying. This initial command struck some listeners as superficial—why not just pray?—but then the live stream started.

People were, understandably, pissed. No one expected the association between teaching the Gospel and a pursuit of cash. Nor did they understand the need for such rigged presentation of the matter. The story of Jesus and the moneylenders was evoked. Complaints were lodged. And little apology was given—to me perhaps the most fantastic part of this story. The school lightly admitted to subterfuge on its part and went about its business. The genuinely Christian students left feeling cheated. The others felt even more bewildered by God than before. Who was this magical God of money?

Personally, I continued to expect nothing but the best collection of absurdities. From the teachers who kept pistols in their cars in the safest of neighborhoods to the schoolwide ban on crystal balls, witchcraft, and Ouija boards, I was never disappointed. 

36 • Zooming Out

Thirteen and Online

a narrative about growing up in video game communities

by Agrippa Kellum

screenshots taken by Agrippa Kellum

I grew up on online video games. It began with a game called Blockland, where essentially you played as a little Lego man who could walk around and build stuff out of blocks, among other little Lego men doing the same. By default, the game contained practically no rules—for instance, anyone could give themselves a rocket launcher, but firing it at somebody didn’t do anything. By using the game’s built-in modification system, players could write their own rules and restrictions, enabling them to make games within the game.

Over the course of my career playing Blockland (mostly from ages 11 to 14), I participated in, and even lead, a number of large-scale projects. Players would solicit help from others using the forums. A variety of skills were often necessary.

All things considered,it was an intense social environment.

The game’s forums were almost completely unmoderated and contained all manner of unique personalities and obnoxious antics. In addition, the community was small enough for most members to know of most other members. While the projects were fun and pressure was low, conflict remained a nearconstant. Through it all, I made more genuine friends than I can easily list—many of whom I remain in touch with to this day. For each of us, the online gaming world has played a

formative role.

Eventually, I moved on to faster-paced games with much larger communities, such as Left 4 Dead 2, and League of Legends.

All of these games are intensely coordinationbased—players live and die (literally) by their ability to coordinate tactical maneuvers, maintain morale, and even negotiate resource distribution. Gone, regrettably, from these games was the creative process that characterized my time playing Blockland and the densely connected social network formed by its tight community.

Despite the transience implicit to these larger games, the rate at which I made friends through them did not slow.

If I enjoyed playing with somebody, I would add them to my friends list in the game and invite them to queue for future games coordinated over Skype. Since teamwork was central to gameplay, this made the games much more fun, and I rarely played without queuing up with a few people I’d friended in the past. If anything, this amorphous social structure provided a more risk-free platform for connection.

Zooming Out • 37

By the age of 16, I’d been hanging out online with people much older than myself for years. I’d borne witness to their struggles, insecurities, and joys—and they to mine—even if we’d only known each other for a few gaming sessions. And why not? There was no reputation to protect, no consequence to failure. In my local peer groups, I’d never been exposed to this sort of radical openness. I don’t think anyone had. By comparison, I look at the sports teams I briefly took part in in high school. Posturing—something I regularly realized I wasn’t any good at and didn’t enjoy—accounted for so much of my social interaction, leaving me alienated. The result was that I backed out, sighting greener (if more distant) pastures.

Having experienced openness, however, I was able to recognize just how easy it was to achieve, and that lesson continues to characterize some of the largest parts of my personality and identity. Instead of entering boarding school as the kid who never really learned how to make friends, I entered as the kid who learned how to make friends with everyone—and in a deep way. That has never stopped benefiting me. But what if I hadn’t had this perspective?

When would I have gotten it elsewhere? For many boys whose social lives consist of transitions from one highstakes, hierarchical male group setting to the other, I fear the answer is never.

That’s not to claim that online gaming communities turn teens into social butterflies; I always have been and likely always will be more outgoing than many of my online friends. However, I think they’ve benefited from getting a better picture of what friendships can look like, even if they aren’t overly eager to find them offline.

I have to wonder how similar the narrative is for the current population, according to Pew Internet Research, of 29% of American boys aged

13-17 (and 5% of girls) who play online games with friends (that is, not in the same room) on a daily basis as I did, or the additional 28% of boys who play online with friends on a weekly basis. I can’t speak to the degree to which their social needs account for their game time—in fact, I’d be hard pressed to generate such a proportion even for myself. What I can tell you is that according to Pew, for 78% of teens playing online, online games are a way to feel more connected with their friends, and 54% of teens playing online games are doing so with people they only know online.

In fact, teens who don’t have online friends are in the minority—and it’s the frequent online gamers who have

the most.

We might also be able to make some inferences about why players play games by looking at what games they’re playing. Conspicuously, the most popular games are also some of the most intensely social. As with the games I enjoyed as a teenager, they typically pit two teams of five or so players against each other for approximately 30-minute matches, where success is heavily reliant on both individual skill and teamwork. Despite the characterization of video games as escapist power fantasies, most of these games do not even have persistent player characters or avatars. That is to say, in the game world, you are not a famous hero—you are simply you, a member of a team as well as a member of a community.

By now, I have spent hours on the order of (tens of?) thousands playing or otherwise engaging with video games.

I’m really not sure what I missed out on during that time.

A prolific reading career? A deeper connection to nature?

Languish? Musical aptitude? True loneliness? Resentment towards my community for failing to engage me? Drugs and alcohol? Nothing in particular? 

38 • Zooming Out

Vampires, Werewolves, and… the Economy? the effects of the Twilight saga on local economies in Washington State

by Magdalene Murphy art by Fauna Mahootian

At the top of the Olympic Peninsula, that dark and rainy spit of land that sticks out from the westernmost edge of the continental United States, sits the unremarkable town of Forks, Washington. It is unremarkable, of course, except for being the backdrop to one of the biggest pop culture stories of the past decade: The Twilight Saga. It’s also located in my home state and was a repeat feature of my childhood.

When I was a kid, every summer we’d escape from the heat and noise of the city and head northwest to see my grandma and stay at the Oceanside Resort in La Push, on the lands of the Quileute Nation. The routine was the same every year. We’d take a long flight or drive to Forks and from there, a short drive to La Push. We’d always arrive just before they were ready to let us in, so Maman would buy us marshmallows from the reservation store and we’d sit on the cold damp sand in cold damp jeans and eat them while Maman and Grandma collected shiny rocks and chatted in a rapidfire French my brothers and I barely understood. I remember Forks well; I loved going there, sitting in the diner and kicking my feet at the bottom of the booth, ducking into little shops to pass the time. When I moved to Washington at six years old, La Push and Forks served as anchors, reminding me that the place I was going was not as unfamiliar as it seemed. Even now, when I describe Washington to someone, the image that comes to me is of First Beach at La Push. The area is one of the ways I conceive of the Pacific Northwest.

But the Forks I visited no longer exists, at least not in the same form; it has been transformed into a reflection of the Twilight series, and attracts tourists for that very reason.

Forks, as I remember it, has no place in Twilight; when Stephenie Meyer visited Forks, La Push, and Washington State for the first time in 2004, she had already completed the first book in the series. The Forks depicted in the book is completely fictional. In fact, the blog post Meyer wrote about the visit, entitled “Forks is a real place and I was there!” details her worries about being “disappointed” by the town, though

in the end she found it a perfect fit for her invented Washington. Nearby La Push, where I spent so many hours as a child, was “incredible,” an absolutely perfect fit to her imagination.

Since the books are so intensely connected to the land and climate—from protagonist Bella’s anxiety about the weather and longing for her native desert, to the vampires’ ability to come out only when it rains, to the direct connection of the werewolf characters to the land itself—it’s strange that Meyer had never even visited when she wrote the first book.

In fact, the decision of the setting was completely arbitrary.

According to her website, Meyer chose the site after a Google search named the Olympic peninsula as one of the rainiest places in the United States. The success of her books transformed the little town of Forks into what the New York Times, in 2009, called a “mecca for Twilighters.”

By that year, four years after the first book was published, local businesses had changed their names, or else had them changed by the Forks Chamber of Commerce—suddenly, the Miller Tree Inn Bed & Breakfast became the “Cullen House.” According to statistics from the Forks Chamber of Commerce, the town received about 70,000 visitors in 2009 and 73,000 in 2010, as compared to only about 5,000 in 2004, before the book was published. Numbers had been on the decline since at least 1997, victims of a

Zooming Out • 39 failing timber industry. Twilight emerged just in time to fill the gap left by timber.

As businesses emerged to satisfy the growing number of Twilight tourists, a strange and very meta transformation turned the town into Meyer’s—and therefore the tourists’— very invention of it, and finally the town became drastically different from the Forks I remember. The Oceanside Resort that I once ate s’mores in, for example, now offers a “Twilight Escape” package (available Oct. 1 to April 1), a “Wolf Den” (a Twilight-themed cabin chock-full of werewolf imagery, including the sheets), and declares on its home page that guests can “visit the haunts of all [their] favorite characters from the popular book series penned by Stephenie Meyer.”

Even more direct, in this same introductory paragraph, “Jacob Black and the rest of the Quileute Tribe invites” guests to visit. The illusion is almost complete—Jacob Black, the invented member of a mostly invented tribe (by which I mean that the activity and mythology of Meyer’s Quileute tribe bears little resemblance to reality) now serves as a spokesperson for the real Quileute Nation’s business. It’s a strange concept, made stranger by Meyer’s lack of knowledge about La Push and the Quileute Nation. According to her blog, she picked La Push for its beauty (which is absolutely undeniable)—but again, the series could have as easily been set in Norway for all the connection it has to West Coast culture.

Despite this transformative success, by 2011 the number of visitors was halved from the previous year, and consequently some of the businesses, like Dazzled by Twilight, have shut down. Others, such as the Forks Adventure Tour, have simply disappeared—their websites gone and Google searches or phone calls fruitless. While tourist numbers for 2016 are still higher than they were in the pre-Twilight years, they are less than half of the peak number. Even the official Cullen House blog, the homepage of the bed-and-breakfast renamed for the house of the vampire family from the books, had its last post referencing Twilight in 2014. Though the website is still up and running, its recent posts are focused on local events: the Quillayute Valley Scholarship Auction, Memorial Day celebrations, and recipes, for example. While there may still be enough tourists to make Twilight tourism a viable source of income, they do not make it a lucrative one—hence the disappearance of many Twilight businesses and websites. The Forks Chamber of Commerce website’s Twilight page has a distinct look of desperation, a glittering slideshow of Twilight-themed images insisting that visitors can “discover the magic…just like Bella did!” Signs in local shops proclaim: “Twilighters welcome.” The Quileute Nation homepage makes less mention of the series, though a note does

“Twilight has

nothing to

do with Forks, but Forks has come to have everything to do with Twilight. ” encourage visitors to contact Tribal Publicist Jackie Jacobs for Twilight inquiries. Twilight lingers in every corner of the public face of the Forks and La Push economy, even as its economic viability and popularity dwindles.

When I spoke to a representative of the Forks Chamber of Commerce on the phone, she told me that one of her favorite things about the boom in Twilight tourism is that people “come for Twilight” but return for the Olympic Peninsula.

They fall in love, she intimated, and want to come back for weddings, vacations, or just to walk in the woods—Twilight aside. I found this comforting—the idea that even a visit just for Twilight could bring people “from all over the world” to appreciate the wild beauty of the Olympic Peninsula. It’s also a hopeful sign for a tourist-based economy; even if Twilight fails, perhaps the tourism might continue. But the marketing of Twilight tourism doesn’t portray the series as just another quirk that helps make a visit worth the trip; rather, it is the main draw, and the rest of the area—the real parts—is an addition. A Forks Chamber of Commerce “guy’s list” of “manly things” to do in Forks includes activities like hiking in Olympic National Park, fishing, or visiting the Timber Museum.

These are main cultural and economic points of interest for Washington State and especially for the Olympic Peninsula, but for the Twilight tourist—at least the one targeted by marketing—they are secondary, there for those who don’t share the Twilight passion. The list assumes these are mostly men, although it adds that “gals can have fun doing these things too!” Twilight is the main reason to visit Forks, at least terms of publicity, and both town and marketing reflect that attitude.

While most attempts to attract tourists rankle, especially for locals, there’s something particularly perturbing for me about the Twilight fanfare. Perhaps it is the way my generation utterly rejected the series just as soon as we were done adoring it. Perhaps the association of Twilight and the essence of teenage girlhood still upsets me in that place where I’ve hidden my memories of being a teenage girl, in part because teenage girlhood and its accompaniments aren’t socially acceptable. Mostly, I think, I’m bothered by the gradual transformation of a place I knew and loved—a place I will forever associate with family and with the intense beauty of my home in Washington State—into a playground for people who care about an unrelated fantasy. Twilight has nothing to do with Forks, but Forks has come to have everything to do with Twilight. The disturbing reality is that socio-cultural movements, like the Twilight craze, that take place almost entirely over the internet—and therefore might seem harmless—have significant consequences on the lives, homes, and businesses of real people. 

40 • Zooming Out

Shaving Off

Gender Norms the politics of beauty and body hair

by Fauna Mahootian art by Fauna Mahootian

Puberty is a very vulnerable time for many. We begin feeling self-conscious as insecurities start forming and intensifying. It’s also a time when our hormones cause us to grow more hair. The media perpetuates the expectation for women to be hairless, so it’s not surprising that girls start feeling self-conscious about their body hair and want to get rid of it. For some girls, this simply means shaving their legs and pits, as the rest of their hair is light and thin enough to go unnoticed. For other girls, however, this time is the beginning of a lifelong struggle with very thick, very dark, very visible body hair.

I have fairly dark, thick hair. I became self-conscious of it around the age of 12, when I noticed that I was hairier than the other girls my age. I voiced my concern to my mom, and although she thought I was slightly young to start shaving, she let me buy an electric razor. I was also concerned about my arm hair, but my mom told me not to shave it because it would “grow back thicker.” So I bore it. I wasn’t teased, but I felt out of place because no one else had hairy arms. I tried bleaching and waxing, but both were extremely painful so I just gave up and let it be. The issue really came down to my comparing myself to other girls: it was an issue of low self-esteem. My self-confidence grew over the course of high school and allowed me to be less afraid of judgement; by the end, I accepted not only my arm hair as part of myself, but also my armpit and leg hair. I stopped shaving when I stopped caring so much about what people thought of me and focused my attention on what I wanted for myself. Since I have a lot of hair that grows quickly, shaving consumes a

lot of time. I didn’t want to waste so much of my time, and I didn’t want to deal with the irritation of the hair growing back, so I just stopped. In bigger communities like cities, most people couldn’t care less what personal choices you make, as long as those choices don’t affect them. I was lucky to be in such a non-judgmental community.

Nowadays, the no-shave movement is getting popular among women. I’ve joined their ranks, and so have a few of my friends. Unfortunately, not everyone has the ability to join us. Even in relatively accepting communities, women face the pressure to shave their bodies. Certain mentalities (e.g. facial and body hair on women is bad) instilled by their upbringing cause women to mandate their own shaving. They don’t feel comfortable with their hair, even if the people around them would be accepting of it.

Other women can’t survive in their communities unless they shave. For these people, it’s not a matter of “not caring what other people think.” Whether that danger is bullying, social isolation, getting laid off, or not getting hired, discrimination based on appearance is a huge problem, and body hair on women falls into that category. Choosing not to shave or choosing to keep unmaintained facial hair may seem like a simple decision, but for some people it’s an unaffordable luxury.

An especially strong pressure is for women to adhere to social norms of appearance by removing facial hair. This pressure is so strong that women may even lose employment opportunities or become social rejects because of their hair. For some women, having a “clean” face is easy; for oth-

Zooming Out • 41

“I’m here to advocate for openness to difference and variety instead of a cookie-cutter mold for beauty.” ers, it is a lifelong struggle. People with sensitive skin have an especially hard time finding a technique that works and is not harmful to them. Some people carry scars from hair removal techniques they’ve used.

Think about that! People harm themselves in order to remove their hair. They’re left with permanent scars. Some people intentionally self-harm due to bullying because of their hair. Many people advocating for no-shave say that you shouldn’t care what other people think, but it’s delusional to think that you never have to care.

It’s unfair that some people need to risk harming themselves to reach societal standards. Our society is conditioned by the media we consume to be more accepting of some appearances than of others. Just as the media has presented us with the “norm” of hairless women, it presents gender as a strict binary, with appearance standards for each side.

We shouldn’t have such a rigid mold for people to fit into. For example, women should be able to have body hair—dark, obvious hair—and not be judged any differently for it. Some people in social media are standing up for this ideal of diversity in appearance. Take for instance the Instagram celebrity Harnaam Kaur.

Harnaam is a woman who maintains a thick beard—and she rocks it. She has polycystic ovary syndrome, which causes excess hair growth. Her beard started growing when she was eleven, and the resulting bullying at school caused her to self-harm. At the age of 16, with the aid of Sikhism, she accepted her hair as part of herself. She still gets stares on the streets and is mistaken for a man sometimes, but she’s learned to live with what she’s got. Her example emphasizes that ‘normal’ shouldn’t be so restrictive. In a time when the distinctions between the roles of the genders are becoming more and more blurred, shouldn’t the visual distinction be blurred as well, or at least not held to such a stringent dichotomy?

Arguing for this normalization through differences instead of through binaries is Alok Veid-Menon of the spoken word collaboration Darkmatter poetry. Alok is a gender non-binary and transfeminine public figure and performer who has been featured on major media outlets including HBO, Buzzfeed, New York Times, TEDx, and more. In a post on their blog RETURNTHEGAYZE, Alok writes, “We should not have to approximate cis and white and binary standards of gender and beauty to be safe…

What if we are never going to look like women or men? That means that the harassment doesn’t stop.” Using their media platform, Alok is increasing awareness of nonconformity to the gender binary and gender norms, as well as the resulting violence faced by those who choose not to conform. Right now, the decision of whether or not to shave is rooted in specific gender stereotypes. In an ideal world, our ideas of beauty and appearance wouldn’t influence the way we interact with others at all. But this world isn’t ideal. Because of the way our brains are wired, we will always make judgements based on appearance which will in some way influence our treatment of individuals. We can’t really help that we make these judgements, but we can try to minimize the credence we give them and just let them come and go through our minds.

This article is not arguing for or against women removing their hair. It’s fine to prefer shaving. Personal preference is just that: personal. What I take issue with is when someone’s surroundings don’t allow them to make personal decisions. I’m not here to argue for or against shaving, nor having or not having facial and body hair.

I’m here to argue for the agency of everyone, and for acceptance of an alternative choice that has been scorned for a long time.

I’m here to advocate for openness to difference and variety instead of a cookie-cutter mold for beauty. 

42 • Zooming Out

Being Habesha in a Black and White World a racial identity crisis in the U.S.

by Abigail Mengesha art by Abby Hailu

Racial identity was never a problem when I lived in Ethiopia. I recognized and understood my ethnicity, and that was enough. However, once I moved to the United States to receive higher education, questions regarding my racial background and the meaning of the term “Habesha”

common language or religion.

Most young or Ethiopian or Eritrean Americans use the term to refer to themselves and others in a way that

“Habesha is neither a race, nor an ethnicity, nor a nation. It is a way of living, a state of mind, and a collective of various cultures.” resurfaced. This spark in curiosity can be credited to my exposure to the American Black/White binary model of race, the stereotypical portrayal of Blackness, and my striving to find a place in the various communities of the United States.

Habesha is a collective term for the native inhabitants of Ethiopia or Eritrea. Habesha is neither a race, nor an ethnicity, nor a nation. It is a way of living, a state of mind, and a collective of various cultures. It doesn’t have a

eliminates the distinctions between different tribes and ethnic groups, while also prompting pride and a discourse of a grander and united Habesha identity.

So, the contemporary

Zooming Out • 43 definition of Habesha is equivalent to “Latino”—a broad term, but also one that still recognizes its various ethnical and cultural constituents.

In the homeland, Habesha has never been associated with anything other than Ethiopian and Eritrean. However, whenever my people move to the United States of America, its racial component becomes hard to decipher within the racial binary construct of the dominant culture. I have experienced this sense of confusion firsthand and have noticed it in other Ethiopian and Eritrean immigrants as well. I have noticed the way they try to assimilate the American constructions of race at certain times and generate counter-narratives at others, in an effort to defer the racial stereotypes and oppression that arise from identification with an undifferentiated Black identity. Some of these counter-narratives posit exclusive ethnic identities or hybridity, while others maintain purely national—Ethiopian and Eritrean—identities.

The stereotypical image of Blackness in the United States is largely responsible for the construction of an undifferentiated and structural identity. This ahistorical portrayal is maintained and fashioned by the popular Western media, which solely associates Blackness with African Americanness. Since Blackness is believed to be a direct opposition to Whiteness, rather than a diverse race that embodies numerous, distinct cultures and ethnicities, Habeshas tend to fear being branded with this label.

I experienced this same fear whenever I felt the stereotypical obligation to speak in Black slang, love Kendrick Lamar, and know how to twerk in order to feel Black. This resulting uneasiness forces other Ethiopians/ Eritreans and me to identify ourselves as just Habesha, instead of Black.

Consequently, our actions could be perceived as a way to distance ourselves from our Black roots, even though that isn’t the case.

Our alienation from the African American community is a result of how we are viewed by its members. Being considered “foreign” tends to annihilate our sense of belonging in this fraction of American society. I experienced this firsthand when, during my first two weeks on Cornell’s campus, I was called “exotic” by a male African American after telling him that I was from Ethiopia. His comment shocked me to the core.

It wasn’t like my other experiences of being mistaken for a Cuban girl when I wore my hair wavy or an

Indian girl when I straightened it. This one somehow felt like a betrayal. How could a fellow Black person believe that my identity was something other than Black? I was indignant: “Why would you think that I’m exotic?” And he gave me my answer: “Because you are from Ethiopia.” This last comment exposed how my Habesha identity alienates me from the African American community. And this revelation was proven and then made concrete as my stay on campus lengthened.

In a matter of days, I got mistaken for a biracial and a Nonblack by other Black people because of the texture of my hair and the shade of my skin. In their eyes, I was completely foreign, and that was completely dumfounding. Nevertheless, as much as I was foreign to Blacks, I was still Black to Whites, and this left me in a very interesting place.

As the days turned into weeks, I searched for a group into which I could fit; I was convinced that Cornell’s community contained a space outside of America’s binary categorization.

I found that I resonated with fellow international students and well-travelled people, since like me, they had been exposed to various cultures, ethnicities, religions, languages, and philosophies that weren’t bound by racial boundaries.

“I was called ‘exotic’ by a

male African American

after telling him that I was from Ethiopia. His comment shocked me to the core.”

As a result, they weren’t used to the dualistic Black/White distinction portrayed in the States. They acknowledged the different aspects of what it means to be Black—that it was something more than identifying as an African American.

These people accepted me for being a Black Habesha.

The prejudice associated with being Black has estranged Habeshas from their Black history. The term “Black” is viewed as a rigid representation of a specific culture—in this case, the African American culture—when in reality, it is a broad spectrum of diverse ethnicities, cultures, religions, and languages. The restrictions associated with being Black in American society are societal constructs built from stereotypes that view me as a girl who is neither “Black enough” nor “White.” Consequently, I identify as a Black Habesha because I refuse to let the overgeneralized definition of “Blackness” scare me away from accepting my true identity.

I couldn’t imagine being Habesha without being Black, since my racial and cultural identities are interwoven components that serve as the building blocks of my individuality. 

44 • Zooming Out

Commodifying the Human Experience It infuriates me seeing an entire group of friends on their phones instead of talking to one another. With bowed heads and fingers flying, they make me wonder what is so important on their devices that they can’t take the time to interact with each other for more than a few minutes. Social media connects people across the globe and allows them to interact in ways that were never before possible; it also makes me want to chuck my phone across the room, flee into the woods, and immerse myself in a Thoreau-like experience until the end of time. I understand that social media and technology allow us to communicate and share experiences almost instantaneously, but they also detach us from the present moment. Whether we want to or not, we end up partaking in the events of other people’s lives while also feeling the need to share portions of our own. There’s a certain kind of pleasure in showing people a sliver of our lives. Isn’t there something about the perfectly crafted Instagram post, the amusing Snapchat story, or the witty Tweet that fills us with pride? We want people to see our posts. And when they do, these people are also responsible for giving them value.

And this is where I find things to be problematic. The saturation of technology and media has begun to dictate what is of importance in our lives through the commodification of social media posts. In 1867, Karl Marx introduced the concept known as commodity fetishism, a theory that defines the relationship between money, labor, and the product. According to this theory, as soon as commodities are put onto the market and given a price, the amount of labor behind the making of the products disappears. The commodity acquires value through the act of exchange, and its underlying labor and utility instantly diminish. The connection to the actual hands of the laborer ceases to exist in the public eye as soon as the object is connected to money. Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism is mainly a critique of the capitalist state and how capitalist societies ignore the amount of real labor that was put into creating a product, treating commodities as objects in which value already exists. Just as one views a commodity as a final product that has inherent value devoid of the labor that went behind making it, one sees a social media post as an encapsulated experience that is disconnected from the labor that went on before it was uploaded.

These posts then become commodities with fetishistic value.

We have found a way to post ourselves—a true version, a crafted one, a little bit of both—on social media. Whether it’s Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, what we are doing, thinking, and saying can be posted for others to see.

by Gaby Leung

art by Jael Goldfine But what I’ve realized is that as soon as we post a picture to Instagram or upload an album to Facebook, we have transformed our true actions and experiences into something that obtains value by the amount of likes and favorites it gets or the number of times it is viewed. A prime example of this new fetishism is Instagram. The single picture that is uploaded on the app seems to capture an entire experience. No one knows what happened before the picture was taken, what the context of the situation was, or who the people were behind the scenes. No one knows how many attempts it took to take the photo or what went into the making of it. Just as the labor put into the making of a commodity vanishes as soon as the commodity is put on the market, the labor put into the photo vanishes as soon as it is posted. The “value” of the photo (and thus the experience, person, or object it portrays) is determined by the amount of likes it gets.

However, the way in which we view posts on social media extends beyond just the idea of commodity fetishism that Marx describes. The labor behind the creation of posts does in fact disappear as soon as it is presented on social media, but more importantly, a human’s connection to that particular experience is lost. The emotions, sensations, and feelings connected to what we post are not recognized because they are presented on social media as contingent on what society, acquaintances, and friends deem “relevant.” The personal, individual feelings associated with an experience are erased when something is posted on social media. A caption or photo, constructed and posted, can only get across so much. People’s lives consist of a continuum of moments that are impossible to capture and upload for others to see.

But our posts are beginning to be seen merely as things that can be given value by the public instead of as real human experiences. People are not products whose value lies in the amount of time and effort put into them. Experiences have value because humans have real, emotional connections to them. And in today’s society, social media has stripped these experiences of their humanness.

It seems difficult to escape the way fetishism shapes our lives. It is subtle and seemingly harmless, which is exactly where the danger lies. Social media is—and will be— an important platform that allows people to communicate and share experiences from all over the world. But our lives cannot be contained and described by a few posts on social media, and what they portray does not capture the human experience. What we really value is found in the experience, not the post. 

Watch & Listen • 45

Hey There Nostalgia...

by Olivia Bono

art by Fauna Mahootian

In the age of YouTube and Spotify, we can listen to any song we want from any era. So why is it that when we hear our favorite middle school jams in Okenshields—be they “Stereo Hearts,” “Dynamite,” or even “Cotton Eye Joe”—we drop everything (except maybe our trays of fried rice because we really don’t want to have to go through that line again) and listen? Whether by discretely foot-tapping or all-out choreographing, we’ve all been there. Why don’t current hits elicit this reaction? Music in general hasn’t changed in the last five years, and yet when I need a boost I still listen to (in private mode) the playlists I made when I was 13. It’s not even like middle school was this magical time—puberty kind of universally sucks. I think that it’s because those years were so rough that the music we listened to affects us so much.

Music is strongly tied to emotions and development. Current pop music doesn’t affect us as much now because we haven’t lived long enough to be nostalgic about it. We associate “Hey There Delilah” with long car rides to the store on rainy days, “Good Riddance” with our last day of seventh grade, and “Sk8er Boi” with throwing up in our best friend’s treehouse (or was that last one just me?). When we’re in a particularly emotional time in our lives, we feel the need to forget our troubles and block out the world. The invention and popularity of MP3 players and headphones certainly helped this, as they made it easier to drown out distractions and really feel like the music was personally talking to you, but certainly generations before ours experienced the same phenomenon. Why were the Walkman, the stereo, or the gramophone invented, if not to bring some sort of solace to past generations’ emotional lives?

Thirteen, especially, is notorious for being an age of capital-A Angst, even when it’s totally uncalled for. Got a B+ when you feel you deserved an A? YOUR LIFE IS CLEARLY FALLING APART. One of your friends forgot to wish you a happy birthday? EVERYONE DEFINITELY HATES YOU. You accidentally drop your deodorant on the way to gym class and your Vice Principal picks it up for you? SOMEONE KNOWS YOU USE DEODORANT; THE WORLD IS ACTUALLY ENDING. And so, being the dramatic creatures that we are, we rely on music to validate us and give us an escape. Who among us hasn’t listened to “Gives You Hell” when they were angry in middle school?

Or tearfully sung out “Traveling Soldier” with their friends? Or religiously belted the Across the Universe soundtrack of Beatles covers despite being way too young to watch the movie?

There’s a scientific reason that these moments are preserved so potently above all others: our brains go through crucial development during adolescence. It’s the reason there’s a drinking age requirement in most countries, and why it’s easier to learn a language as a child than as an adult. In 2000, a study led by Dr. Paul Thompson at the UCLA Laboratory of Neuro-Imaging found that the areas of our brain that

specialize in language learning are rapidly growing until sometime between the ages of 11 to 15. When our brains are still developing, we’re the most vulnerable to outside influence, and most susceptible to absorbing new information, like song lyrics.

We might not be able to memorize every single part of a plant cell, but we’ll know the lyrics to every Taylor Swift song until the day we die, whether we like it or not.

When we allow music to occupy so much of our consciousness, and define who we are as individuals, we get defensive.

This is where the notion comes in that “all of today’s music SUCKS.” As much as we may complain about our early teen misadventures, we still feel a deep connection to them. This isn’t only a Millennial phenomenon—it’s precisely why “classic rock” is popular among older generations, and why “80s nostalgia” or “90s nostalgia” is now so common. In 20 years, today’s tweens will feel a sense of longing for today’s hits, and the tweens of the future will feel a need to listen to our music, insisting that certain lyrics reveal a “deeper meaning” and “sincerity” than the tunes of the future could ever recapture. Music is maybe one of the biggest elements of generational identity. It ties millions of people across cultures together, uniting them under the badge of honor that they came of age at around the same time.

Even if we experience intense emotions in college like we did in middle school, our brains are just developed enough so that any new songs we learn won’t quite elicit the same instinctual reaction in the future. We might get teary-eyed when we think about songs that have specific meanings to them, but we won’t feel the need to protect that song with everything we have.

We can learn to speak a new language with practice, but we’ll always think and feel instinctively in our native tongues.

So will we look back fondly at our college years when we hear Meghan Trainor? Maybe. Maybe not. Quality doesn’t necessarily determine how much a song means to us. More than likely, we’ll still experience nostalgia, but today’s music will mean more to Cornell’s Class of 2021 than it will to us. They’ll have developed alongside today’s pop culture, as opposed to simply adapting to it. Was “Cotton Eye Joe” an artistic masterpiece? My middle school P.E. teacher might disagree with me, but I’d say not. And yet, every kid I know grew up hearing it at every school function, and knows the whole dance, whether they consciously tried to learn or not. It’s certainly not a deep, artistic masterpiece, but it’s a part of us now.

When a song is so ingrained in our identity, as are the songs we learned when we were just entering the “teen” demographic, it can have curious effects on our mood, despite the apparent “quality.” Somehow whenever I find myself at the end of the impossibly long line for pizza at Okenshields, and that song comes on, I feel a little more at ease, more in my own environment. The song might even follow me for the rest of the day, despite being one of the more obnoxious ear-worms of contemporary music. 

46 • Watch and Listen

White Girls Watching Lena what we can learn and unlearn from Lena Dunham’s flawed, loud, public feminism

by Jael Goldfine

I’ve never known what to think about Lena Dunham— what to make of her, how to speak about her, how to relate myself to her, or whether I should at all. As a young woman, I’ve felt obligated to have an opinion—a strong one, probably—but have skated by with a variety of mumbled, neutral non-comments about her, requested mostly by women whose opinion I respected, and boys I didn’t want to talk to.

I’ve largely avoided her work and the 14 million Google hits associated with her name in order to procrastinate having to make one, to avoid having to reckon with Lena Dunham.

However, as Lena Dunham’s legacy has grown messier and more fraught, and become more intimately attached to the emblem of white feminism and all of the subtle brutalities it encompasses, negotiating my own position within her orbit began to seem more urgent.

This November, Dunham, in a Q&A interview with Amy Schumer, took public aim at Odell Beckham Jr., the wide receiver for the New York Giants, mocking and dismissing him as a misogynist because he chose not to spend the night

“Lena Dunham is a white girl who messes

up loudly, grotesquely, and often.”

talking to her at the Met Gala.

Dunham said of the Gala: “I was sitting next to Odell Beckham Jr., and it was so amazing because it was like he looked at me and he determined I was not the shape of a woman by his standards. He was like, ‘That’s a marshmallow.

That’s a child. That’s a dog.’ It wasn’t mean. He just seemed confused… The vibe was very much like, ‘Do I want to fuck it? Is it wearing a…yep, it’s wearing a tuxedo. I’m going to go back to my cell phone.’ It was like we were forced to be together, and he literally was scrolling Instagram rather than have to look at a woman in a bow tie.”

Commenters across the Internet, skeptical of the elaborate monologue Dunham fabricated for Beckham Jr., took her to task for the racialized implications of a white woman publicly sexually villainizing a black man. Twitter users explicated the various problematic moves of her statement: the instant sexualization of Beckham Jr.; the assumption that Beckham Jr. should have been interested in her; and her failure to connect these racist narratives about black men as hypersexual, aggressive, and predatory towards white women before she published her rant to millions of readers. Many of her critics acknowledged that of course, to her point, lots of men do objectify women, and decide whether they are worth speaking to based on the way they look. However, it’s hard to separate Dunham’s comments from the power structure underlying her interaction with Beckham Jr.

Initially, she dismissed the criticism via Twitter, writing, “My story about him was clearly (to me) about my own insecurities as an average-bodied woman at a table of supermodels & athletes. It’s not an assumption about who he is or an expectation of sexual attention. It’s my sense of humor, which has kept me alive for 30 years. Glad the outrage machine roars on though, right, @amyschumer?” Later that day, she posted an apology on Instagram.

This is not the first time Dunham has been criticized for her negligent racial blind spot, defended her mistakes, and ultimately apologized, but I was struck by this particular incident and the cultural moment that followed. I was struck by the reckless, selfish, feminist self-righteousness of Dunham’s comments; by the disgust, anger, and hurt produced by them; by her defensiveness; by her shame and guilt, and the disbelief of many, that it was sincere. I was struck by the way that there both were and were not two sides to the story, and by the obvious fact that Dunham didn’t intend to do harm and didn’t mean what her words expressed, juxtaposed with the equally obvious ugliness of her comments. I was struck by the fact that Dunham is still fucking up this badly.

An opinion became inescapable. So here it is.

Lena Dunham is a white girl who messes up loudly, grotesquely, and often. However, this legacy of mess-ups is, I believe, fundamental to her mode as an artist. Her artistic and

Watch and Listen • 47

political project has always been about imperfection, nakedness and hyper-transparency, about ripping herself open, forcing us to look inside of her and see her instead of what we expect to see. Arguably, she does this brilliantly, and even her most ardent critics tend to qualify their arguments about her, praising this sensibility in Girls. However, she seems unable to switch off this sensibility off-screen, and in public. In the overlapping contexts of race and feminism, Dunham has unwittingly achieved the raw, hyper-visibility that is her ethic and her brand. She sheds the devices that white feminists use to shield themselves from that same title, parading her ignorance and blind spots for everyone to see.

In this sense, Lena Dunham is the id of white feminism— a finger on the unfiltered, primitive pulse of modern American white girlness, and all the complicated power and terror that goes along with that identity. There is something profoundly crude and raw and pleasure-seeking about the way she makes these ugly, big-small mistakes over and over again. She reveals a certain set of instinctive tendencies of the white feminist, among them a tendency to erase, to center herself in a conversation not about her; to project; to self-victimize; and to think of no one but herself. For exactly this reason, I think Lena Dunham is culturally important,

even crucial.

I would not attempt to persuade anyone to share my opinion. There are plenty of people who have seen enough of Dunham to know exactly what they think about her. But for me, ignoring her or her work doesn’t seem like an option.

I think her failures and mistakes and the harm she has done, and the conversation her mistakes ignite, are what make her someone worth paying attention to.

As a white woman, I feel the need to engage with, linger upon, absorb, and parse Dunham’s mistakes and failures— because inevitably, they are also my mistakes and failures, whether I commit them or not. Despite my discomfort with aspects of her work and public presence, it feels disingenuous that I (and her white feminist audience) should participate, at least quite so loudly in what she calls “the outrage machine.”

I found her comments about Odell Beckham Jr. unsettling. But me hating Lena Dunham for her reckless racism, that doesn’t do much good for anyone. This is especially true given the fact that, had I come across her comments before reading a critique of them, I might have found them funny and relatable. Rejecting her would, of course, be much quicker and easier, but inevitably it would come in part from a deep place of fear that I may be just like her. It is much more challenging and painful to try to engage with the ways in which Lena Dunham and I are alike.

As relatable as her brutally raw portrayals of white millennial women have been deemed, Dunham’s artistic and political failures can teach us much more than her successes.

Her mistakes reveal what she never meant to show us at all.

Her fuck-ups and selfishness and ignorance have the potential to alert white women to our own blind spots, to make us conscious and self-critical as a response to her carelessness.

It is challenging work connecting Dunham’s failings to our own. But it is made much harder when we fear her and frantically try to distance ourselves from her and her mistakes, as if they are newly staining and embarrassing to feminism— instead of revealing stained and embarrassing things about white feminism, that already exist.

White girls can and should be critics of whiteness but we will be much more effective in this anti-racist project if we make space for the ways that we are implicated within it. White women should criticize Dunham fiercely, but I don’t see posts and articles decrying her work, or tweets about how she is “so problematic,” as an appropriate or productive forum for white women’s critiques. These forms of expression are inevitably theatrical, a performance of anti-racism.

For me, Dunham’s story is the story of modern white feminism. We must consider not only the story that she has constructed and packaged for us (capital M Millennial, voice of her generation, modern girl, feminist leader), but also acknowledge what we see when we take a closer look. Hers is a story of trying and failing and being careless, of apologizing, being hurt, and scrambling to recognize that your intentions don’t matter and your hurt is not really the point at all. Hers is a story of ugly, messy, complicated, exhausting conversations with your friends and families and strangers and the Internet and the world, which often leave you all the more confused. Whether we like it or not, Lena Dunham’s legacy is one that white feminists must reckon with as our own. 

48 • Watch and Listen

Reading Television as Text confronting realities in Donald Glover’s Atlanta

By Jacque Groskaufmanis photos courtesy of FX

I watched the first episode of Atlanta in the Fine Arts Library, sitting next to a literal Greek statue and a fancy, old-timey map of 1970s Manhattan. Donald Glover’s show portrays the city of Atlanta and the vibrancy and violence that exist within it. The scenes are emphasized in an unsettling way, set against the background of the ivory tower that is Cornell.

This juxtaposition was, in part, so striking because the main character, Earn, frames his story within the context of a leave of absence from Princeton University. The show spends little screen time on Earn’s years at Princeton and does not reveal why he left, but the tension between the collegiate world that Earn abandoned and the vastly different city he currently inhabits is a constant motif throughout the show. Cornell

“Cornell changed the way I

watch Atlanta, and Atlanta, to some extent, has changed the way I watch Cornell.” changed the way I watch Atlanta, and Atlanta, to some extent, has changed the way I watch Cornell.

The show features Earn, a young man in his early 20s who is technically homeless, couch surfing and managing his cousin’s emerging rap career in a scheme to make money and get back on his feet. Earn’s situation is anything but straightforward, starting with his reasons for leaving Princeton and returning to Atlanta. “Three years is a long break,” his cousin Alfred says in the pilot episode—but this is largely the extent of the information offered to viewers about Earn’s departure from Princeton. Earn’s own father admits that he doesn’t know why he left, and after the first few lines in the first episode, the story of Earn’s time at school evaporates.

It’s easy for viewers to forget about this part of the storyline,

however, because the depiction of Earn’s reality in Atlanta is so vivid. Every episode is fast-paced and dramatic: Earn is detained; his girlfriend loses her job as a teacher for smoking weed; his cousin is accused of multiple shootings. The show integrates social commentary into the script so rapidly that it sometimes creates a white noise, and things get lost.

As an English major, I’ve made a habit of dissecting texts, and taking note of poignant motifs, arresting moments, and compelling characters. In terms of this kind of substance, Atlanta reads like a book. There are entire episodes in which the plot does not progress at all, existing in narrative autonomy, like a short story. The cultural and political implications of the show are impossible for me to overlook; however, trying to insist upon a full understanding of Atlanta would be a mistake, because it is too complex to understand in isolation.

I’m not from Atlanta. I’m a white woman from the suburbs, and the narrative of this show is not my own. I can’t attest to the accuracy of Glover’s portrayal of the city or relate personally to the issues the show addresses. But I can examine how the show reads and is being read—by myself, friends and peers—in this political climate on a college campus. Before trying to piece apart the show, I spoke to Austin Crute, an actor from Atlanta and a current student at NYU. Crute is a student, a singer, and now, an actor. He gravitated towards his role in the show because of his At-

Watch and Listen • 49

lanta roots, but also because he thought that the show highlighted the realities of the Southern city in authentic, comedic and provocative ways. Crute said about his experience on the show: “I was having fun, being the character I was directed to be. It all kind of hit me after watching the episode (and reading some analytical articles) that ‘Oh…[my character] may have been more of a political statement [than I thought].” And I think Crute is right­—about the show in general and his character. Crute appears in the fifth episode of the season, which fixates on the idea of “playing your role.”

In this episode, Earn’s cousin, Alfred, is advised to exaggerate and perform the stereotypical trope of aggressive, unlikable rapper, even though this is counter to his character’s personality.

This plotline provides a striking commentary about the pressure within pop and political culture, placed particularly on black men and women, to adhere to a particular and narrow range of roles. This isn’t necessarily a new cultural concept, but it’s one that Atlanta dramatizes and critiques successfully. I asked Crute about this pressure, as an artist and a black man in the entertainment industry. “When you are an impressionable black child and everyone around you is basically white…your environment can brainwash you into pretending things aren’t racist,” he said. “I used to give people the benefit of the doubt for mere social survival. No more. No one can afford to be silent anymore.” And he’s right. Although it cannot carry this conversation alone, Atlanta works to fill in some of those silences.

This kind of substantive commentary is particularly obvious in the second episode, when Earn and his cousin are arrested. While Earn is waiting to be put in “the system,” he sits in a room with other people who have been arrested.

Next to him, a trans woman and a cis man are reunited, and reminisce about their romantic past. When the man refers to the woman as his “girl” the other men in the room get aggressive and mock him, calling him gay. This scene centers on gender and sexuality: how the two overlap, and how they don’t. However, the script takes these considerations a step further by framing them at a site of criminal and legal rules, reminding viewers that the state and the criminal justice system still largely view gender as biological sex, failing to allow people to self-identify. The show also presents these

situations without attempting to convince viewers that these issues are fair or unfair. It just leaves them on the table and viewers are free to consider them or pass them by.

In the same scene, a man who is mentally ill dances around the waiting room. “He’s in here tearing it up every week,” says one of the officers, amused. The scene is lighthearted and it feels like, in a twisted way, the show finally attempts to punctuate a heavy episode with some comic relief. However, the man then starts drinking toilet water, and spits it on an officer, who retaliates by physically beating him.

“Why is he in here every week? He needs help,” Earn says, moments before the incident. On one hand, Earn’s conclusion is obvious: the criminal justice system fails those who suffer from mental illness. But when the subject of mental health is situated in a waiting room next to issues like gender identity, sexuality and racial profiling, it becomes harder to understand which issues need to be handled first, or how to begin handling them at all. Atlanta, as a show, is like this waiting room: a compressed clump of urgent issues, with faces and stories to flesh them out. Only unlike this scene, Atlanta is ultimately a comedy.

On one hand, you can separate this commotion from Cornell. But on the other hand, issues of social justice are talked about constantly on campus—in Government and English classes, around tables in Temple of Zeus, and during lectures and panels in Bailey Hall. The difference is that, for most at Cornell, these issues are abstract: intellectualized, mourned, and bookended by other realities. The fact that many of the show’s characters are of college age makes their radically different experiences and early thrust into adulthood all the more jarring. Over the summer I spent time working in parts of Washington, D.C. that remind me of the neighborhoods Glover depicts in Atlanta. Whenever I study in a particularly beautiful library at Cornell, I think about the people I worked with there, where they are, what they’re doing—not out of guilt or pity, but just in awe at how dramatically different America can be from town to city, from college to workinglife. On a more intimate level, Atlanta offers poignant images to carry around and consider. As Crute put it, “I think this show is doing a great job of forcing us to confront a lot of realities in Atlanta and America. And they manage to make harsh realities very freakin’ funny while they’re at it.” 

50 • Watch & Listen

Art in the Internet Age

an analysis of www.billwurtz.com

by Nathaniel LaCelle-Peterson

photos courtesy of Bill Wurtz

It is with little fanfare that the Internet has seeped into the day-to-day routine of life. It is a quiet medium that regurgitates pictures of my friends smiling and pointing at waterfalls or platefuls of chicken and waffles, the day’s news, the day’s think pieces about yesterday’s news, and the vague affirmation of strangers quantified in likes, “wows,” and retweets. There’s rarely a waking hour where I don’t unthinkingly reach for my phone and let myself melt down into the two-dimensional world of image and texts. I am not here to pass a judgment on these changes—they are complex, and too easily condemned out of the discomfort of change—but to explore the simple idea that art, in some capacity, reflects life. And a significant portion of our lives is now spent online.

The Internet is not devoid of people making (looselydefined) art; YouTube, any image-sharing site, and social media make large audiences handy to anyone with WiFi. This does not mean that all of the art being made on the Internet is good—middle school boys not only comprise most YouTube comment sections, but provide us with commentaries, satires, music videos, and Minecraft “let’s-play” videos—but it is exciting to think that any living room can become the stage for an audience of millions.

Living rooms with online audiences are a radical democratization of art, but the sense of intimacy they provide is a voyeuristic trick. It can feel as if you’re really there, sitting awkwardly close, on the bedroom floor of your talented friend who’s playing an overwrought cover of “Let’s Do It in the Road”—although you may think that their tasteful posters and ironic T-shirt are proof that you’re destined to be fast friends, to the onscreen kid with the guitar, you don’t exist. Off-screen, you know nothing about their life.

Bill Wurtz is one of the many amateur-turned-sensation content producers (I’m shying away from throwing “artist” around here; the difference between art and commercial content online is constantly challenged and a little arbitrary) who, for most viewers and readers, exists only as their work,

in the trivial ether of the Internet.

Wurtz is most famous for his nine-minute-long frenzied, and attention-deficient “History of Japan” YouTube video, which shares a fairly nuanced history through manipulated graphics and gratuitous lounge-jazz intrusions in his speedy narration. His commentary on various historical turning points and developments is both whimsical and informative, and the musical jingles that suddenly grip his storytelling often bookend major historical events or adjectives (“It’s time for World War One,” “Jesus,” “Trees,” and “Beautiful” are all suddenly sung and played). Besides this sole longer work, Wurtz’s videos are essentially just these bookend jingles—an unresolved chord progression, played on a synth keyboard and clean electric guitar—set to simple computer graphics of text, or webcam videos of Wurtz in his messy room. The “lyrics” are all short catchphrases, ranging from “I hate myself,” to “space toast,” to “a neat thing to do in your spare time.” The music is impossibly upbeat, which is ironically undercut by the simple, frequently sad lyrics—my personal favorite being the sung line: “Hello, thanks for checking in, I’m still a piece of garbage.” The video graphics are neon-paletted and pulled out of the deepest reaches of Microsoft Paint. The videos are painstakingly low effort—typically, they are only the text of Wurtz’s singing and small clip art style pictures which relate to the lyrics.

There are a number of exceedingly talented and strange people on the Internet, and in some ways, Bill Wurtz is just another. His videos are not especially profound and have not created a notable cultural echo.

What I find so remarkable about him is his website (www.billwurtz.com), which houses all of these videos and a page labeled only “notebook.” Wurtz’s notebook is a blank webpage with a descending list of hyperlinked dates, all formatted by the date and time, e.g.: “3.29.15 9:07 am.” That particular link, when clicked, leads to another nearly blank webpage, with “hi i know what i’m doing” written in plain font in the upper-left corner. There are over 350 entries all

Watch & Listen • 51 similar to “3.29.15 9:07 am,” such as “and also one more trick is, a good way to deal with this stuff that you may have forgotten about is RAVING EXISTENTIALISM” (12.21.13 1:02 am). Some are prognostications—“one day bikes will ride themselves. so you can just stay home” (11.30.14 1:24 pm)—or tidy sayings: “going to legally change my mind” (3.1.15 4:18 am).

It is a truly strange thing: why would someone so dutifully record these passing thoughts and share them with invisible digital strangers? On the whole, they seem to be little more than chuckle-worthy flotsams of consciousness. And how much can they reveal of Bill Wurtz? All the notebook seems to do is beg you to try: try and see if you can turn these passing thoughts into an understanding, or seek and find the entries which add a layer of authentic, spontaneous humanity to an artist otherwise only available in his carefully composed videos.

I’ve read most of Wurtz’s notebook, and I haven’t been rewarded with any great, complex knowledge of Wurtz or his projects which would make his videos seem more meaningful, or my life make more sense, as a good book or song sometimes does. But there are moments where there is an arresting tenderness to the whole project—the anonymous Internet user (me) is catching a passing thought of Wurtz’s at 5 a.m., a closeness that typically, in the day-to-day world outside of a screen, we share with only our closest friends (or no one at all). But most of the time, our choice as browser-readers is rewarded (punished?) with “tag, nobody’s it” (2.17.15 10:22 pm).

“Notebook” is an intensely personal project for its sense of spontaneity, but also a lonely, alienating one. Knowing the passing thoughts of a stranger at any hour of the day is less intimate than it may sound—the interactiveness of searching through the moments of Wurtz’s mind in the notebook is no substitute for the give and take of conversation. “Notebook” is a project which deeply fascinates me, but it can’t escape the trap of Internet art— the promise of communion with a complete stranger, undercut by the alienation that seems inherent in the vast Internet.

Both through the notebook and through his larger digital footprint, Wurtz is capturing a cultural moment. His notebook can be read as a dramatization of the digital experience: both in “notebook” and the Internet at large, there is a constant give and take between moments

of spontaneous humanity and random banality. For all the moments of humanity—those where, through the flat space of the Internet, you glimpse a vulnerable thought or moment of a total stranger and feel understood—there are many more moments of randomness—those where the massive size and speed of the Internet as a whole seem to overwhelm and subsume any possible glimpse of humanity.

These two contradicting sensations are what guide his videos: even when the words alone sound sincere, the music and graphics remain highly ironic. Wurtz takes the sights and sounds of the Internet and uses their context to frame his lyrics.

Microsoft Paint-style text and clip art would not be the most sincere way to set the text “I hate myself,” even without the context of Internet memes, image macros, and all the other ironic, silly, ephemeral Internet content that looks like it. Perhaps it’s a better visual setting for the text “the origin of pineapples is chickens,” as neither the text nor the image attempts to be serious or significant. The use of plastic, glossy jazz frames all this—the silly and the serious— with the generic background noise of advertisement, which is unavoidable on the Internet. As he alludes to in his notebook: “i went to the hospital to see if they can remove the ads from my blood. they said it’s ok, the ads are supposed to be there” (11.7.14 10:29 pm). Advertising jingles aren’t supposed to be conveying feelings of deep isolation, or even Wurtz’s inability to write songs over 15 seconds (which is itself a recurring theme of the videos and notebook), but they do seem to come naturally to Wurtz; the mock seriousness of jingle-jazz is a perfect compliment to both sides of his own creative focus and a good sound for both the whimsical, silly side, and the spontaneously human side of the Internet, too.

The Internet is very young.

As a form for possible creative expression, it’s barely begun—we’re a few decades in, which compared to the novel, song, poem, painting, or even film, is no time at all. Of course, the Internet of today will probably not be a whole lot like the Internet of tomorrow, but this moment of the Internet—a chaotic and exciting, lonely and overwhelming place—is well-preserved in a perfect product of it: www.billwurtz.com.

Will Wurtz be remembered? Who knows? Regardless, his videos and words will remain, dumped into the digital void, available to all who care to click. 

“It is a truly strange thing:

why would someone so dutifully record these passing thoughts and share them with invisible digital strangers?”

52 •

A Night at Mrs. Georgia’s

by Blythe Whitten-Snarr

Mrs. Georgia scrutinized herself in the huge, gold-framed mirror that hung over her cherry oak vanity in the master bedroom. She had been appraising with disquiet her current social standing in Maple Acres, which she feared was in subtle decline. Her neighbors in the small community never tired in their efforts to preserve and build status through various shows of grandeur, and Mrs. Georgia realized now that she had been on a road to irrelevance through her relative neglect of such efforts. She reluctantly abandoned her reflection and let her gaze drift in contemplation; it meandered towards the broad, mahogany bookcase to her right, tripped over a few gray books, and fell onto a copy of Gatsby. It struck her that a dinner party might serve as the perfect opportunity both to adjust the social spotlight to a more flattering angle and to identify any potential weak spots in her unsuspecting neighbors by which to take them down a peg or two. Resolute, Mrs. Georgia rose from the satin-cushioned stool in front of her vanity and glided to the top of the marble staircase leading downstairs. She called operatically, “Stanley, darling!” There was no reply.

She produced a perfect repetition of the first attempt, a few notches louder. “Stanley, darling!” Still, her husband did not answer. Mrs. Georgia’s excitable temper, which was beyond her control and therefore not a characteristic for which one could rightly blame her, was set ablaze. “Stanley! For God’s sake!” she bellowed.

A meek and barely audible, “Coming, dear,” issued forth from some far end of the house, and soon Stanley emerged from the corridor leading to the kitchen. He was wrapped so tightly in a white apron and was of such bulbous proportions that he looked to be half-man and half-egg as he trotted towards her.

“Stanley, we’re having a dinner party a week from Saturday.”

“As you wish, dear.”

“Make sure that Fran has the night off; her wrinkles have been out of hand lately. We’ll hire Ruby for the evening instead. Oh, and Felipe! Mrs. Still will be incensed that she didn’t snatch him from Butlers, Etc. first.” She paused for a moment as she envisioned the scene with satisfaction and then continued, “We’ll get Jean-Paul to redo the gardens. And that tapestry in the dining room needs to be taken down and burned. I know you like it, Stanley, but it’s hideous. We’ll

replace it with the mirror I bought last week. The beagles have to be groomed and polished and I want them in their bowties.” Stanley nodded and looked tired.

Satisfied that preparations were underway, Mrs. Georgia returned to her vanity and Stanley returned to his cupcake baking. By week’s end, the exhaustive preparations had rendered the house and grounds fit for what would be an extravagant and undoubtedly exquisite dinner party. All twenty-two adults living in Maple Acres had been invited; the children were purposely omitted from the invitations in order to preserve the atmosphere that Mrs. Georgia hoped to create at the party. It was thus with a thin and drooping veil of composure that she welcomed Lucinda and Hank Falm and their young son, Freddie Falm, when the three arrived at the door on Saturday. She embraced the parents stiffly.

“Why, Freddie’s here, too!” she said, her broad smile peeling off at the edges. A close inspection of Mrs. Georgia’s face at that moment would have revealed a left eye squinting and quivering ever so slightly with stifled rage. The effect, however, was indiscernible to careless eyes like those of the Falms.

Lucinda smiled. “Oh, yes! Freddie wanted to come along, and we couldn’t leave him alone at home anyway; that new sitter... What’s her name, Hank? Mary? Maria? Well, she canceled an hour ago and we couldn’t replace her. Can you believe that? An hour before she was supposed to arrive. The work ethic of these people is appalling.”

“There was a death in the family,” Hank said in a perfect monotone.

“Well, whatever it was,” said Lucinda. The trio stepped inside, and Freddie in his small tuxedo ran off to occupy himself as a nuisance in whatever capacity presented itself.

Mrs. Georgia continued to greet the other invitees at the door, and at last the guest of honor himself, Sir Allen, arrived. He had by far and away the largest and most expensive home in Maple Acres, which housed a staff of twenty-eight to tend its gardens, pools, tennis courts, bowling alley, theatres, vineyard, racetrack, observatory, shooting range, amusement park, and private airport. No one knew what he had been knighted for, or if he actually had been, but that seemed irrelevant in the face of his fortune. With Sir Allen’s arrival, the hors d’oeuvres were served.

Poetry & Fiction • 53

The schmoozing went seamlessly for the first several minutes of the party, until an olive came flying at high speed across the room and hit Charles Banfer (fourth husband to the wildly unpopular president of West Ville’s Pretty & Proper Lady’s Guild) square in the eye. The olive was the first of many, and soon a barrage of olives began to rain upon the crowd from what seemed like all directions. Several of the guests resorted to using their hors d’oeuvres plates as small shields, but largely without success because of the unpredictability of the olives’ point of origin. It was discovered at last that the guilty party was, perhaps unsurprisingly to those who knew him and that he was there, Freddie. He was scuttling unseen from point to point, having had the foresight to bring with him the slingshot he had received for his eighth birthday the week before. Felipe the butler was Freddie’s covert olive supplier, which allowed for much more rapid fire than Freddie would have been able to accomplish with only the occasional pilfered olive from abandoned martinis.

Felipe had good reason for being unwilling to aid in the success of the evening on Mrs. Georgia’s behalf; he had made efforts to call in sick the day before but Mrs. Georgia, believing his motives to be disingenuous and rooted in laziness, insisted that Felipe work Saturday lest she be forced to spread slander about him and ensure that he never buttle in that town again. As it turned out, Felipe’s motives lay actually in the crippling bout of flu he had contracted, as was evidenced upon his arrival at the party by his pale and clammy countenance and the fact that he couldn’t stop coughing, sneezing, and sniffling wretchedly all over everything.

Felipe was at least spared responsibility for the olive fiasco, for though Freddie was a brat and a pest, he was no rat. And so the young scamp suffered the consequences of his actions alone and valiantly, having been sent by his ruthless father to a time-out in the living room with only a flat screen television, his iPhone, and a small pack of beagles to keep him occupied. And with that, dinner began. The conversations around the immense, round table were lively and Mrs. Georgia was at last feeling happy with the state of the party.

But the happiness, alas, was fleeting, and in the next minute Mrs. Georgia’s heart left through her chest as she heard Mrs. Halter (whose father had been the chef for the Queen of New Zealand during her childhood and who was generally considered by the neighborhood to have the last word as far as food went) complain of a slightly unpleasant aspect of the bratwurst with fig sauce that had just been served as the main course.

“It tastes... putrid,” she said.

Mrs. Georgia thought for a moment that she might implode, and quickly made plans to wreak a savage vengeance upon both Mrs. Halter and Chef Victor when the chance arose. In fact, the opportunity to exact revenge upon Victor seemed immediately doable, as she thought about it.

“Oh!” said Mrs. Georgia. “How frightful. Please excuse me; I’ll go speak with Victor this minute.” She rose and hightailed it to the kitchen, heels sharply thwacking the wood floors, only to discover the chef fast asleep on a sack of rice in the pantry, reeking of gin. Admirably deciding that to murder him while he lay unconscious would be inappropriate

behavior for a lady, Mrs. Georgia simply closed the pantry and locked it from the outside with plans to handle the matter appropriately when time and consciousness would allow.

She returned to the dinner table and apologized profusely though vaguely to the guests. Noting her obvious embarrassment, Sir Allen had the chivalrous impulse to come to her aid and decided to make a toast in her honor as a means of removing emphasis from the shortcomings of the party. He took his steak knife to his wine glass in hopes of signaling his intent to make such a speech, but misjudged the necessary force (perhaps due to the nine whiskeys he had downed with dinner) and shattered the glass on the first blow. It was a successful effort to garner the crowd’s attention, however, and everyone stared at him. He rose.

“Mrs. Georgia,” he slurred, a sprig of parsley poking out from between his front teeth. “Mrs. Georgia... she’s something all right. L—let’s give a warm welcome to Mrs. Georgia. Mrs. Georgia, everyone!” He was pleased with himself, and beckoned to Mrs. Georgia, who found herself unprepared for the introduction and deeply embarrassed by the show. She rose.

“I...Well, thank you, Sir Allen. Thank you all for coming this evening, it’s been so... just wonderful to see you.

I’m so sorry that the bratwurst was putrid, and for the olives.

That Freddie is such an... an adventurous child. I do hope that Charles’ eye is salvageable and that the pimento can be removed without too much–” She was interrupted by a terrible, muffled yelling from far off. The guests, with wide eyes, fell silent. Cries of, “Help! Help! Please, help!” emanated from somewhere in the house. Mrs. Georgia’s heart sank once again. A few guests rose as if to assist in some way.

“Oh, that’ll be Victor!” said Mrs. Georgia. Everyone looked baffled and tired and those standing now sat down again. Mrs. Georgia took off once more down the corridor to the kitchen. When she arrived, she opened the door to the pitch-black pantry to find a frightened and incoherent Victor.

“Where’s the meaning of this?” he asked.

“Victor, if I hear another peep from you, you’re fired.

And how dare you serve putrid bratwurst? I ought to fire you this minute. Now sit down here and recover your senses, you damn fool,” she pushed him with some force onto a small heap of rags that sat beside the pantry door, and flew from the kitchen back to the dining room. The guests stared at her expectantly as she entered.

“Chef Victor and his practical jokes! He’s a rascal, that one. He really does delight in pulling everyone’s leg.”

She forced a laugh and a few sympathetic guests forced one with her. By then, some people had abandoned dinner and meandered to the main room, and from the library began emanating a terrible, off-key blaring sound. Sir Allen had brought his trumpet to the party, it seemed, and decided that he would grace his fellow guests with an impromptu afterdinner performance. At the sound of the heinous honking, the beagles, who had been locked in a small second living room off from the first when the guests arrived (which Freddie now shared with them), began howling to wake the dead.

Sir Allen took great amusement in their reaction and played louder. They accepted the challenge and howled louder.

The other guests laughed heartily at the riotous scene when it began, a few recording videos, but quickly lost

54 • Poetry & Fiction their amusement when the show did not stop or decrease in volume. After several minutes of the deafeningly loud and dreadful cacophony, the partygoers began escaping to the far reaches of the house, where the trumpet and beagle symphony could not be heard as loudly. Mrs. Hillside took rather invasive solace in the sweater section of the master bedroom’s immense closet, the thick garments offering excellent sound-cancellation, and Mr. Crosswell ventured as far as the attic, where he found Stanley rolled tightly in a fleece blanket and fast asleep with a cigar in one hand and a baking catalogue in the other.

Despite the clear displeasure of the other guests, Mrs. Georgia didn’t dare deter the knight and the hounds. It was not until Sir Allen had exhausted himself that the racket came to an end and the guests slowly began to gather once more in the main room. Conversations resumed. Mrs. Georgia wandered over to Van Gilde (Hector Farbon Whyst Van Gilde, who was known throughout the county as just Van Gilde) and Ms. Gretlin. The latter had an imported, extra-spot Dalmatian from the Philippines that had become the talk of the town and to whom she was entirely attached, considering him some version of the son she never had. Van Gilde, never highly attuned to social queues, was saying to Ms. Gretlin as Mrs. Georgia approached, “I’m sure he’s a fine beast, that mongrel. But tell me, did you have to pay extra for the spots, or did you get a discount on a per-spot basis?”

Mrs. Georgia could see plainly the wild impropriety

of Van Gilde’s comment, though without missing a beat she chimed in, “Extra for the spots? Ha! That’s too much; extra for the spots!” Ms. Gretlin looked hurt and uncomfortable and smiled flatly before excusing herself. The party limped along, the spirit of both it and the guests having reached an all-time low and most of the attendees feeling an unpleasant mix of drunk, nauseous, and achy, from the alcohol, bratwurst, and inclement flu thanks to Felipe’s germs that he had handed them with their hors d’oeuvres. Then, amidst the dreariness, the fire alarm began to sound.

Everyone ran for the door, careful to grab their coats and accoutrements from the small room off the foyer on their way out, and once outside never stopped running. It turned out, though not a soul remained to find out besides Mrs. Georgia, that Stanley’s cigar had made contact with his baking catalogue and set off the attic’s smoke alarm.

Once the fire engine had arrived and left–unneeded after all because Stanley had come to and doused the flame with his orange juice in time–Mrs. Georgia went back inside.

She passed herself in the mirror that hung in the foyer, and turned back to look at her reflection. Had that fragment of shrimp tail been wedged between her incisors all night?

The beagles in their bowties, who had been released from the second living room along with Freddie when the alarm sounded, came inside now and howled at Mrs. Georgia. She realized that the poor things must have been hungry, since Victor had surely forgotten to feed them. 

The Scarred Land

Geneva

by Alex Davies

by Alex Davies A glistening lake outside Geneva, quicksilver covers the sand.

Gazing out at the tide, drenched in the ignorance of war.

“Well, it’s tough, you know, is international law.

So just be glad we didn’t need more.”

Above all men, such lore.

“Aye, but depends on the height of the tide, and the breadth of the sand.”

Get lucky, yes, that’s something more, but otherwise you’ll need her.

For there’s no hope in this war.

“Less is death, and life is more.”

“We need her.”

Onto the water, a petal, a gavel, a law.

Turning their backs to the sand, two partners in war.

Buried, their feet and hands tied.

Back home, they say, “What war?”

“That ain’t no law.”

Or is that what they do in Geneva?

Marble towers stand out from the tide, but their lighthouses shine no more, beneath them only black sand.

The bodies bloated, victims of a spring tide, water over their heads no more.

Brittle skulls filled with skeletons of war, ninety years from Geneva.

The future falls on Mediterranean sand, and dies under European law.

Rivers and sand, that map of war.

No more, no law, for the tide, has taken Geneva.

Along that strip of sand, raged the war, the law, proved no more, like a tide sweeping over Geneva.

Black feet stand firm beneath the big sky, As the sun slides through the trees, Softening the blackened hills, Over which they pray.

Upon the prairie, needles have sewn, Asphalt and coffins, For men who speak of minutes, And keeping their peace.

Proud on the wild range, an old church stands, Hewn of stone by wind and rain, Its spire broken by men, And stolen in pain.

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