This week we’ve got so much to say and only twentyy pages of magazine to fill so let’s just leave it

The Nass doesn’t have the time/ space for introductions, so, this week, we get right into it.

The Nassau Weekly

Volume 48, Number 5 April 11, 2024

In Print since 1979 Online at nassauweekly.com

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April 11, 2024

This week we’ve got so much to say and only twentyy pages of magazine to fill so let’s just leave it at “GO!”

Masthead 4 7 8 10

By Otto Eiben Designed by Vera Ebong and Hannah Mittleman

The Sartrean Diary of a Cranky Barista

The Nass was founded in 1979 by a couple guys who still answer our emails and one guy who doesn’t. It makes a nice story that the magazine was created as a reaction to the countercultural wave breaking against Las Vegas. Maybe–these guys said–we can scrape together what’s left and hold this animating energy in our hands. Then, we can put it in a filing cabinet, so other people can also hold it down the line.

Photography

But four years after the American exit from Saigon? Sure. Whatever you say.

A-Train to Elsewhere

By Sasha Rotko Designed by Vera Ebong and Emma Mohrmann

By Basak Ersoy Designed by Hazel Flaherty

By Frankie Duryea Designed by Vera Ebong

My Thoughts are Running Away

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By Alexander Picoult Designed by Vera Ebong and Alexander Picoult

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Private Logic in The Bear

15 16 19 20 Cover Attribution

Editor-in-Chief Events Editor Charlie Nuermberger John Emmett Souder

Say It Like You Mean It With Your Fists for Once

By Annie Wang Designed by Jasmine Chen

Amazing Thai in Princeton NJ Needs to be on Your Radar

By Dana Serea Designed by Vera Ebong

Fugue on the Theme of a Name

By Kelsey Wang Designed by Vera Ebong and Chas Brown

From Typesetting to Tradition: Marc Fisher’s Footprint on Nassau Weekly

By Jonathan Dolce and Marc Fisher ‘80 Designed by Vera Ebong

Anabasis

By Michelle Ho Designed by Vera Ebong and Alexander Picoult

Alexander Picoult

I had a dream that it rained for two million triassic years, and we called it April. Ferns grew as big as lifted pickups. The Nass, at present, occupies a small room in the basement of Bloomberg, and in the dream, it flooded. All the archives melted into a pulpy soup of poorly written cultural commentary. We were adrift. We had no history anymore.

Every tragedy evokes a sort of limp catharsis as if, crotch-deep in these flood waters, you had pissed yourself. And what a tragedy. To leave the materials soggy and illegible behind you.

Dear god–the one in heaven–please cast down that deluge. Bring it upon us. Flush out the filing cabinets of the Nassau Weekly, and let us ride atop a high and beautiful wave of our own design.

Charlie Nuermberger, EIC

Publishers Isabelle Clayton Ellie Diamond Managing Editors Sofiia Shapovalova Julia Stern Creative Director Otto Eiben

Audiovisual Editor Mia Dedic

Web Editor Abani Ahmed

Historian Jonathan Dolce

Trustees Alexander Wolff 1979 Senior Editors Katie Duggan 2019 Frankie Duryea Leah Boustan 2000 Eva Vesely Leif Haase 1987 Marc Fisher 1980 Junior Editors Rafael Abrahams Ivy Chen 2013 Melanie Garcia Robert Faggen 1982 Teo Grosu Sharon Hoffman 1991 Marisa Warman Sharon Lowe 1985 Hirschfield Mia Mann-Shafir Alex Norbrook Aiko Offner Sasha Rotko Head Copy Editors Cailyn Tetteh Sabrina Yeung Design Editor Vera Ebong Art Director Alexander Picoult

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Volume 48, Number 5

This Week:

Verbatim:

Fri

5:00p Taplin Ungroomed Renaissance: Josquin’s Missa L’ami Baudichon

5:00p McCosh Princeton French Film Festival (Opening Night): The Braid (2023)

Tues

4:30p East Pyne Cosmopoetics: On the Ecologies of Nature, Poetry, and Ethics

5:00p Chancellor Green Spring 2024 Student Reading

Sat

7:00p Betts Auditorium PFFF: Black Girl (La noire de...)

7:00p Chapel The Annual Milbank Memorial Concert: “A New Heaven”

Wed

11:00a Firestone Plaza Spring 2024 Campus Farmers Market

11:15a East Pyne PFFF Masterclass by Richard Brody of The New Yorker

Sun

2:00p Lee Music Room Princeton University Wind Ensemble Inaugural Concert

5:00p McCosh PFFF: Toni (Toni, en famille)

Thurs

12:30p Chapel After Noon Concert

4:30p Louis A. Simpson The Cy Black International Book Forum

Mon

2:30p Murphy Studio Authentic Jazz and Swing Dance Workshop

5:30p Frist Zen Whispers– Meditation Classes with Chung Tai

Got Events?

Email John Emmett Souder at js0735@princeton.edu with your event and why it should be featured.

For advertisements, contact Isabelle Clayton at ic4953@princeton.edu.

Overheard in Choi Dining Hall Enlightened empath, currently taking HUM219 Jesus and Buddha: “You should always feel bad for stupid people.”

Overheard while reading thesis edits Professor in the streets, verbal veteran in the Sheets: “I have used the word “cowed” but I would never recommend it.”

Overheard in Ellipse Neighborhood Scooter-less freshman male: “I swear, dude, with all this rain and all these NPCs walking around, I’m going to hit someone on my bike and kill them.”

Overheard at Dillon Normal guy: “I feel like I’m witnessing some kind of masculine pagan ritual right now.”

Overheard in Zumba Cottage cheese & tinned fish fangirl: “I’m trying to eat more elderly people foods.”

About us:

Overheard in Guyot Hall Has their priorities straight: “I want to take a gap year to focus on my aquaponic farm.”

The Nassau Weekly is Princeton University’s weekly news magazine and features news, op-eds, reviews, fiction, poetry and art submitted by students. There is no formal membership of the Nassau Weekly and all are encouraged to attend meetings and submit writing and art. To submit, email your work to thenassauweekly@gmail.com by 10 p.m. on Thursday.

Include your name, netid, word count, and title. We hope to see you soon!

Overheard on the Sixth Floor Thirsty Nass-supporter: “I would be honored to have a verbatim-writing credit.”

Overheard while scoping in Frist Discerning mentor: “You should be thankful if you get someone that is 5’6 on Princeton Campus.”

Needs help: “I can’t tell how tall he actually is because he wears Doc Martens.”

Overheard while having your cake and eating it too Disillusioned by American desserts: “There’s no taste.

It’s just something white in my mouth.”

Overheard at office hours Ambitious, hardened woman: “I don’t want to be up at midnight helping some stupid kids, I wanna be in bed at midnight in my mansion.”

Overheard during Confession Females these days: “I want to dress pretty and yap. I want something warm inside me. I love men.”

Overheard while opening Hinge Yearning addict: “It’s a reflex.”

Submit to Verbatim Email thenassauweekly@gmail.com

Read us: nassauweekly.com Contact thenassauweekly@gmail.com us: Instagram & Twitter: @nassauweekly Join us: We meet on Mondays and Thursdays at 5 p.m. in Bloomberg 044!

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April 11, 2024 PAGE DESIGN BY VERA EBONG ART BY HANNAH MITTLEMAN

SAY IT LIKE YOU M MEAN IT WITH YOUR FISTS FOR ONCE

A Nass writer says it like he means it with his fists for once

By OTTO EIBEN

y phone buzzes and a message from the co-managing editor pops up on my screen: “Julia’s wondering when you might submit to the Nass,” she says and I type out “Never” with a period at the end. Never again, that is. But then I change my mind, because I don’t want to be a pain in the ass. So I say “maybe when I’m less busy” instead. That is probably a half-truth anyway.

I’m on the Pomona Freeway in LA County, going 65 miles an hour. My friend is in the driver’s seat, and he’s pretty confident despite the overwhelming number of commuters in the early afternoon hours. I know no one would trust me with a car, especially a rental. And I’d be a bitch about it, too, if they made me drive. The European mind can’t comprehend 14 lane highways, they say, but that’s not what concerns me–at least not in this instant. The AUX is playing “American Teenager” by Ethel Cain, which I requested, so I’m singing along. It’s a hot summer day, but in early March, and I’m looking out the window at the palm trees and billboards passing by like little guard towers, observing the stream of cars flowing beneath.

The billboards in LA are peculiar, I note to myself. They all seem to follow a specific pattern,

advertising for one industry only.

A man in a well-pressed suit and glasses smizes at me from above and asks if I was hurt in an accident, which I wasn’t, so I deem his offer irrelevant. I’m sorry, Mr. Sweet James, not today, I whisper. He lets me know he’s voted Number One in the country, but he doesn’t explain by whom. We drive away and I say goodbye, slightly entertained by this interaction.

But it only takes two seconds until I see the next one, a man dressed in gray this time. He’s less verbose than Sweet James–he simply asks, “Car Accident?”–but I’m afraid I can’t help him either. His name is James Wang, representing James Wang Law, and he doesn’t claim to be voted Number One, but he does tell me that he has a 5-star rating, and speaks Spanish as well.

Lo siento, James Wang, I can’t really take you up on the offer. Maybe some other day. We keep driving, hoping that no other James pops his head up, but it doesn’t take long until I’m advertised another insurance lawyer.

And they just keep coming.

Badly Hurt? Let me help you. Car Insurance? Truck insurance? Hurt on the road? Motorcycle insurance? Number One in the State.

Number One in the Country.

Voted Number One five years in a row. Jacoby & Meyers. Morgan & Morgan. Fucking Sweet James again.

I’m dying to see a McDonalds ad.

The Pomona Freeway is not for beginners, I conclude, and I marvel at this entire industry that

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Volume 48, Number 5

seems to dwarf all the others in the highway’s vicinity, despite being built on the premise of people getting badly wounded. They’re hyenas atop a mountain, waiting for a drop of blood, sniffing around on the sidelines. They desire you to fail. I entertain this thought for a while. What if I lean forward and yank the steering wheel to the right, just for a split second? What if I give these hyenas something to prey on?

“I really want you to submit, Otto,” reads the next text from the co-managing editor, and this time it isn’t just Julia who wants to see me write. But how can I write anything with the hyenas looking at me all the time?

I pull up my assigned reading for my Austrian Literature class instead. This week it’s Stefanie Sargnagel, an author writing about writing. She hates everything she does for money. She hates writing, mostly. She wishes to slice off some kids’ fingers at the ice skating rink.

She won a ‘Bachmannpreis’ for this story. Maybe I’ll yank the steering wheel when we get closer to the carpool in front of us. That’ll take out more than fingers. That’ll give me something to write about.

I know I’m not a good writer.

I’m barely a writer at all. I’m mostly just okay at this stuff that I do.

Amy March from Little Women said “I want to be great or nothing.”

I submit this piece slightly after the deadline, silently hoping that no one I know will ever get to read it. My friend keeps driving over the speed limit, silently hoping he won’t have to call Sweet James at

the end of it. I’d like to choose to be nothing, because how could I be great with hyenas bearing their teeth at me? I’d like to drive at the speed limit too. People would honk.

The co-managing editor urges me to think back to the last time I

narrator would be thrilled to see that Tesla crash into someone.

She would be fascinated by Sweet James and the rest of them.

My favorite thing about this Austrian reading assignment is Sargnagel’s desire to write literature without the weight of litera-

had an idea for a piece. That turned out great, she thinks. Maybe I just need a little nudging. A Tesla honks 20 feet away from our car and I think about how I’m only trudging along the freeway of alternative journalism. Sargnagel’s

ture resting on her shoulders. She wants to create something mundane, something that doesn’t collapse under the enormous pressure of innovation, and the search for the spectacular. The banality and the crudeness of the piece,

her excitement at the sight of fresh blood oozing from a drunk’s wounded forehead scares me, not because I find it disturbing, but because I relate to it on some level. She incorporates this bloody, repulsive, borderline tragic event into a piece about her own grouchiness towards life in general, and wins the audience award. If only the Pomona Freeway had something horrid to offer that I could incorporate, maybe I could win the prize for best piece in this week’s Nassau Weekly.

Who am I kidding?

I look up at the next billboard and it’s a copy of the September 10, 2023 Issue of the Nass, titled, “The Very Hungry Frosh.” That can’t be, I say with my mouth agape. Has our reach really expanded so far West? But that goofy ass design is so fundamentally Nass that there’s no doubt left in me. In the issue itself, Sofiia Shapovalova’s piece, “Godless,” pierces a hole in my lungs, and gently whispers “great or nothing, Otto. Great or Nothing.”

Like Sweet James and James Wang Law, 48 years of Nass history shiver with anticipation as an idea starts forming in my head. Will he do it again? Will he write something so mediocre that it sets back student journalism by a decade? 48 years of Nass history that includes maybe five pieces of mine. Some are okay, some I wish were never published.

And God knows, some that the Nass would be a much higher quality magazine without. The ones I don’t hate are almost worse in a way. They have a short little blurb at the top, claiming to be rated

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April 11, 2024

5-star, and available in Spanish as well. If you could quit it with the growling, Hunter from October 5, 2023. You’re just as much of a hyena as James Wang from James Wang Law. We’re near the outskirts of LA when Sargnagel’s “Ich-Erzähler” meets up with a friend to comfort her after a rough breakup. Her narrator is being a proper friend, she says all the things one needs to hear when broken up with. But truly she’s just bathing in the drama of it all. She’s a sucker for a good story. She thinks she may write about this friend for the “Bachmannpreis.” Maybe that’s the trick to writing, I think, take something ordinary, like a friend’s breakup, and accentuate the drama in it enough so that it becomes a story. Maybe I’ll write something about LA Highways and injury lawyers. Sweet James can duel James Wang. They can call each other for legal help if they get injured.

When I pitched this piece I’m writing right now, someone suggested I pretend I ruined the Nass’s reputation with something I wrote in the past. A junior editor even sent me a New Yorker article called “My Life Is a Joke.” I tried not taking it personally. He says it’s about a woman, who dies, gets resurrected, and then gets invited to speak at a conference. He says the question is how can we go on after reaching rock bottom. The Nass wants me to pretend I did. Maybe I have. My piece will probably be

labeled fiction on the website anyway. Whatever.

Sargnagel ends her short story by ordering pasta at a furniture shop’s restaurant. She says it doesn’t taste like anything. Exactly how she likes it.

The reason I hate writing is that everything I write turns into something it’s not. Hunter started out as an observation about dogs at Balkan borders, and so-called “Border Hunters” in my own country. It ended up being a story about my father. But the truth is, he never said any of the things I made him say in the piece. He never even thought any of those thoughts.

I wanted it to be great. I wanted it to be Godless. I wanted it to be everything the Nass ever was, innovation, authenticity, and a bit of a spectacle. I wanted to stare Sweet James in the eye and scream “who’s Number One in the country now, bitch.” A part of me wishes I had just eaten my bland, furniture-shop-restaurant pasta as it was.

We get off Pomona Freeway at the next exit and soon we’re in downtown LA where billboards are sparser, but arguably more creative. One just says “You can’t escape rush hour traffic, but you can escape prediabetes.” That makes me giggle. Maybe one day I’ll escape the weight of alternative journalism, and I’ll just write for the Nassau Weekly like a normal person. Maybe one day I won’t overplay the drama of it all, and instead

of yanking the steering wheel and slicing off some kids’ fingers, I’ll just drive at the speed limit, down Pomona Freeway.

We get out of the car at the first In-N-Out we can find. Above it stands another injury lawyer’s giant billboard, which somehow found its way downtown, away from the highway and the other hyenas. His name is Ali. He’s asking one simple question. “Who hurt you?”

I’m not exactly sure what to say to that. No one. Not really. I hurt myself. I hurt myself every single time I submit to the Nass. I hurt myself each time I take a line from a song I like and make it the title of a piece, even though it’s only vaguely relevant to the piece itself.

I keep doing it anyway, because I want to be great. I’m nothing. I’m food for the hyenas. I’m a hyena myself, on better days. I hit a vape that a friend got me before I enter the restaurant. It’s a clear vape.

She says it was the only one they sold at the store. Literal air that kills. But at least it doesn’t taste like anything. Exactly how I like it.

The Nassau Weekly wants to create something mundane, something that doesn’t collapse under the enormous pressure of Otto Eiben, and the search for the spectacular.

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Volume 48, Number 5 PAGE DESIGN BY VERA EBONG

A-Train to Elsewhere

ART BY EMMA MOHRMANN

“I did not understand the sentiment of a chapter. Life had only been one chapter.

I thought life would only be one chapter.”

By SASHA ROTKO

T

he house was filled with cardboard boxes. I was five years old, and everything seemed large to me, and the memories I have from this time are scattered and I may have forgotten the worst of them. I remember lying on a bench outside while strong men put our things in a truck. I remember my mother brushing the hair from my face, expressing tearyeyed that this would be a great new chapter. I did not understand the sentiment of a chapter. Life had only been one chapter. I thought life would only be one chapter. I thought life would be play time and Van Nuys and elote in the park forever. Or maybe I did not know forever.

— The apartment was filled with cardboard boxes. When I’d arrived in New York City four years earlier, I thought it would be forever.

But Los Angeles called my father on the phone and told him there was a job waiting for him, a really good job, and he’d be stupid to say no. So when they told me we were going back, I heard, instead, that these years I’d spent on treeless walks by the brown, brown Hudson river would go to waste.

That this was all for nothing. It was a new kind of betrayal. And when we left and I slid down to the floor against the elevator door I thought that tears would never cease, that today would never go, and when I returned to Los Angeles it would

not be the homecoming my mother made it out to be. Because this was home. I’d made it home. But I was nine years old and my mother’s hand was bound to mine. I would go where she took me. I rode the A train with my mother and my sister all the way from Tribeca to JFK. The seats were orange, and when I moved back to New York City much later, I liked knowing that each A train I stepped into could be that very train, could take me home. ­— The new house was filled with cardboard boxes. We hadn’t been there long enough for me to care.

Los Angeles, I’d figured out, was more than Van Nuys, and in fact the land of big hills, of kids with famous parents, of Sun, of traffic, all the time. I went to school that morning, sat in my very first middle-school classroom, got bullied by my very first middle-school bullies, cried in my very first middle-school bathroom, and came home to a new new house down the street from the old new house. The new new house was bigger, but we had no living room furniture and so my dog thought we were giving her away because that’s what happened last time her owners packed up the house in a bunch of

cardboard boxes. Our address only changed by two numbers, but my mother was very excited. Driving to school that morning, she told me that this was a new chapter. I didn’t question her. It was new enough.

— The new new house was bought by a famous comedian. My bedroom is now an office. I cried like a baby when I left the new new house because I hadn’t cried the last time, and I thought about leaving a mark somewhere, here, thought about ruining the perfect paint. The new new house was eight years new and when I sat on my bedroom floor, watching strong men take my things and put them in a truck, I wondered if anything could last forever. I had friends who’d lived in one place all their lives. Studio City, by Tere’s Mexican Grill. Larchmont, a block away from the first cardboard-box house. Silver Lake, atop the big hills I hadn’t climbed yet because I was in another chapter of brown rivers and concrete. I was moving back into my old bedroom in the apartment in New York City and I had a whole summer ahead. I was doing big-girl things, working, cooking, leaving. Leaving for college, which meant putting my life

in cardboard boxes again. I cried when I left New York. I sat on the floor of the elevator, riding lobby to 7, 7 to lobby, until it didn’t hurt to walk out the door. I think a part of me still sits on the elevator floor. I think she keeps the old me company.

— In August, I unpacked the boxes. In May, I’ll pack them right back up again. I am starting to think this is the nature of life and me. Maybe I will always be going somewhere, elsewhere.

Sasha Rothko thought life would be play time and the Nassau Weekly and elote in the park forever.

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April 11, 2024 PAGE DESIGN BY HAZEL FLAHERTY

Diary of a Cranky Barista “Perhaps days are too long for me. I must change the scale of memory. I’ll try writing in hours and minutes.”

F

By BASAK ERSOY ebruary 6

I have been having trouble remembering the details of the day. Even journaling day to day has been insufficient to keep the minute details in line. It’s not like I don’t enjoy life. I’m content and I’ve recently had plenty of pleasant moments. Yet, I keep living in a soup of hours, faces, and spaces that barely leave any traces.

I’ve been reading my diary entries from last year. The one from June 25 seemed to signal the beginnings of my current mental state: – June 25 – Aix-en-Provence, people watching in the promenade “The best thing would be to write down events from day to day. Keep a diary to see clearly – let none of the nuances or small happenings escape even though they might seem to mean nothing. And above all, classify them. I must tell how I see this table, this street, the people, my packet of tobacco, since those are the things which have changed. I must determine the exact extent and nature of this change.”

–Sartre, the incipit of Nausea I got bored at my host parents’ home. V keeps calling me to the living room for biscuits and tea. She

talks about how communism, refuges, and Macron have been ruining France. I don’t quite get how she thinks those three are connected.

Oddly enough, I enjoy her company. There is something comforting about our difference.

Recently, I’ve been feeling that I’m living more than I can record in my memory. I am awfully aware that what happened on Saturday does not feel the same on Monday. Even on the day of my experiences, I lose so much of the moments. It bothers me that I can’t remember enough.

– Memory does not speak, but I want it to speak. Memory is silent, but I want it to scream.

February 7 I have been thinking about Sartre’s incipit. Perhaps days are too long for me. I must change the scale of memory. I’ll try writing in hours and minutes. I don’t like writing, but I will write.

I have an assignment for an anthropology class. The task is to describe in great detail what is happening in a space. I suppose I will use that as an excuse to change the time scale of my writing. I’ll write about Coffee Club.

Feb 8, Thursday 12:20 I don’t have a shift today. I enter the shop for a cup of coffee. I peek behind the bar to see who is working. The familiar faces give me comfort. I get in the line. There are 4-5 people before me. The grinder growls. A barista yawns. The chatter in the background blends into the rhythmic mechanical sounds behind the bar. Customers

giggling, light footsteps, the matcha whisk buzzing, the espresso machine dispensing water after every shot. Order and chaos coincide in the complex soundscape.

The more experienced barista intently watches the espresso shot drip into the espresso tumbler. The flow isn’t very steady. The barista looks at the pull time and starts complaining about how short it is.

“It is severely under extracted,” I hear her say. The other baristas peak at the shot and nod along.

The senior barista asks her two colleagues whether they would like to dial in the espresso, a process that requires adjusting the size of the grounds and the dosage to ensure the optimal taste profile.

The younger baristas nod along, agreeing to a mid-rush espresso rollercoaster.

One of them giggles and says, “I can’t drink espresso. I’m not built for that.” The other two shrug and giggle back. They split the shot of espresso into three tiny porcelain cups after mixing it between two espresso tumblers. The baristas assume different corners behind the bar and turn away from each

other while tasting the espressos.

The newer ones avoid eye contact with the espresso connoisseur, waiting for someone else to comment on the taste. Behind the bar, saying the espresso’s bitter when it’s sour is like a sin behind the bar.

They choose their words carefully.

They take another sip of the espresso and someone announces the verdict: “It is too bitter.

We should try setting the grinder coarser to make it less bitter.” The trio nods along to the decision.

One of them makes eye contact with the customers and heads back to the register. The barista and the many customers go back and forth asking questions: “What can I get you today?”

“Which syrups do you have?”

“What is a small?”

“Is cow’s milk fine, or would you like soy/oat?”

“Yes, I can add it to the tab.

What was the name?”

It is my turn to order. I always second guess my order. I look at the barista and utter a long “hi” to gain time. We make small talk and I decide to get a cappuccino.

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Volume 48, Number 5

Feb 8, Thursday 12:42 (Writing in hours and minutes is tiring. I want to go back to days.) I finished my cappuccino. I am nodding along to the music on aux and doing readings. If I see anything interesting, I take notes.

Sometimes I feel as though I might fully lose the ability to write if I force myself to write. The temporal precision of this exercise is inducing in me a sense of discipline that I find disturbing.

Feb 9, Friday 10-1pm Feb 9, Friday 10:05 I have a shift after my Chinese class. Since it is the Chinese New Year’s Eve, our professor taught us how to do calligraphy. I picked up a red bookmark and wrote “peace” (héping: 和平) on it. I could have stayed for longer to write more elaborate characters on bigger pieces of red paper. Yet I had to leave for my shift. Afraid of smothering my first calligraphy attempt, I carried the bookmark in my hand to the shift.

Entering the shop, I say hi to a few friends studying at the tables.

Three baristas stand behind the bar, one of whom sighs in relief upon my arrival. She clocks out and leaves for a precept. As I wash my hands, I greet my coworkers.

A few minutes later, an off-shift barista stops by for a drink and chats with us. He remarked that we all had brown-hued sweaters. I jokingly note that we look like a thrift store. A week or so earlier when I invited a friend to apply to become a barista, the friend answered that he didn’t have the barista “aesthetic.” I think about that, looking at our brown sweaters, baggy jeans,

and corduroy pants. It’s true that we have an aesthetic that matches the wooden interior of the shop.

12:02 The barista on aux left at 12. Now I am responsible for setting the atmosphere of the shop. It’s a rush.

Customers are arriving in groups. I don’t have much time to write this entry or to choose the music. So I just put on my Spotify Chill Mix. 12:24 The Chill Mix happened to mainly consist of jazz songs, an accurate reflection of my recent taste. A customer stopped by a few minutes ago and asked who was on aux. The baristas pointed at me. He told me that he liked the “tunes”-what an interesting word choice.

Every three or four minutes, he tries to guess the song. He hasn’t guessed the song right even once until now. While we don’t mean to be impolite, we laughed at his questions. We are used to seeing all kinds of people.

12:45 I was on the register for twenty minutes, repeating the same questions over and over again. When I first became a barista last year, I disliked being on the register the most. I didn’t like dealing with money and facing people directly intimidated me. Maybe it was because I also felt intimidated ordering drinks at coffee shops. There were too many options, yet I only liked simple drinks like espresso and batch brew.

I am looking forward to getting off my shift. I am tired. After Friday shifts, I feel the entire weight of the week collapsing on me.

1:03pm

I am sipping on my shift drink on one of the barstool chairs, no longer behind the bar. I am sipping on my shift drink. I survey the people and objects around me to see if I am missing anything.

1:15pm I will leave the shop after I write a few more sentences to this entry.

An interviewer and an interviewee sat next to me. They are talking about a finance job, I think I heard the interviewee saying “generalist” and “trader”. I don’t understand the conversation entirely, yet the terminology and their professional air contrasts with the warmth of the shop. They are being glared at from all directions.

It is almost a violation of Coffee Club’s code of conduct to bring the corporate world into the shop and to profane its sacred relaxed pace with outside realities.

Still Friday, 8:30-11pm 8:45pm I am back to coordinate a comedy show at the shop. It is just the comedy people, me, and the three baristas behind the bar until 9pm.

Some performers removed the cables from their source and I struggled to put everything back together. There isn’t a single shift without a mini crisis at Coffee Club.

9:15pm The line for drinks stretches outside the shop. I can’t even go to the closet.

10pm The performers are done. I relax a bit. I have never organized such a busy event. I guess it’s good for the business, yet I feel a bit bad for the baristas who staff the events I

organize. I try to help as much as I can on both sides of the bar.

Feb 11

I forgot to write yesterday. I guess I will remember February 9, 10 am-1pm and 8:30-11pm in great detail and forget about February 10.

I see a spider on my ceiling. I will gladly look away and try to forget that it’s there living above me.

She talks about how communism, the Nassau Weekly, and Macron have been ruining France. Basak Ersoy doesn’t quite get how those three are connected.

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April 11, 2024 PAGE DESIGN BY VERA EBONG

NEW CLAIRVAUX

By Frankie Solinsky Duryea

The last time my grandma and I spoke, she was bed-bound. In a lucid moment she told me about a monastery near where my mom had grown up, and promised we’d go together.

The monastery is called the Abbey of Our Lady of New Clairvaux. It’s a four hour drive from my hometown. In January, when I stayed for three days, there was only one other guest.

Volume 48, Number 5

The Abbey is scarcely marked by road signs, hidden in the fields of walnut trees and grapevines that make up the Northern California Valley.

I made the trip alone, a couple months after we’d finally spread my grandma’s ashes. She used to bring me to Sunday mass. At New Clairvaux I attended for the first time in a long time.

When I left, homebound, I said goodbye to the monks. I drove over the Sacramento River, then past the house where my grandma had raised her family. Thank you, Gee.

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12

RUNNING AWAY

MY THOUGHTS ARE

April 11, 2024 PAGE DESIGN BY VERA EBONG ART BY ALEXANDER PICOULT

A Nass writer beams 24 thoughts straight from his brain to yours

By ALEX PICOULT

G

reetings readers, At a loss for actual substantive writing, I have instead compiled a list of thoughts that have been running around my conscience lately. Hopefully there’s something for everyone here. Enjoy.

1. That television show How It’s Made has really fallen out of public consumption and it desperately needs to make a reappearance.

I still have no idea how a lot of things are made.

2. Why did the art of the silent film die but people still go to watch ballets? It’s the same thing but live and you are less aware of what’s going on.

3. There are only two movies that have made me cry in my entire life.

(1) Won’t You be My Neighbor – that documentary they made about Mr. Rogers. (2) Saving Mr. Banks – that non-documentary-documentary they made about the film adaptation of Mary Poppins.

4. What happened to the art of the 1950s kitchen? We really had something there. Interior design-wise.

5. I wish there was such a thing as lowercase question marks so that last thought didn’t sound so serious. I just want to ask something without sounding desperate.

6. Within the past month I’ve come to the conclusion that I may only be happy if I work as a Disney Imagineer in the future but I also really want to live in Montana or Wyoming so I don’t know how I’m gonna make that compromise. I’ll have to learn to love Anaheim.

7. It’s continually perplexing to me why we made futuristic postmodern architecture for almost twenty years in the middle of the twentieth century and got so close to looking like Star Trek and now I’m looking around and everything’s

boring. Look at the TWA airport terminal (now hotel) in JFK. What happened to that sort of thing [lowercase question mark] 8. My 19-year-old pomeranian poops in her sleep. Thankfully the only thing we have in common is our age.

9. Duolingo doesn’t have an option between Brazilian Portuguese and Portuguese Portuguese – what if I need to learn one of those specific types? (I figured out how to do the lowercase question mark).

10. Ambient lighting is truly a wonderful thing.

11. Two nights ago I sat in the Bloomberg common room from 3am to 4:30am and it made me want to permanently change my sleep schedule and become nocturnal. I think from now on I just need to go to sleep immediately after classes end and then wake up at midnight and start all of my homework.

12. Wondering if it would have been possible for Ariana to keep her eyebrows the normal color and not bleach them. I know she has to be Glinda and everything but I feel like Glinda also didn’t bleach her eyebrows that much.

13. Max Hooper Schneider makes really cool miniature sculptures.

Check them out. There’s one that is a tiny bar in an overgrown forest with a bunch of tiny TVs that are all playing random scenes from Cheers. Creative genius (I have no idea what it means).

14. The temperate rainforest climate seems like a great place to be. A low-commitment solution to semi-tropical living.

15. Who determines what good taste is? Is there like a corporation or something of the sort…

Probably Target.

16. Wait is it just Anna Wintour (lack of punctuation to indicate stunned and/or dragging on of thought) 17. Whenever I step off the train into Manhattan I have a visceral need to vomit and/or pass out.

18. Whenever I think about muscles and tendons I have a visceral

need to vomit and/or pass out.

19. Whenever I think about the possibility of raising a child I have a visceral need to vomit and/or pass out.

20. I am obsessed with the last scene in Past Lives where Nora is walking back after saying goodbye to her friend and she has a little silent cry in her little boots and her little dress and it is just so pleasant to look at.

21. (a) I got new socks for Christmas and they all have ‘foot’ written on them. Now I will never forget where they are.

21. (b) Socks part two. If I can prevent it, I never wear matching socks.

22. Addendum to 21(a). Maybe all clothes should be labeled by body part. Eliminate confusion altogether.

23. Every week, on average, I add about five new songs to my liked on Spotify and then only listen to those until the next five come along. Currently those songs are: - Clouds Across the Moon - The Rah Band - Red Wine - Grapetooth - Crying on the Subway - Hana Vu - Memphis - Kitten - The Movie In My Mind - Miss Saigon Original Cast 24. I believe you can watch the Lord of The Rings trilogy with maybe 45% attention and despite not entirely knowing what’s going on, you can completely understand everything. And it surprisingly doesn’t get boring.

So, that is what has been running around my conscience. Now I’m letting them run away to settle here. Farewell.

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Volume 48, Number 5

PAGE DESIGN BY JASMINE CHEN

Private Logic in The Bear

Intimate silences and expository behavior in a hit Hulu series

By ANNIE WANG

H

ulu’s The Bear stars Jeremy Allen White and Ayo Edebiri, who play Carmy and Syd, two chefs trying to open a restaurant together, while navigating grief, anxiety, and life. The show follows their and the other characters’ personal struggles separate from the restaurant connecting them all.

Collaborating in opening a successful restaurant prompts these characters to transform as individuals and as a group. For instance, Carmy arrives at the restaurant after leaving his previous position after his brother’s suicide. He’s ridden with anxiety and grief but only copes in solitude. Yet, as he invests energy and time into opening this restaurant, he also invests himself in his coworkers and sister Natalie.

The loss of one sibling strengthens the bond between the other two, a bond that Carmy and Natalie both need.

The Bear was my hyper-fixation over winter break. When returning to campus, my creative writing

professor introduced the concept of private logic to the class. Private logic refers to a character’s inner motives and can be revealed through behavior, especially how they say or move. It is one of my favorite concepts in screenwriting because I think it’s one of the most ambiguous. Can a few words and body language really reveal the internalized frameworks characters operate through? And are these characters themselves aware of their private logic? The characters and the way they interact in The Bear is a perfect example of how private logic can captivate viewers or readers.

Part of the show’s allure is its ability to condense complex dynamics and relationships in seemingly mundane scenes, like this one that Carmy and Syd share at the end of season two: Syd: “You could do this without me.”

Carmy: “I couldn’t do this with out you.”

Syd: “Yeah, you could.”

Carmy: “I wouldn’t even want to do this without you.”

All this is said underneath a broken table. Syd is lying on her back

against the floor, looking up at the table’s surface. She holds a screwdriver in one hand, reaching for a loose bolt near the tabletop. Carmy is sitting upright underneath the table, slightly hunched. Sunlight from the windows behind them spills into the empty restaurant. I can’t remember if they are alone in the restaurant, but the scene is strangely quiet.

The show is known for being loud, with knives quickly hitting cutting boards, sizzling oil, shouting and swearing, and the ever-present “Yes, chef.” Frantic movements, tension, anger. Syd and Carmy are often at the center of these intense moments, like the scene in season one where Syd has an argument with Richie, one of the other chefs, which ends up in him getting stabbed with a kitchen knife. (Richie handles the stabbing with relative grace). Yet, on the day of the restaurant’s opening, we can only see Syd, Carmy, and the space between them underneath a broken table.

The show is not a romance-- the official genre is a comedy-drama, but I wouldn’t consider it that either. However, the relationship between Syd and Carmy is incredibly intimate and tells a lot about

each character’s private logic. The words they exchange in this interaction are short and simple; no wordy declaration of love mimicking classic romances is necessary.

The scene can even be considered a bad metaphor: two broken people fixing a broken table, who get close to fixing each other. But there is much more to Syd and Carmy than being broken, as there is much more to this scene than just a table.

Syd and Carmy invest most of their time and energy into the restaurant opening. The restaurant is their life; if they can’t do the restaurant without one another, they can’t do life without one another. Their dependence on each other speaks to their relationship with themselves as individuals.

They both have suffered losses in the past— in both their personal and professional lives-- which creates their need for someone else to catch them in case they fall in their present. The trust they have in each other helps them deflect.

Their private logic can be taken as two individuals feeling like they can’t do “this” alone without becoming victims of self-sabotage.

Admitting the need you have for another person is an incredibly

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vulnerable thing to do. Essentially, you are exposing the empty parts of yourself and asking another person to fill them. You’re revealing your insecurities. Syd and Carmy aren’t only exposing themselves for their lack of independence but also admitting their vulnerability.

The Bear has been praised for accurately reflecting the real restaurant life, like the reality that goes into preparing a meal, and the struggles of running a small business. However, what made it compelling for me is the way it treats the multiple manifestations of the human condition. Everyone in the show’s set of characters is treated as a complicated, multifaceted person, and each relationship that forms is, in turn, complicated. The intensity of the cooking scenes just heightens the intensity

April 11, 2024

of these relationships and the people who are partaking in them.

Viewers, in trying to understand these character’s next moves and following their arcs, are prompted to examine the characters’ private logic.

Such examination of fiction forces viewers like myself to consider our own private logic, and how it may translate to real life.

The Bear makes me think that any interaction between two people, just like the ones between its characters, can reveal so much with only a few words. There are tells we may be fully ignorant of, that unintentionally reveal bits of our mind and personal history. Maybe we give the power to those around us to interpret our own private logic, diminishing our own autonomy.

“You know, you make me better at this.”

There’s a pause before Syd softly replies: “You make me better at this.”

Syd and Carmy use the word “this” to drive their conversation.

The restaurant, their lives, and maybe the act of fixing the broken table all fit under the umbrella term “this.” They have a mutual understanding of its implications.

They never touch, and hardly make eye contact with each other. Carmy rarely looks away from Syd, but there are only several moments where Syd pries her eyes off the broken table to look at him. They adjust their positions and posture throughout the scene to fit under

the table together, yet the physical space between them hardly shrinks or grows. They can’t seem to stray away from each other, and their physical closeness is a manifestation of their emotional one.

Even though their dynamic is not overtly romantic, I still think of this moment as a romantic one -it’s just more passive compared to conventional romances. But maybe my assumption says something more about my own private logic.

Readers, in trying to understand the Nassau Weekly’s next moves and following its arcs, are prompted to examine Annie Wang’s private logic.

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Volume 48, Number 5

PAGE DESIGN BY VERA EBONG

AMAZING THAI in Princeton NJ Needs to be on Your Radar.

A team of two sisters offers up authentic Thai cuisine for the chilly spring weather

N

By DANA SEREA othing beats a warm, comforting meal after a long day of enduring the cold weather. After trudging through the frigid temperatures, my body craves something warm and delightful to combat the icy wind and snow.

One of my favorite soothing dishes comes from Amazing Thai, located on the end of Nassau Street in Princeton, New Jersey.

Founded in August 2019 by two sisters from Bangkok, Thailand, Amazing Thai offers traditional Thai recipes from the northern, eastern, southern and central regions of the country.

“We had a lot of experiences in the restaurant business but we took so long (at least 6 months to a year) to adapt and create Thai foods in Princeton. We hope the people here enjoy our food,” they told me.

“We love everything about Princeton,” affirmed the sisters.

“We enjoy creating our recipes, representing Authentic Thai foods, and are very excited to see people love our foods.”

The restaurant created a welcoming environment, with its beautiful, golden leaf chandeliers, intricate wooden wall decorations, and gentle background music. I was greeted with large smiles from the staff and was immediately seated at a small table by the window, perfect for watching the snowfall outside. The people around me were devouring steaming bowls

of curry, noodles, and stir fry dishes, as if they were the dishes that held the cure to any winter freeze. I was surprised to see that the place was also home to many Santa figurines; I tried to count them all, but the waiter, my savior, came to take my order and finally feed my empty stomach, rumbling in anticipation as I inhaled the spiced aromas in the air from everyone’s plates.

For an appetizer, I ordered the crispy spring rolls that are filled with carrots, basil, cabbage, and silky sweet vermicelli noodles that come with a lime-mustard seed sauce. Although I’m not a big fan of mustard, its addition to the sauce added the right tart punch, and made me dip the roll in for more. The rolls were fried perfectly, allowing for an excellent crunch between each bite. The crunchy vegetables, pungent seasoning, and delicate noodles soaked up the flavors of the tangy sauce that complemented the fresh vegetable filling and added just the right amount of acidity.

As an entree, I ordered a classic vegetable Pad Thai. The dish is a stir-fry made with rice noodles, eggs, radishes, peanuts, bean sprouts, scallions, and an assortment of vegetables including broccoli, zucchini, cabbage, snow peas, and green beans. The combination of such ingredients made each mouthful an incredible experience, as the different textures and flavors worked together in making a dish delectable. The crushed peanuts were scattered in between the delicate noodles and provided a nutty flavor. The crunchy bean sprouts balanced the soft chew from the steaming hot noodles, and the well-seasoned

vegetables offered the dish an appreciable degree of freshness.

However, the highlight of the meal was the rich, sweet-and-salty sauce that heavily coated the stir-fry. The sauce brought the ingredients in the dish to life, as each element was thickly painted with a fusion of fish sauce, oyster sauce, brown sugar, and tamarind. The combination of salty, nutty, and a slight bit of sweetness left me craving more. The meal was satisfying and I licked my bowl clean with a happy, full stomach.

For first timers to Amazing Thai, the owners recommend the authentic Khao Soi, a northern Thai style dish that has egg noodles with slow cooked chicken immersed in a creamy coconut curry.

Their personal favorites include the northern style Lanna wrap for an appetizer and the Chu Chee Duck from the central and southern parts of Thailand for an entree.

“The Lanna wrap is a very unique recipe that is hard to find in [the] US. The Chu Chee Duck is the perfect combination with spicy,

crispy duck and the delicious curry sauce,” they attested.

Excited to be a part of Princeton’s dining scene, Amazing Thai anticipates sharing their cuisine in more places across the Northeast. “We hope to expand Amazing Thai in many locations in the future,” the sisters said. It would be incredible to see Amazing Thai in New York City, Miami, or even Los Angeles, massive cities where this cuisine needs to be enjoyed.

While the place is a bit of a trek away from campus, it is worth it.

With each step I take through the snow, I feel as if I’m on a mission to the best comfort food in town.

As the name suggests, Amazing Thai is truly amazing, and I highly recommend visiting the restaurant during the winter season for some delicious Thai cuisine.

The people around Dana Serea were devouring steaming copies of the Nassau Weekly as if they were the dishes that held the cure to any winter freeze.

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April 11, 2024 PAGE DESIGN BY VERA EBONG ART BY CHAS BROWN

“He noticed his own language was becoming violently metaphoric.

The unseen power of this landscape awakened his mind to un-apprehended combinations of thoughts.”

By KELSEY WANG

I

n the second week of April, Keller visited Lake Natko.

The pure white light of evening flowed down the terrain that gently sloped into the town.

Pilgrims once climbed the mountains to communicate with divinity. The townspeople said that the air was so thin at the summit, it was easy to hallucinate the deity speaking to you in your own voice.

The mountainsides were in bloom. Keller arrived too late for the veiling of the world in winter.

Another veil, the veil of mist, constant as the piety of a small town, floated down from far like the pure spirit of wind, or the hint of an unseen power. The inconstant representation of red-brick buildings at the foot of the mountain glimmered behind this grey veil and ideated into a hymn to beauty.

Yet dearer for its mystery.

Teasing his thoughts out of eternity, Keller gently mocked himself, murmuring, “Where are the songs of spring? Ay, where are they?”

Keller walked from flower to flower, wrenched himself from the allure of comparison, and found room and board for the night.

The next day, a rainbow arched

FUGUE ON THE over the sunrise, and the mist scattered.

There was a harmony in autumn. Keller caught himself staring deep into the tender features and unfurled himself in the great harmony of what he saw, bound to a love for all nature. Musing deeply, he wove in and out of the phantom organization of the human mind, glimpsing from time to time a higher power.

Words in likeness of nature, many-colored, many-voiced, bound the everlasting universe of things in an unapprehended song.

Ordinary words, spiritualized by the secret alchemy that flows from death to life, could contend with the fiery spirit of the west wind.

A drama of human thought in blank verse reached out in widening ripples, never residing, ceaselessly raving.

Keller’s own mind was bringing its own tribute of water.

He tilted his head as if catching the music of an evanescence that had fled, or a voice from the grave in that distant land whence Keller came.

He noticed his own language was becoming violently metaphoric. The unseen power of this landscape awakened his mind to un-apprehended combinations of thoughts. It spoke in the same divine tone that had called up Keller’s first love for poetry.

He followed the directions of the bell-boy. The countryside compelled the mind always to comparison. Directions were given in measures that glanced into

eternity. Thousand-year oaks or women-shaped rocks represented distance. His journey to the house by the lake resembled a visionary adventure.

A visionary who found nothing but an empty house.

Compared to the great shoulders of the mountains, the house was as small as the works and ways of man, their deaths and births, their feeble dreams.

Keller had known the one who for many summers lived in this house by the lake. Whatever he is now, it is not what he had been.

He unlocked the door with the key he had been entrusted. The rusted hinges gave a protest but gave in under his hand. The house had one floor, a minimally furnished kitchen, a modest guest room, and a study with books.

Keller shut the windows and entered the study. In an unlocked drawer he found the papers.

Keller spent the day reading the papers, which were not voluminous. Letters from friends and students, drafts of articles promised and never submitted.

After uninterrupted hours of reading in absolute solitude, the absence of sound and human presence of the house seemed to stand in as symbol of something beyond.

He spent the night in the guest room. In lieu of an alarm, the noise of early ducks woke him. An unseen presence, one of the gods of the seasons, disguised himself as a youthful figure and strode solemnly through the town.

It was a town from the novels of

Gotthelf. Young men were sweeping leaves from the cobblestone paths. Keller touched his hat as he passed them.

The presence was not visible, but produced an effect of agitation, stimulated color, emotion, and motion, made Keller acknowledge it was there.

The sky shone like under a stained-glass dome, prismatic, and made the skin radiant.

In the cozy, Swiss establishment, he was surprised by a stranger who asked to sit with him. The black cloak blended the stranger into the darkness, like a softer voice hushed over the dead.

Keller was surprised by the sudden appearance.

Steam rose from the freshly brewed coffee.

The stranger introduced himself as the local priest. “I heard someone is looking for the professor’s house.”

“That’s me. I’m collecting his manuscripts.”

“I hope you don’t take my curiosity badly. News travel fast in this small town, and an old man is easily curious about a long-unseen acquaintance...”

“I don’t mind,” Keller said.

“Actually, the professor died a few months ago.”

The priest was stunned with shock for a few seconds. Then he apologized. “I’m sorry if I’m bringing up unpleasant memories.”

“Don’t worry about it. The professor left the manuscripts to the university, and the librarian asked me to collect the last of them. It took a long time, even for me, as

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Volume 48, Number 5

THEME OF A NAME a former student, to pinpoint his summer residence.” Keller gave a wry smile. “Though I wasn’t his best or favorite student.”

Yes, he had a high opinion of the professor. As a scholar. The professor was witty, passionate, fair, and fairer to students he liked. Keller was not a person who excited passionate feelings of kindness in others. He was just glad that his career did not depend on the professor’s good will.

“I can only tell this to a stranger...but in his final seminars he was old, mad, and…I hate to say it, despised.”

Like old King Lear, the work he loved. Keller recalled the beauty of the letters that shocked him. I feel I live without a conscious will to live, but at the same time I am kept conscious enough to write of it, the professor had written. The draft was without a recipient, and Keller couldn’t guess to whom it was meant.

Against the chatter of people and the clink of cutlery, the priest hung his head in silence.

“I never imagined receiving news of his death this way.”

The priest’s eyes were lowered in a slightly lonely expression.

“It’s been long since I last spoke about the professor. I couldn’t help but dislike him when he was alive, but to remember him felt nostalgic. I will push for the publication of his letters,” Keller said, and took a sip of coffee that had grown cold.

The priest said the professor had stayed in the house by the lake every summer until three years ago.

“He often volunteered to play the organ for morning worship.”

This was not what Keller expected. “The professor played music?”

“Yes, he was quite accomplished. I wondered if he studied music professionally. It was an astonishment to listen to his improvisations, if the mood struck him.

He left no manuscripts for those, unfortunately.”

Keller sharply caught the implication. “The professor wrote music? He composed? Are there manuscripts?”

“Is he not known at all for his music? The whole town knew him by his public concerts. He was a very accomplished musician. He didn’t leave most of his manuscripts to me, but I can give you the ones I have.”

This was an unexpected find.

The church towered prominently over medieval brick-and-stone houses. The priest returned with two brown envelopes in his arms.

He handed the smaller one to Keller. The movement made a few creases in the meticulous black sleeve of the cassock.

“This piece for violin and piano is the Vinteuil Sonata. I judge it as an intellectual exercise.”

As a former student of the professor, Keller immediately caught the literary reference.

The priest indicated the other, heavier envelope. “But this is the one upon which he lavished the most care. This piece he kept revising, never-ending: The Fugue on the Theme of a Name.”

He hesitated before giving the

manuscript over, as if what he held in his arms was not a manuscript but a living, breathing creature with a beating heart and its own secrets.

“Could you entertain an old man’s hypothesis?” the priest asked. “Now that it does not matter.”

The fugue begins in C major, the key signature of innocence, and ends in E flat minor, full of pain and death. Everything terminates in the key at the greatest possible tonal distance from its beginning.

The journey took more than thirty years.

“I believe,” said the priest, “the fugue is the composer’s final words.”

The fugue is a farewell to the dead.

About the name, said the priest.

The professor had invented a musical alphabet. Music notation can be written as letters from ‘a’ to ‘h’. After ‘h’, the professor repeated the cycle: ‘i’ becomes ‘a’, ‘j’ becomes ‘b’. Matching this to the subject of the fugue produces the melody fragment that translates into the name ‘Alain.’

Not any corpse would have worked for the subject of the fugue.

“I believe the fugue is a tomb for Alain.”

Alain? Keller did not read the name from the letters. There wasn’t an Alain in his immediate family. None of the professor’s friends Keller knew were Alains.

“It must have been a friend when he was young,” Keller suggested. He left the second part of

the sentence out: the friend must have died when the professor was young.

Then another hypothesis came to Keller: “Could Alain be an invention?”

“Perhaps, the professor was proud of how he hid fragments from someone’s sonata in the fugue.” The priest went quickly through the music score, but to no use. It has been too long. He couldn’t find where.

Keller looked at the patch of white on the collar close to the priest’s throat, and said with full conviction, “I believe you are right.”

“Would you like to hear the fugue?

It is a very physically demanding piece, but I will play as much as I can. Maybe you will sense something I do not.”

Keller doubted it. He had no musical training and had no ear for classical music. To him, the professor’s beautiful fugue will be harmonious madness, without sense. But he appreciated the priest’s sincerity and sat faithfully on the bench to listen to the end.

The fugue opens with the theme of Alain. The first voice states the theme in its simplest form, then successively in each of the four voices. The priest told him to pay attention when the Alain theme recurs.

As Keller expected, the music bound him to no secret communication. He heard, as he expected, nothing.

He was able to persuade the priest

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to entrust the manuscripts to the university. The department was organizing a collection of essays in the professor’s honor; it would be an occasion to publish the fugue, and the music librarian would be delighted at this addition.

The priest had said with some dejection, “Is that where it’s going to end up?”

Keller assured him hastily, “Of course, I will push for publication, but the professor never lectured on music, and nobody knew he composed. Would you rather keep the manuscripts?”

The priest shook his head.

“Every summer until three years ago, the professor reworked the fugue. That is why I kept it. It has no use for me. I can do nothing for it.”

Keller watched the priest relapse into silence and let the words echo within him.

“And the Vinteuil sonata?”

“He never mentioned it.”

Keller left the church as the twilight was making itself felt. The darkness had not yet time to make the path unfamiliar.

A sea of fire enveloped the silent snow at the summits. Nothing moved, all was eternal. Despite his reconciliation to nature, he seemed to see out of the corner of his eye a veil that has been torn, and behind the veil, in shadows, the sightless chasm.

Music, when living voices die, vibrate in the memory.

Keller asked himself again if the fugue that the professor had borne long in his heart evoked anything in him.

The permanent snow on mountains burned in the setting sun.

April 11, 2024

Under painted windows that tore the sunlight through the glass, made it holy, scattered it over the priest at the organ like a handful of white feathers, Keller could not deceive himself. He was not moved by the music.

The priest playing the organ did not transform into an image of professor and the fugue in his mind. It was not because of a flawed imagination. The idea simply did not

occur to him.

Soul-searching sorrow, as if all the sorrow of the generations were bound in the keys, crying out, crying, crying — this he, categorically, did not hear.

He didn’t catch the Alain theme at the beginning, much less when it was subjected to various developments. The music score meant little to him since he couldn’t read

it. To his untrained eye, the notes were as meaningful as hieroglyphs or ideograms to a foreigner.

The wind blew back his hair, and a voice spoke to him from the mountains. It was hard not to be melancholy in this evening breeze, harder to resist that the music was as meaningless as a randomly generated number, vanishing on a whim, pitiful as if it had never been.

He was still shaking the numbness from his hands.

After the performance, his hands were clenched, red, and numb. It hurt when he uncurled his fingers, and he drew a sharp inward breath, as though he’d been holding his lungs still.

No unleashed spirit, no vision was conveyed. Not even the

memory of the fugue disrupted Keller’s thoughts.

But when the light crystallized in one corner of the church, the music vibrated in his mind. It lived in the perpetual life of the mind, abiding in life despite not being a physical presence.

Keller didn’t search for the fugue; it found him. Perhaps he consented to hear the fugue because he thought it would bless his soul.

At its end, a veil was lifted from the world, and he saw things differently.

A name evoked through music presented a beautiful world, intimate, only theirs. Composing from it, acting upon it to color it with his own light, the professor made the unseen presence abide.

The church lost a talented organist, the university lost a brilliant scholar, the letter lost its recipient, and the dead lost someone who remembered them.

Keller walked to the house by the lake. In a sense, he had walked the path from birth to the grave.

At the door, he bowed slightly and changed from holding the manuscript under his arm to holding it against his heart.

Time stretched out his shadow farther and farther. Beneath the gathering swallows in the sky, the carillon bells of the church were singing the hour for evening vespers.

To Kelsey Wang, the Nassau Weekly will be harmonious madness, without sense.

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Volume 48, Number 5

PAGE DESIGN BY VERA EBONG

FROM

TYPESETTING TO TRADITION

Marc Fisher’s Footprint on Nassau Weekly

An alum reflects on the Nass before the Nass: a Holderbased pilot mag called Friday

By JONATHAN DOLCE AND MARC FISHER ‘80

O

n the night before the Nassau Weekly’s first ever issue in ‘79, Nass members were tasked with producing a completed edition from “a rented typesetting machine that would spit out columns of copy ready to be pasted onto dummy pages.”

Between squeezing a finished copy into their only computer and meticulously typing without error into the machine, all they needed was an urgency for exactitude and, though seemingly contrary to their mission of precision, some alcohol. But, despite their attempt, when our founders compiled the copy into the monster instrument, they fell upon any journalist’s nightmare: they were short one piece. As “the clock ticked toward deadline and the recalcitrant machine did its best to resist [their] attempts at journalism,” Marc Fisher ‘80 took responsibility to write a story from scratch; to beat the clock, he was privileged “no revisions, no editing, no mistakes.”

This was over four decades ago.

In the Nass’s early years, the now Nass Trustee Marc Fisher played a major role in nurturing the paper from idea to conception. Along with Steve Reiss ‘79 and a few other members of the University Press Club, “[they first] started Nassau’s predecessor, a one-issue pilot called Friday that appeared in the spring of 1979. The prototype was designed to do the things that the Prince did not in that era: In-depth features, arts coverage, sports features, and the sort of longform (though that term didn’t yet exist) reporting which we might today call literary nonfiction. The idea was to produce one issue to show the campus what we were aiming for, then to get going for real the next fall.” Though a one-issue experiment, Friday excited a new desire among the Nass founders: an age of journalism on campus that investigated topics that had since been glossed over. The world and very notion of journalism was changing; Marc Fisher and his peers were trying to catch up.

After learning from Friday’s financial faults, “[Marc] recruited a publisher (Bob Faggen ‘82), a couple of business managers (David Bookbinder and Andrew Carnegie Rose), and a bunch of Press Club writers, as well as some other writers from all around campus, and off [they] went, starting out in a few

rooms we got the university to give us way up in Holder Tower.” In this new batch of mastheads, “[Mark] became the first editor in chief of the rechristened Nassau Weekly.”

Though we no longer have to copy onto a typesetting machine and have since been moved to the basement of Bloomberg Hall, the Nass has maintained the same spirit that excited Marc Fisher and the other founding members of the Nass: to find a story in the radical, weird, messy, confrontational, and everything in between. In the end of my interaction with Marc, he noted that he is “thrilled to see the current Nass staff’s dedication to print, not only because it warms the heart of an old print nostalgist, but mainly because it demonstrates that a new generation has

absorbed the vital and enduring lesson: Print and digital both have their strengths, but we’ve now finally relearned that reading in print implants ideas and literary experiences in the mind, memory and soul in a way that the speedier yet more fleeting medium of bytes cannot.” As I lift my figurative glass with Marc, “here’s to the next four decades of the Nass in print.”

Between squeezing the finished Nassau Weekly into their only computer and meticulously typing without error into the machine, all they needed was an urgency for exactitude and Jonathan Dolce.

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April 11, 2024 PAGE DESIGN BY VERA EBONG ART BY ALEXANDER PICOULT

A AN NA A BBA A SS II SS

By MICHELLE HO

Today, the forecast in Avernus: heavy fog; flash flood warnings; rising tides from the River Cocytus and Acheron. “New at 11, we’ll see that despite our individual attempts at self-control, lamenting and sorrow will continue spilling into the future,” the weatherman drones, and haunted, I think of those ghosts with clipped wings clicking their tongues at me, cacophonies of grief in oblivion; and I think of skies in winter, fields of baby’s breath punctured by wildfires and rainstorms swelling with curling smoke, flocks of gray cutting into blue.

After November burned into April, I mourned over memory graves hiding in Lethean shallows; you only laughed — like rattling dice, and I remembered turning around, hearing the fragments of a “Goodbye.”

But today, leaving Avernus, I glanced back to see you alone, drowning in depths of Stygian foam.