Post- 11/29/17

NOV 29 – VOL 20 – ISSUE 11

In this issue...

Books, Bikes, and Billboards

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Editor’s Note

FEATURES

Dear Readers,

A Journey on Thayer

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taking it very personally.

– Baylor Knobloch

Circle Dancing

Time Inc. was sold yesterday to Meredith Corporation. Weirdly, I’m

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– Nicole Fegan

I grew up with TIME. It was the only piece of print journalism in English I had access to in Tunis. As a child, I would flip through the large pictures, reading every hit-or-miss humor piece by Joel Stein, who penned his final article for the magazine last week. In 7th grade, I proudly announced that my goal in life was to be interviewed for “10 questions” on the back page. TIME launched me on the winding path of

5 LIFESTYLE A Temporary Moment

a love for journalism that has brought me to Post- .

Everyday, as publications go out of business, staff get cut, and billionaires finance media acquisitions, I fear we lose a little more of what

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sustains our local communities.

– Divya Santhanam

Post- remains committed to bringing you independent, accountable

Creative Capital

journalism every week. This issue, you can learn more about the bikers

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– Daniella Balarezo

on Thayer, what the loss of Aurora Club means for Providence, and more. Who knows what the future has in store for TIME, or for Post- , for that matter. We’re still here, for now, so start reading!

Best,

7 ARTS & CULTURE Letting the Wolf In

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– Ameer Malik

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Odd Girl Out – Anna Harvey

The Antihero Allure – Zander Kim

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Saanya

editor - in - chief

This Time in Ages Past...

Hot Post- Time Machine “My heart pooped its pants.”

— Gabrielle Hick, My Heart Pooped Its Pants 12.03.2015 “Winter (break) is coming.”

— Post- Editorial Staff, Winter (Break) is Coming 12.03.2015

Post- Staff Editor-in-Chief Saanya Jain

Creative Director Grace Yoon

Features Managing Editor Jennifer Osborne

Head of Media Claribel Wu

Lifestyle Managing Editor Annabelle Woodward

Features Editors Anita Sheih Kathy Luo

Arts & Culture Managing Editor Joshua Lu Head Illustrator Doris Liou Copy Chief Alicia DeVos Layout Chief Livia Mucciolo

Lifestyle Editors Amanda Ngo Marly Toledano Divya Santhanam Arts & Culture Editors Celina Sun Josh Wartel Copy Editor Zander Kim

Layout Assistants Eojin Choi Julia Kim Gabriela Gil Media Assistant Samantha Haigood Staff Writers Andrew Liu Anna Harvey Catherine Turner Chantal Marauta Chen Ye Claire Kim-Narita Daniella Balarezo Dianara Rivera Eliza Cain Emma Lopez Jack Brook Karya Sezener

Natalie Andrews Nicole Fegan Sonya Bui Sydney Lo Veronica Espaillat Staff Illustrators Caroline Hu Erica Lewis Harim Choi Kira Widjaja Nayeon (Michelle) Woo Cover Illustrator Doris Liou

A Journey on Thayer “HARD WORK”

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t the start of the fall semester, I set out to write an article about the motorcycle riders who frequent Thayer Street, and let me tell you, it has been quite the journey. In researching for this article, I came across some interesting characters, receiving everything from crude date requests to Instagram direct message spams, and learned lots of things that counter popular opinion. For instance, there is no set motorcycle group or crew that comes to the street, and often, the riders revving their engines as they pass through campus are very different from those who are parked on the street and hang out on the sidewalk.

One Thayer Street biker of the latter category stood out to me as both a remarkable and strikingly honest storyteller. Over the course of half a dozen conversations, some intentional meetups, and other coincidental run-ins, I got to know this man: his lifelong relationship with this street, his tumultuous struggle with addiction, and finally, his refuge here on Thayer.

The first thing you might notice when meeting Sonny, aside from his motorcycle, is his ink—most notably, a tattoo of the words “HARD WORK” spelled out letter by letter on his knuckles. He considers it a symbol of his recovery: After struggling with heroin addiction for most of his young-adult life, Sonny is now six-and-ahalf years clean. Through both addiction and recovery, Thayer Street has played a central role in the Rhode Islander’s life.

“I’ve been hanging out here since I was 15,” he says. “I’m 42 now. You do the math,” he chuckles, the self-proclaimed jokester baring his gap-toothed smile and deep crow’s feet.

Now, Sonny comes to Thayer for a variety of reasons: after his 12-step recovery program meetings to grab a bite to eat with fellow program participants, on warmer nights to hang out on the sidewalks with other bikers, or during the day to walk his dogs. But his relationship with the street has not always been positive—at one point, Thayer was where he came to buy heroin. “This street has been in my life forever,” he says.

Within a year of his first sip of alcohol at age 16, Sonny was using heroin. The event that he believes precipitated his turn to the drug was his father’s divorce from his stepmother, whom he considers his mom. “I didn’t know how to deal with my feelings, so I started lashing out,” he says.

For the next 20 years or so, Sonny’s life moved in waves of addiction, punctuated by overdoses and arrests. And in spite of his current love of motorcycles, riding wasn’t what saved him. In fact, his early riding days only sucked him deeper into a cycle of addiction. Sonny had wanted a motorcycle since he was young, and when he turned 30, he could finally afford one.

At the time, he was on methadone, an opioid intended to ease heroin addicts into recovery, but it didn’t stick, and he was soon back to using. In the midst of Sonny’s struggles with addiction, he experienced

the thrill of his first time on a bike, an adrenaline rush that he describes as its own kind of addiction.

There is a “sense of youth and freedom that you feel when you first get on a motorcycle,” he says, like “being a kid on a bike, not having any responsibilities, and just going on an adventure.” But this life of adventure soon led Sonny into the trappings of gang-like motorcycle clubs, embedded in a culture of violence and reckless riding. Within a year of getting his first bike, Sonny became a member of the Redline Crüe, a Providence-based club that has since disbanded. The crime-laden atmosphere did nothing to help his struggle with drug addiction. “I wish I never got into the club,” he says. “We just fueled each other to be bad.” Bikes lost the magic they once offered Sonny. At one point, “the only time I used to get on a bike was to go cop coke,” he says.

In the years leading up to his finally getting clean, Sonny served a few short prison sentences for assault, weapons possession, and domestic disturbance.

He always chose to represent himself in court, and he got by with relatively lenient sentences due to his ability to negotiate, a skill he attributes to the “manipulative part of being a drug addict,” he says. While Sonny served a six-month jail sentence (bargained down from a sentence that was supposed to last years), not one of his fellow motorcycle club members reached out. “No one came to say hi,” Sonny says.

“No one wrote me.” He decided to end his involvement with the club.

But even out of jail, Sonny’s life as an addict was plagued by solitude. “I was alone a lot,” he says, looking back on the holidays he spent by himself. When he was 36 years old, Sonny finally hit a low point while living in his ex-girlfriend’s grandmother’s house. Forced to sell his motorcycle for money, he struggled to get through each day and found no relief from the drugs that once sustained him. That year, the death of his estranged mother marked what he calls his “end of the road.” “I just wanted to die,” he says. “I wanted to kill myself, but I just couldn’t, so I got clean.”

Sonny officially began the journey on May 1, 2011. “It was just my time,” he says.

He underwent about a year of in-patient rehab and continues going to multiple weekly meetings in a 12-step, where he met his current fiance, Kelli.

Kelli is a “speaker seeker” for her group, and the two first met when she reached out to Sonny, asking him to come speak at one of her meetings. “Sonny is really good at speaking,” she tells me. “He’s very honest.”

The soon-to-be-married couple lives near Providence College with their two French bulldogs. Sonny works as a union carpenter, and Kelli works as a branch manager for Citizen’s Bank, though she has plans to put her newly earned nursing degree to use with a career change. Neither wants kids, perhaps due to their own difficult childhoods. Kelli grew up with

an alcoholic father who still refuses to get help with recovery; Sonny was born to a distant father and a mom struggling with her own drug addiction, though he eventually found guidance in his stepmother.

Without her, he says, he “wouldn’t have known what love was.” To this day, long after his dad and stepmom split up, he still goes to her house every Sunday, and Kelli accompanies him when her work schedule permits.

Two years ago, Sonny decided he had recovered enough to handle the adrenaline rush of riding again, and he bought his first motorcycle as a clean man. He rediscovered life as a biker, and this time, unhindered by addiction, he was all in.

Before recovery, Sonny says he “was always numb,” but now he gets “enjoyment out of motorcycles” because he is “able to feel.”

“I’m a totally different person now,” he says. These days, when he’s on his motorcycle, Sonny surrounds himself with much safer riders than he did when he was in the Redline Crüe. “The people that I choose to hang around with are more responsible riders that are basically motorcycle enthusiasts,” he says. “If you get a group of regular riders together, we all know how each other rides, so the chance of a fender bender happening is rare,” he says, the words coming out more like fendah bendah with his thick Rhode Island accent.

He still takes some risks on his bike, like racing and doing stunts, but he admits that he’s not as good as he used to be—probably because now he actually cares about living, he says. Sonny’s love of motorcycles has persisted through some bad crashes. Last year he broke both of his wrists in a motorcycle accident, but that didn’t keep him from getting back on a bike. Just last month Sonny wiped out on Interstate 295 and completely totaled his motorcycle, but he has already made a downpayment on a new one. “It’s kind of addicting,” he says. “I’ve never had a new car in my life, but I’ve had seven brand new motorcycles.”

Sonny rides whenever he has a

chance. Kelli has even followed suit, buying her own bike and learning how to ride so that the two of them can do it together.

“It’s freeing,” she says.

As Sonny re-entered the biking world, he also returned to Thayer Street, this time using the area as a place to hang out on his bike and meet new people. Now, he comes to Thayer “at least three times a week,” he says, to eat, walk the dogs, chat with other bikers, or hang out with Kelli and their friends from the recovery program after the weekly meetings nearby.

Sonny has built a community of fellow motorcycle enthusiasts on Thayer, making “friends who are passionate about bikes,” he says. “People who are really bike enthusiasts, that’s why they’re out on a Friday night on the side of the road, because their bike is their thing, not going to drink and hit the club,” he says. “It’s a lifestyle.”

There is also a touch of nostalgia to the impromptu gatherings of bikers on Thayer. “It’s just people hanging out on the corner,” Sonny says. “That’s one thing that I think we’ve lost through the years. When my parents were kids, they would hang out at the park,” and “that’s what Thayer Street kind of reminds me of,” he says.

It’s hard to believe that this man— athletic, confident, outgoing—once came to Thayer to buy heroin.

Students passing by on the campus thoroughfare don’t talk to Sonny much, but this doesn’t bother him. “I was young once, and I was just in my own little bubble,” he remembers. And in a way, now that he’s clean, Sonny is making up for lost time, returning to this youthful state of mind. “I’ve been through so much in my life, but I’m just enjoying my time right now.”

Baylor Knobloch

contributing writer

Jie En Lee

illustr ator

Circle Dancing

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Aluminum Foils

“Circle Dance does its job as public art—it catches your eye and then proceeds to rest there under the shadow of students and buildings, unnoticed unless you are looking for it.”

T

here is hardly a piece of public art on this campus that isn’t a little bit strange.

There’s Blueno, a giant blue teddy bear with a lamp impaling its spine up through its head. On the Main Green, there’s a fake tree with a large rock sitting comfortably on its tallest branches. Sure, there are some basic statues of old men on horses. But then there are those children, those 11 figures joining arms, each with one leg thrust into the air in jubilation— except for the one child with both legs flying, overcome with excitement.

Circle Dance stands on an intersection already so crowded with students that one may wonder why the University decided to add 11 more children to the mix. Inspired by the famous painting La Danse by Henri Matisse, artist Tom Friedman created a faceless and indistinct interpretation out of aluminum roasting pans.

The final sculpture still features the engravings from the pans, causing many students to ask, Is it really made of aluminum? How is it so sturdy? These questions are answered on a small plaque so shrouded by grass that it might as well be invisible: The original model was made of pans, but the final product is “highly polished stainless steel.”

On the bottom of this same faded plaque is an oft-overlooked line:

“Please do not climb on the sculpture.” Brown’s own website showcases a violation of this rule, a picture of five students sitting on the shoulders, arms, and legs of the sculpture’s figures. To see something so expressive and joyful and not to join in on the fun is something of a lost opportunity, and no one knows this more than students coming to campus after a long summer. It is returning to an old friend, hearing music playing down the hall, and seeing if the door is open to ask if you can join. The figures in the sculpture are dancing, and it’s as if they call to students: Come and dance along.

For the first few months, people do. Parents take photos of their children locking arms and smiling with the faceless figures. Upon seeing the sculpture, students press their body weight to it, trying to see how sturdy it really is. But by the time assignments start to arrive and the leaves begin to change, I can sit on a bench across from the sculpture for an hour and find that no one pays it any mind anymore. By November, the initial confusion and intrigue has mostly vanished.

Instead, the sculpture stands there like a part of the scenery, blending into the grass and the air without much regard. There is a subset of people who still interact with the sculpture, but they go as unrecog-

nized as the sculpture on an average day. Nobody notices if a student sits in the center of the circle working for hours. No one notices the little girl running in, out, and under the joined arms. Circle Dance does its job as public art—it catches your eye and then proceeds to rest there under the shadow of students and buildings, unnoticed unless you are looking for it.

I smile every time I pass the sculpture while walking south, walking north, walking past the students gathered around food trucks on Waterman Street. I like to imagine myself partaking in this circle with the same faceless glee, and I can only assume that was the hope of the anonymous donor who sent this to our campus. It is an apt contribution; college campuses are full of students who face ever-growing amounts of stress, and these jubilant children evoke the youthful glow that students are searching for in the midst of constant work. The statue depicts a sense of human spirit and the camaraderie of man!

It seems ridiculous that the spirit of a mere statue might actually affect anyone, but I have seen it happen. I remember the nervous smiles of my friends in the first week of freshman year as we walked around campus at night. We were at once scared and excited about this new beginning

and clutched to the vague tethers we had created with one another as we passed the sculpture on our way to a party. As a group, we climbed under the arms and drunkenly goofed around, snapping poorly-lit pictures and laughing. There is a reason the tuft of grass in the center of the circle has faded away, leaving only a patch of dirt. Shenanigans have happened here. I have seen and been a part of many, and there are endless more that have gone undiscovered over the years.

As I was passing the sculpture with a friend one day, he proudly said to me, “I gave someone head in the middle of this once. I remember it fondly.”

I am sure no one even noticed.

Nicole Fegan staff writer

Linda Liu

illustr ator

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A Book Signing

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eeting your favorite writer in the flesh and blood is not always the same as reading their thoughts in paper and ink. Their voice, which fills pages with its rich magic, does not sound the same when they speak aloud. It is easy to expect writers to be an amalgamation of their characters—both vulnerable and mysterious, witty and sarcastic. We expect Agatha Christie to exude the eccentricity and pompousness of Hercule Poirot and Jane Austen to have the piercing eyes and wit of Elizabeth Bennet. At first glance, however, a writer may look and sound much more like the man you sit across from the subway, his nose buried in his paper. Or the kind old lady next door, who sits on the veranda with her dog, sipping tea.

When I first learned that Arundhati Roy was coming to Toronto as part of her promotional tour for her newest novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, I was curious to meet her. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness was the first fiction novel she had written since her debut, published in 1997, the year I was born. I had read her Man Booker-prize-winning debut novel, The God of Small Things, and fell in love with her poeticism, the intricacy of her characters, and the suppleness of her ability to construct plot. Set in Ayemenem, Kerala, the novel weaves elements of mystery, the greater political landscape, and darker undercurrents of family life, ultimately creating a story that breathes and lives on its own. Roy took a pause from fiction to pursue activism and pen several fiery nonfiction books, in which she fiercely advocates against the usage of nuclear weapons and argues for the independence of Kashmir. Her second fiction novel in twenty years was thus greatly anticipated.

When my best friend cancelled a few

For a Temporary Moment, Four Strangers Become Friends days before the event, I debated whether to attend the book launch by myself. But it was a hot summer day and there was nothing to do at home, so I found myself in a line that stretched the entirety of the street from the Bloor Street United Church, where her talk and signing was to take place. I was astounded by the length of the line and even more so by the diversity of the crowd that had gathered around the church; there were people young and old, academics in their blazers and activists in bold clothing.

As I stood in the line, munching on my dinner, sweat streaming down my face in the blaze of the June sun, an elderly woman with graying curls in front of me in line turned around.

“Why do you like Arundati Roy?”

in Ayemenem with her last one, and I felt like I was in New Delhi in this one.

Even when I have not been to either place,” the British woman said.

“Really?” the elderly woman countered. “As I read it, I wondered how anyone who had not seen those places could have understood her words. She is so specific with them—only those who have lived in New Delhi would have smelled its scent through her pages. I felt like I was back home after so long, when I read her new book.”

“When did you leave India?” I asked, as the child of Indian immigrants myself.

“I left New Delhi nearly 70 years ago, when the borders were drawn and Pakistan was born. I was only seven

“It was clear that she did not want to shy away from horror but rather witness it in its full spectrum, to question and to confront it—not out of anger but love for humanity.”

Her voice was deep and resonant, velvet tones textured the roundness with which she pronounced her As and Os. Dark kajol lined her midnight eyes. I cannot remember her name now, but it somehow fit the regal way she carried herself. In response, I mumbled something about the vividness of her writing style, the angry passion and the discerning criticism of her nonfiction.

The woman behind me, who looked to be in her mid-fifties and spoke with a British lilt, leaned over and joined our conversation.

“I like her because she brings me to places I have never been. I felt like I was

when I saw it for the last time and we resettled in Lahore. But the way she described the foods, the streets, the air, it felt I was seven years old again.”

I nodded, touched by her words.

As a member of the Indian diaspora, the nostalgia with which she spoke of New Delhi felt familiar in a way I could not place. Perhaps it was a longing for a home that I could never truly inhabit.

It is a feeling echoed by the characters of Roy’s Ministry of Utmost Happiness who are caught between borders, whether they be those of gender or caste, religion or place. For those who have crossed borders, home can sometimes

only be found within the pages of a book.

After almost three hours, we were admitted into the church, losing each other in the crowd amidst the hundreds of others scrambling to find good seats.

Nearly a thousand people filled the church, straining their ears to catch Roy’s voice. When she arrived on stage, she was smaller than I had imagined her to be—dainty, elfin in her build and mannerisms. Her voice was childlike, musical, soaring with joy as she thanked us for attending. It was an image that juxtaposed the fury encased in her essays. Prior to reading a chapter, she announced that she would be showing us a clip of a documentary. We watched footage of the violence in Kashmir, the heavy presence of military in the region, the human loss of life as a result of the fight for borders. There was a young woman in her mid-twenties sitting next to me who recently immigrated to Toronto from Bangalore, India. We struck up a conversation about India and eventually land on the Kashmir conflict.

“It’s strange,” she said, “how your own country can withhold such horrors.”

Roy was unflinching in her interview following the documentary. It was clear that she did not want to shy away from horror but rather witness it in its full spectrum, to question and to confront it—not out of anger but love for humanity. When I finally met Roy, a copy of my book in hand, I was struck by the warmth that creased the folds of her eyes. For a person who has achieved a great deal as a result of her penchant for justice and gift for the written word, she has an earthiness to her that makes her feel tangible. She is the sweet middle-aged woman next door, the comforting friend, the fiery activist, and the gifted writer all at once. I wanted to say something eloquent as she looked up at me after signing her name, but all I could stammer is a thank you for everything. From the look in her eyes, I think she understood.

Perhaps the extraordinary nature of literature lies not solely in the dialogue between the writer and the reader, but the way in which a book lives on its own, breathing and touching the lives of those who enter its radius. And The Ministry of Utmost Happiness has created quite a large radius for itself, from Lahore to New Delhi, from London to Toronto, twisting and crossing borders, making the foreign familiar and the familiar foreign, and most of all, uniting four strangers, even if for just a temporary moment.

Divya Santhanam sec tion editor

Erica Lewis

staff illustr ator

Creative Capital

I

t’s nighttime in downtown Providence and the fairy lights that adorn Westminster Street cast a warm glow on the faces of a small crowd of young people loitering outside a lively, though not crowded, venue. The space, former home to The Roots Cafe and the Providence Black Repertory, is none other than Aurora, “a mixed-use creative space,” which closed its doors on November 3. Since 2015, Aurora served as a homegrown locale that promised creative programming every day of the week, with events that included live music, dance and art exhibits, screenings and, as noted on their website, “other innovative events to further the intellectual and creative discourse in Providence.”

Remembering Aurora green-hued lights set a relaxed, trippy atmosphere. A few people grab drinks at the bar before entering into a larger space toward the back of the venue, where the petting zoo and music show are taking place. The crowd is easy-going, its size modest at best. One can tell from merely looking around the room that people are there not just to see the synth or grab a questionably pricey (albeit delicious) drink—they are there to be in community with one another.

As I write this piece, I must admit I was not an Aurora regular, and I can’t pretend to be someone who knows Providence well, even after nearly four years of living in the city.

When Aurora announced it was closing its doors at the end of October, I

“Now, only the ghost of the mixed-arts space remains, with local bloggers and artists noting the loss of the venue that will be “deeply felt,” according to the Providence Daily Dose.”

Students on College Hill are infamous for rarely venturing off campus and into the city, but on this particular night, several Brown and RISD-goers are at Aurora to attend “The Last Synth Petting Zoo Show,” an event where attendees can “pet” synthesizers (meaning they can play with and explore the synths gently, as the event’s host reminds the audience constantly over the speaker) prior to a synth-music concert. Ryan Campos, a WBRU Chief Operator, organized the event and, naturally, a crowd of WBRUnonians attended to support him.

The occasion is as cool as can be. Funky graphics and blue and

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was taken aback. I always told myself I would go someday (Does that sound familiar?). Someday turned into someday soon, and I ended up going to the synth event with some friends in a panicked effort to witness the magic I had so often heard about before it was too late.

Aurora did not disappoint.

The Providence Journal reported that Aurora closed because of new redevelopments on Westminster Street that aim to renovate buildings into residential, retail, and office spaces.

Interestingly enough, the now former owner of Aurora is also a member of the downtown property developer associates that supposedly brought

forth the shutdown in the first place.

The news of Aurora’s closure broke suddenly: The venue’s schedule filled up with unique programming that lasted through the official shutdown on November 3. Events included Gay Goth Nite (a regular program and crowd favorite), a Halloween Costume Party, a “Queer Alternative Party and Drag Show,” the monthly iteration of the “Running Thru the 401” dance party, and of course, “The Last Providence Synth Petting Zoo Show.” This programming was in addition to other nights of live music that played genres ranging from salsa to disco to metal and swing.

This is not to say that Aurora became eclectic only as it came to a close. The calendar had always provided such a diverse array of opportunities that it became the stuff of folklore for me, rivaled only by programming at AS220 just a few blocks away. I only went to Aurora once, but I, too, lament its closing, for the community that it created felt as special and tight-knit as I have witnessed in Providence. Now, only the ghost of the mixed-arts space remains, with local bloggers and artists noting the loss of the venue that will be “deeply felt,” according to Providence Daily Dose.

I took a look at the place where the news of the shutdown first made waves, aka the Aurora Facebook page, and was delighted to find countless reviews from past Aurora-goers. The posts read more like journal entries— and together, they formed a living, breathing memoir of the times people spent in this fun, welcoming space. I was able to get a strong sense of what the Providence community will be missing, and what I myself missed by staying on The Hill for so long.

Emily Cordon Drainville gave the place a 5 star review. She threw her wedding party at Aurora, hav-

ing “loved the venue, atmosphere, vibe and staff ” for years. She ended her review with the words a drunk university alumnus might yell after a melancholic visit to their alma mater: “Love this place with my heart!”

In a post from 2014, right around the time Aurora was getting ready to open, Chris Daltry (5 stars) wrote: “When Providence most needed a new downtown venue, Aurora opens!

We’ve needed a live music room this size for years, and now we’ve got it.

Rock on, Aurora.”

Colin Ferrara, ever an optimist, wrote that Aurora was a “cool little place… every kinda crowd seems to occupy this place now and then.

From goth nights to folk music nights lol… One of my faves in Providence that I am glad hasn’t closed yet.”

For yours truly, Caoytei Awndotne’s review (5 stars) was the one that resonated the most: “IT SUUUUUCKS THAT THIS PLACE IS CLOSING. COME ON PROV PEEPS -- SOMEBODY GRAB THE TORCH!!!!!!!!!!!!”

Yes, “it suuuuucks” that many of us didn’t fully participate in this magical space in the first place, and I really do hope somebody grabs the torch. For now, I’ll be heading over to AS220 and The Strand as much as I can, lest I go forth into the adult world and leave the creative capital with nothing but stories about crew house parties, spicy chicken patties with cheese, and a giant lamp-headed blue bear.

Daniella Balarezo staff writer

Doris Liou

he ad illustr ator

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Letting the Wolf In

W

henever I write in my journal and try to pin down the thoughts swirling around in my head, I realize that the different parts of my mind are messy and extremely hard to map. I’m certain this is true for all us—we’re made up of warring passions, emotions, opinions, and beliefs that push constantly against each other, like ocean waves crashing in opposite directions. These battles never end, and the winners keep changing.

My optimism might feel like the victor in one moment, but my cynicism can overpower it just a few hours later.

It’s difficult to come to grips with our complexities, to reflect on our personalities so acutely that we even contend with the parts of ourselves that we don’t like. This difficulty is one of the reasons why I think Kaveh Akbar’s new book of poetry, Calling a Wolf a Wolf, is a magnificent work of literature. After reading it, I felt like I’d witnessed a vivid and detailed self-portrait of the author.

I don’t want to equate the speaker of the poems with the real-life Akbar. After studying poetry in a few of my classes, I’ve learned that even poems that seem confessional are not always factually autobiographical and that poets often construct a persona as the speaker of a poem. Still, the persona can serve as an analog for the author’s self. After all, the persona is not wholly detached from the author because the author is the one who has constructed the persona.

In Akbar’s book, the speaker of the poems seems to allow for the author’s often metaphorical and figurative self-reflection. This self-reflection does not seem to be literally true due to cer-

Odd Girl Out

C

armen Maria Machado wants you to believe in ghosts. In her masterful debut short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties, they lurk in the aisles of stores selling prom dresses or in the dreams of a detective who sometimes appears on primetime TV. Most often, these ghosts haunt the minds of her characters. Machado has packed her pages with madwomen in the attic, but this time, they’ve built the attic for themselves.

A finalist for the 2017 National Book Awards, Her Body and Other Parties is unsettling, uncanny, and utterly spellbinding. The collection comprises seven

In Praise of Kaveh Akbar’s book of poetry, Calling a Wolf a Wolf

tain fantastical details, but it still feels deeply piercing and honest because it firmly grapples with the complexities of a person and with the varied aspects of a person’s life. The pleasures and pains of life are viscerally related, such as when the speaker in the poem “Yeki Bood Yeki Nabood” says, “I hoarded an entire decade / of bliss of brilliant dime-sized raptures / and this is what I have to show / for it a catastrophe of joints this / puddle I’m soaking in.” Ten years of immense happiness, of numerous moments of ecstasy, the intensity of which comes through with the hard consonant sounds in “bliss” and “brilliant,” result in the speaker’s body becoming injured, perhaps even mangled.

Elsewhere, the speaker acknowledges his capacity to be both kind and callous. In “Against Hell,” he says, “Most days I try hard to act human, to breathe / like a human and speak with the same flat language, but often / my kindness is clumsy—I stop a stranger to tie his shoe and / end up kissing his knees.” This act of kissing a stranger’s knees evokes a sense of great humility and boundless service, but it contrasts starkly with the acts described in the poem “Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Inpatient).” In the latter poem, the speaker says, “I am less horrible than I could be / I’ve never set a house on fire / never thrown a firstborn off a bridge still my whole life I answered every cry for help with a pour / with a turning away.” Here, the speaker explains that he denies help to people in need, and he even implies that he is capable of committing horrible, violent acts. The many ways in which the speaker contends with the contradictory

parts of himself are bold, brutal, and unflinching.

Contradictions are also grappled with in the many poems that deal with themes of alcoholism and the tension between hope and despair. The book has several poems with titles that begin with the phrase “Portrait of the Alcoholic,” and in some of these poems, the speaker expresses hope for recovery. For example, in “Portrait of the Alcoholic Three Weeks Sober,” the speaker says, “I’m grateful to be trusted with any of it: the bluebrown ocean / undrinkable as a glass of scorpions, the omnipresent fragrant / honey and the bees that guard it,” the ocean and the honey symbolizing alcoholic drinks that can damage his health, which the speaker thinks he can resist even though they surround him. Yet, in other poems, the speaker’s temptations seem to overpower him, such as in “Portrait of the Alcoholic with Craving” in which the speaker talks to his cravings and submits to them by saying, “What I was building was a church. / You were the preacher and I the congregation, / and I the stage and I the cross and I the choir.”

Despite the conflicting forces throughout the book, the book conveys a sense of cohesion, not fracture. Part of this might be due to how the conflicting parts of the self seem to be brought together in stunning images. In “Exciting the Canvas,” the speaker says, “I hear crickets chirp and think / of my weaker heart, the tiny one / sewn behind the one / that beats. It lives there / made entirely of watery pink light, / flapping at dawn like a baby’s cheek.” Also, the sense of cohesion emerges from the

powerful and consistent mastery of form and language throughout the book.

There’s not a single weak poem in it. All of them moved me and made me reflect. All of them are packed with powerful imagery, precise diction, and stunning turns of phrase. Standout lines that I haven’t shared yet include: “one way to live a life is to spend each moment asking / forgiveness for the last” from the poem “Unburnable the Cold is Flooding Our Lives,” and, “Like the headless grasshopper and his still- / twitching legs, I’m learning how much of myself / I don’t actually need,” from “So Often the Body Becomes a Distraction.”

This book is thematically brilliant and linguistically stunning. It’s such a deep, rich book, and my reflections here cannot do justice to how sharply intelligent and deeply moving it is. Kaveh Akbar’s book is an astounding achievement, and I highly recommend it.

Ameer Malik staff writer

Kira Widjaja

staff illustr ator

Reviewing Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties stories and one novella (a reimagining of 272 episodes of Law and Order: SVU, which spins a progressively weird web from the real synopses and includes eerily perfect doppelgangers, fridges filled with rotten vegetables, and girls with bells for eyes). Each story offers a self-contained universe that hovers between reality and science fiction, pushing the limits of genre to such an extreme that even her most fantastical narratives can’t help but circle back to some aspect of our own reality. A wife charts her adolescence, marriage, and suburban motherhood, yet the ribbon around her neck is the only thing holding her in place. A woman watches porn with her boyfriend, until she realizes she can hear the actors’ thoughts through the screen. These are not simple fairy tales, though they definitely take some inspiration from the history of feminist retellings á la Angela Carter. Rather, they are reflective of what it is to be a woman in the modern world, to be simultaneously imprisoned and liberated by one’s own body and by one’s own brain.

In a superb social satire dreamscape, “The Resident,” the narrator (whose initials are incidentally CM), attends a remote artists’ colony. She moves through

the weeks in a haze, sometimes a literal fever-dream, other times in the odd real/ not-real space of her own head as she tries to finish a novel, all the while trying to make sense of the manufactured party personas of her “poet-composer” peers.

The story is provocative, intensely physical (abscesses of unknown origin crumple “chamber by chamber, like a temple from which an adventurer is feverishly tearing”) and psychologically unnerving.

After weeks in this bubble, CM cracks, gathers her belongings, and decides to leave immediately. Before she goes, she scrawls her initials above her desk, accompanied by the epithet “madwoman in her own attic.” If Machado’s women are indeed crazy, they are also undeniably in control, begging the question of whether the world outside is scarier than the one within.

If Machado writes good characters, she writes even better sentences. Each one is a shock wave, and when combined with the others, they form a web of words that buzzes with electricity. Sometimes they are descriptive: a baby’s head is “like the soft spot on a peach that you can just plunge your thumb into, no questions asked.” Sometimes they are sensitive:

sex that makes the narrator feel “like a bottle breaking against a brick wall.”

Sometimes they are directive: “If you are reading this story aloud, force a listener to reveal a devastating secret, then open the nearest window to the street and scream it as loudly as you are able.” But Machado’s writing is visceral, bordering on the grotesque and the glorious at the same time, and always circling back to the body. These words are lived-in, these ideas terribly, terrifically human. Machado’s stories have a heartbeat, and it’s up to us to decide whether it pumps in the head or the chest.

In one of two epigraphs, Machado quotes poet Jacqui Germain: “My body is a haunted/house that I am lost in.”

Her Body and Other Parties is certainly haunting, pulsing with hunger, desire, and full-blooded fear. With Machado as a guide, we find our way through the party, and maybe, one day, we’ll figure out how to find ourselves.

Anna Harvey staff writer

Harim Choi

staff illustr ator

The Antihero Allure

I

n the past two years, popular television and film have seen a thematic shift from despicable antiheroes to warmhearted stories about likable people, perhaps as a counter against current events. NBC’s sophomore series This is Us, a family drama, and ABC’s freshman show The Good Doctor, a medical drama that focuses on an autistic surgeon, are strong evidence of this, and some of the year’s top-rated movies are also feel-good, such as The Big Sick and Wonder Woman.

But while the antihero may be on its way out, it is definitely not dead yet, as Frances McDormand demonstrates brilliantly in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.

An antihero with nothing left to lose, McDormand plays Mildred Hayes, a mother whose teenage daughter was sexually assaulted and murdered seven months earlier. Upset with the incompetent local police department led by Chief Willoughby (Woody Harrelson), Hayes rents out three weathered billboards on the outskirts of town calling out the department for not making any arrests.

These billboards, one which says, “Raped While Dying,” and another that calls out Willoughby by name, stirs civil unrest and local news stories among the small, folksy town of Ebbing, Missouri—the first dominoes to fall in a string of events caused by

Trouble With Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

these titular billboards.

Hardened by her daughter’s tragedy, Hayes lives with her son, Robbie (Lucas Hedges), in a nightmare where her daughter escapes her thoughts—seeing her ex-husband with an attractive 19-yearold doesn’t help either. Renting out the billboards seems to be the first major action she takes in being proactive instead of grieving, and Hayes is on a rampage,

stellar performances. In one of the film’s memorable scenes, Dixon tells Hayes that black people are now referred to as “people of color,” but makes no comment on the torturing part of the accusation—a good example of the social commentary on which Three Billboards treads but never indulges.

Once the premise settles in, director Martin McDonagh, best known for

“Renting out the billboards seems to be the first major action she takes in being proactive instead of grieving, and Hayes is on a rampage, lashing out against all around her in numb fury ...” lashing out against all around her in numb fury, including dentists, priests, and Robbie’s classmates.

But, as the billboards suggest, the cops are the object of her attention, whom she accuses of being “too busy torturing black folks” to solve real crimes. One cop in the department is Officer Dixon, a comic-boy loving mama’s boy played by the astounding Sam Rockwell, who is the film’s strongest character in a film full of

Seven Psychopaths in 2012, steers the film toward a similar violent direction that evokes Fargo, a film to which McDormand has also lent her talents. It also feels like a companion film to Manchester by the Sea, where our lead character deals with an unmanageable amount of grief, except Hayes becomes aggressive and takes action instead of the path of passivity and ambivalence that Casey Affleck’s character takes. Lucas Hedges also plays

8

essentially the exact same character from Manchester, no doubt a nod to his role in the film which earned him an Oscar nomination.

Three Billboards no doubt aspires for similar acclaim, as the film is carried by its performances, led by McDormand, Harrelson, Caleb Landry Jones, and Rockwell. Most characters have their moments—aside from Hedges, who feels a little underutilized—but are in many ways both likable and reasonable. McDormand is definitely the star of the film, testing us to see how far we can sympathize with her cathartic, confused journey—which temporarily takes the form of a literal blaze of glory when she, in her grief, concocts molotov cocktails. The film’s first acts are unpredictable and don’t settle into routine plot, and it borders on absurdity and surrealism in the final act, with McDormand’s character realizing the depth of the burden she’s had to face.

Three Billboards is often hilarious, at times laugh out loud funny. Its humor can be subtle in its awkward conversations, and the little one-off lines just before the scene switches have a nuance and purpose behind them. The film has sharp, if not fully committed, commentary on race, police reputation, and media without hitting you over the head with it, and invites the viewer to decide their stances for themselves. But it all serves a purpose in Ebbing through its complex web of characters and a story that leads you one way and then unveils another. These twists result in McDonagh’s most complete film to date, and one worth the ride.

Release | 10 November 2017 (US) Genre | Comedy, Crime, Drama Director | Martin McDonagh Writer | Martin McDonagh Main Cast | Frances McDormand, Woody Harrelson, Sam Rockwell, Caleb Landry Jones, Abbie Cornish, Lucas Hedges, Peter Dinklage Rating / Runtime | R / 1h 55m Personal Rating | 9/10

Zander Kim copy editor

Katie McLoughlin illustr ator

Game Changers 1 Crocs 2 The little jibbits you put in Crocs 3 Rolling luggage 4 Tide to Go 5 Can openers (invented like, 20 years after

“Welcome Back to Lil’ Rhody!”

cans) 6 Capitalism 7 The +4 Wild Card in Uno 8 Exit signs that light up in the dark 9 Portable chargers!

10 Scissors that cut in squiggly lines

“In a t could rue dem oc live i n Co racy, eve r nnec ticut yone .”