Swarthmore Review 5/13

INSIDE:

Three Short Stories

AND: An essay on belonging by Mark Wallace v The worst and best of David Sedaris v On Korea’s most important poet

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State of Marxism INTERVIEWS WITH TERRY EAGLETON AND MICHAEL HARDT

CONTRIBUTORS Nyantee Asherman ’15 is a sociology and anthropology major who would’ve been an art major if it didn’t look so hard.

Sara Blazevic ’15 studies comparative literature with Spanish and French. She likes farming and planning for the revolution.

Yenny Cheung ’16 currently works for the Phoenix as an illustrator and layout artist and has six years of experience in Chinese art and image design. Her portfolio can be found at yennycheung.wix.com/myworldindreams.

Erin Ching ’16 believes in ghosts and recently cut off all of her hair.

Anna Gonzales ’16 dedicates her poem to every straight girl she’s ever had a crush on, and hopes that her parents aren’t reading this.

Hannah Grunwald ’14 spends much of her time reading and writing, but far more of it sleeping and eating.

Patrick Hackeling ’14 is a film and media studies and history double major from Long Island, NY. He enjoys Cali sunshine and mimosas.

Taylor Hodges ’15 is interested in America’s original musical forms: jazz, house, and techno.

Letter policy Letters are welcome from all readers. We will not ever publish letters anonymously and we reserve the right to edit all letters for length and clarity without contacting the letter writer. Letters generally should run no longer than 1,000 words. They should be sent to swarthmoreview@gmail.com.

How to contribute We solicit pieces from writers, though we will also accept submissions of long-form reporting, personal, argumentative and photo essays, book and movie reviews, short stories, poems, and anything else that seems suitable. Submissions will be considered from Swarthmore students, alumni, faculty, and staff, and will be considered anonymously, though we will not, except in rare cases, publish anonymously. Submissions should generally not go longer than 10,000 words. We are also looking for editors and staffers of all kind—staff writers, graphic designers, artists, web designers, section editors.

Contact: swarthmoreview@gmail.com. Feel free to contact individual editors as well: ikornbl1, agonzal4, jlevin1 (all @swarthmore.edu).

Ian Hoffman ’15 is an English major from Berkeley, CA. He likes cats and the like.

Izzy Kornblatt ’16 is a prospective philosophy major from Northampton, MA. Paul LaFreniere is a major in English. He will graduate this year.

Jeannette Leopold is a graduating senior pursuing an honors double major in English literature and theater with a concentration in creative writing.

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Mark Wallace is Professor of Religion at Swarthmore.

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ILLUSTRATIONS NYANTEE ASHERMAN

REPORTING & POETRY ANNA GONZALES

PUBLISHER & EDITOR AT LARGE KOBY LEVIN

Published by the Swarthmore Phoenix swarthmorephoenix.com

Olivia Ortiz ’16 is majoring somewhere in the field of numbers and letters.

Alec Pillsbury He wrote for this magazine He is a freshman

EDITOR IZZY KORNBLATT

Founded 2012 | Vol. 1, No. 2

Design © 2013 the Swarthmore Phoenix. All content © 2013 by its listed author unless otherwise noted. The “R” logo is based on the font Layer Cake by Luzia Prado. The “Review” logo is based on the font Soraya by Pactrice Scott. We can be contacted at swarthmoreview@gmail.com. Printed at Bartash Printing, Philadelphia, PA. Please recycle this magazine.

If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist.

Karl Marx

PHOTO ESSAY S

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Arts

COMMENT

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BOOKS

Korea and Imperialism A poet bridges the divide between north and south 34

by Alec Pillsbury

by Mark Wallace

Portrait of a Woman 9

by Erin Ching

State of Marxism

The Humorist

The worst and the best of David Sedaris 36

by Hannah Grunwald

MOVIES

Introduction by Izzy Kornblatt 12

Recommended viewing from Ian Hoffman

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MUSIC

Post-Post-Dubstep A new album from James Blake

by Taylor Hodges

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POEMS

Get the Fuck Away From Me, Or, Please Take Your Arm Off My Shoulders 16

by Anna Gonzales

Interviews with two of the world’s leading Marxists

Terry Eagleton on socialism in tough times, terror in Boston, the follies of cultural studies, 13 and more

Michael Hardt on socialism’s critics, democracy, resisting power, and his own time at 19 Swarthmore

ON THE COVER: Karl Marx (photo courtesy of List of Images)

THREE SHORT STORIES Stutter by Jeanette Leopold 22

Teeth 24

by Sara Blazevic

LETTERS & corrections

On the power of rituals to connect us to earth

1250 by Paul LaFreniere 25 Pudding v. Popsicle by Olivia Ortiz 26

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An exchange on “Pariah” between Mike Lumetta and Izzy Kornblatt

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS

Nyantee Asherman 23 / Yenny Cheung 27

AND A SCREENPLAY

“This Side of Here”

by Patrick Hackeling 31

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LETTERS “Pariah” review was indeed offensive

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appreciate the motivation behind the Swarthmore Review and its stated goal of common sense, but I think that editor Izzy Kornblatt’s introduction [“‘Common Sense,’” April 2013] to this effect missed the point. Specifically, I found his reaction to push-back on his review of the movie “Pariah” disturbing—especially since I had published a piece in a magazine that used this reaction as an example of its goals. It’s something that white men in particular (including myself) do frequently—hear that they have said or done something messed-up from marginalized groups and then immediately deny that they have. Before I get into specifics, I want to be clear that this is not about me, and this is not about Izzy. Social justice should not get lost in trying to protect dominant groups from hurt when they’re already protected so much. My voice is not particularly important in this conversation, and I am concerned that speaking up will reinforce and reproduce the exact thing I want to question. But I do believe that it is important to question, from whatever corners possible, and I would like to stipulate that this letter does not by any means represent the most important, relevant, or definitive statement on this question.

First off, aesthetic taste is not valueneutral. Aesthetic taste is deeply subjective, rooted in our own perspectives, which are all influenced by raced, gendered, classed, and sexualized experiences, among other things.

And these are not simply arbitrary differences with no social meaning, either. Social identities code for power; they determine who gets to speak and who gets to determine what’s valuable on a cultural level. Most movies in this country have been produced, directed, written, and created by straight white guys. When Izzy says he “missed the

C orrec tion s In our April issue we mistakenly wrote that we can be contacted at swarthmorereview@ gmail.com. In fact, that email address is owned by someone else, someone who has not replied to our requests to forward along any emails meant for us. So if you tried to contact us at that address we did not receive your message.

Our actual email address is swarthmoreview@ gmail.com (the “re” not repeated). Also feel free to contact individual editors, in person or via Swarthmore email.

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memo about white men no longer allowed to be critical of movies about black people,” he neglects the history in which that has always been possible but the reverse has never been true. If it were, I think, many black film critics would have a much, much larger labor ahead of them than Izzy does now; the proportional volume of movies created by, for, and about white people is huge. When Dee Rees spoke at Swarthmore, she talked about her film pitch being rejected because it was “too specific”—meaning “too black and too gay.” The identification of “Pariah” as a queer black film reveals how those identities are othered, and how whiteness and heterosexuality are invisible. A film about the trauma of mostly white, mostly straight teenagers in the suburbs? That’s so meaningful, and look at Emma Watson being cute. But queer black teenagers’ trauma? It’s a movie about a black lesbian teenager.

In short, there is, or at least may be, something about Izzy’s reaction to the film that is tied to his identities, and it shows in the original review. A lot of the review is focused on how “there’s just little to like here” and “the characters never seem like characters.” I would like us to at least consider the possibility that these characterizations of the film fall within a history of white people dehumanizing or othering people of color, particularly women and queer folks of color.

It may or may not be true that the characters all fall within certain tropes, but it may also be true that they are rooted in someone’s lived experiences. When Izzy says “I mean, this is too easy,” he rules out the latter possibility. Alike is “not someone we identify with,” according to the review, but who is this “we”? Is it everyone, or is it white men? Given that whiteness and maleness are invisible, what does it mean for a white man to assume that there is some cohesive “we” who do or do not feel a certain way? Moreover, even if the movie does use tropes, white people make movies that rely on tropes all the time, but people rarely deride the fact that “Mean Girls” is about pretty femme, straight, white girls or that every Woody Allen movie is about a (usually narcissistic) straight white man. And perhaps Kornblatt is, as a critic, equally critical of these and similar films, and I just don’t have access to those opinions. But by no means are the ingredients of Alike’s life “indie-film bingo.” While Rees certainly seems to be trying to find solace through

her work, Pariah does not romanticize this struggle. Oppression, and in particular intersectional oppressions, are not a tool for the work of filmmakers—they are something through which real people live every day. A quick Google search turns up at least a few reviews by queer and black critics, including one on Racialicious, and I do think that these takes on the film are more meaningful, because the film is attempting to tell their stories. Izzy, and I, and many others do miss some of the nuances of the film because of our specific identities. Though “of course sex toys are funny,” part of the particular joke (and discomfort) of Alike’s strap-on is that it’s white. While it’s definitely okay to react to the experiences of people who are different from us, and particularly those who are marginalized in ways we aren’t, with a lack of understanding, asking “What was that about?” to someone in person is very different from saying “I don’t understand that.” Part of the challenge is to seek to understand the nuances of these stories.

But, while I do think he missed a lot in the review, that’s not what bothers me most.

What bothers me is that he felt so strongly about the criticism (some of which was published in the Phoenix) of his review that he felt the need to publish his opinion again in a different venue. Why is it so important that we hear this opinion and accept it as valid?

By reacting so negatively to feedback, by not considering his social location as influencing his opinions, Kornblatt suggests that the whole thing has no bearing on what he has said. He takes no responsibility for the possibility that he might have done something to perpetuate hierarchies of different kinds.

And while I recognize that this is easy to do, given the prevalence of colorblindness in this country, people who have racial, gender, sexual, and class privilege need to lean away from this tendency (really hard).

Over the past several days, we’ve heard a lot about wanting to do ally work and what that means (for which, I should say, there are many resources). But one of the primary rules of being an ally is that, again, it is not about me. When someone to whom I am ostensibly trying to be an ally (emphasis on trying) tells me that I have done something wrong, I cannot question that. You have to reflect on it. Maybe after that I can ask for clarification, but there is no world in which the statement “You’re wrong—I am a good ally” makes any sense whatsoever. Asking people with privileged identities to respect

the possibility that they have done something hurtful while still being well-intentioned does not reduce them to the identities in question; rather, it acknowledges that there is history, meaning, and power in that social location.

Responding otherwise, particularly in print, has the feeling of shouting over and silencing marginalized voices, and that is not okay.

Final point: to the contention that “good storytelling has nothing at all to do with social justice,” good storytelling has everything to do with social justice. Only through telling stories can we understand how our experiences are informed by identity, whatever identities we have. In fact, pretty much everything has something to do with social justice. There is no facet of life to which we can go and “turn off” the unjust hierarchies of power and oppression in which we live.

If I’m not actively being thoughtful about trying not to say or do fucked-up things, chances are good I’ll say and do some pretty oppressive things. Even if I am being thoughtful, I’m still liable to perpetuate these systems, and almost definitely will perpetuate them. I know from my own experience that the ability to walk away from social justice, to wall it off, or to view it as merely something “we approve of” is an indicator of a great deal of privilege. To actually support social justice, as Izzy claims in his review, people with

privilege must acknowledge that sometimes, or even often, they have to step back and let the voices of marginalized people be heard.

(It’s possible, too, that I have said too much here, as I said at the beginning.)

Izzy, I agree with you that there is a lot of pretentiousness on this campus. But I think it is woefully inaccurate to equate the struggles that people unfairly face every single day with pretentiousness, or to characterize their fight for justice as intolerant and moralizing.

Please do not conflate the two. Respecting the work and the voices of women, queer folks, people of color, and particularly those who exist at the intersection of these groups is not something to do for the sake of political correctness. It’s because anything else is just wrong. Also, though I am always hesitant to frame justice in terms of benefiting the dominant group, I do believe that no one can claim to be empathetic human beings if we accept the various privileges we have without question. Finally, although love, like empathy, should not be the sole criterion for working toward justice, it is important for me because there are people whom I love who have to work through oppression and marginalization. If you would like to extend this conversation further, feel free to contact me in person.

Mike Lumetta ’15

Izzy Kornblatt responds

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ike Lumetta seems to think that just in defending my opinion, I am silencing already-marginalized people. The elusive logic behind this claim is presented in this extraordinary passage: When someone to whom I am ostensibly trying to be an ally (emphasis on trying) tells me that I have done something wrong, I cannot question that. You have to reflect on it. Maybe after that I can ask for clarification, but there is no world in which the statement “You’re wrong—I am a good ally” makes any sense whatsoever... Responding otherwise, particularly in print, has the feeling of shouting over and silencing marginalized voices, and that is not okay.

What is proposed here, despite all the progressive rhetoric, is remarkably reminscent of the morality of Western imperialism.

Both are predicated on the unquestionable prerogative of one group to determine what it is to act morally. Edward Said, in his intelligent essay “Nationalism, Human Rights, and Interpretation,” notes that what this leads to is that the controlling group

“babbles on about how really moral they are as they do some particularly gangsterish thing.” Of course that is not what is going on here, but it is the likely political consequence of this kind of thinking. Once morality is equated with the will of one person or group, it becomes arbitrary, no longer a product of any common humanity or fellow-feeling but instead an unquestionable commandment. The proper way to fight marginalization is to conclude from rational consideration that it ought to end, not to put aside reason and hand moral authority over to the presently marginalized. They might end up doing just as much wrong as we have to then.

And anyway, how is it to be determined just who is marginalized enough to have this special moral prerogative? Lumetta acts as if his use of the term “marginalized people” is univocal and transparent, when really he just uses it to refer to two marginalized groups: black people and queer people. To take my own case: first, he has no right to assume, as he does, that I am straight. Second, it is true that I am a white man, but I am also Jewish, and I have gay parents (and have been teased rather nastily

for it). Can I then make at least a couple of marginalization-morality rules? On his own logic, I do not think Lumetta can answer that question with a “no.”

If we reject this confused notion of morality, and assume that what is racist or offensive is not just what a marginalized person thinks is those things but rather what is objectively those things, dealing with Lumetta’s specific criticisms of my review is not at all hard. To be clear, in my review I criticized “Pariah” for specific aesthetic reasons: I said I thought the characters were two-dimensional, the screenplay was haphazard and driven by plot requirements rather than characters, and the cinematography was excessively stylized.

Lumetta thinks my reaction to the movie “is tied to [my] identities,” and that it possibly falls “within a history of white people dehumanizing or othering people of color, particularly women and queer folks of color.” This claim, essentially that my review is racist, would appear to require some kind of evidence, though Lumetta cannot really marshal any. “It may or may not be true that the characters all fall within certain tropes, but it may also be true that they are rooted in someone’s lived experiences,” he writes, but of course stereotypes are based on real traits. And plenty of excellent novelists and filmmakers put stereotypes to interesting use. The question is how to make characters, and more broadly, a story, come to life—to represent the world through more than just predefined notions. The literary critic Viktor Shklovsky put it best: “art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stony stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known.”

Lumetta may disagree with my judgement in this one case, but he has no grounds for claiming that it was in any way based on the race or gender identity of the characters at hand.

Lumetta also criticizes my contention that “good storytelling has nothing at all to do with social justice” on the grounds that “only through telling stories can we understand how our experiences are informed by identity, whatever identities we have.”

First, that is patently untrue. Telling stories may be one way of understanding how our experiences are informed by identity, but surely it is not the only way. More importantly, all I meant by that claim was that the sort of criticism I leveled at “Pariah” was apolitical in that it had nothing to do with the social agenda of the movie, just continued on page 39 Swarthmore review

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COMMENT TOGETHER On the power of rituals to connect us to earth

by Mark Wallace

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walnut fragments in my mop of early morning hair, has restored my sense of vigor and belonging to the life-giving flow patterns that make my existence vibrant and meaningful.

This daily activity—an alchemy of Christian prayer of thanksgiving and Native American sacred hoop ritual—goes to the heart of the green vision that animates my life. I believe that earth and sky, human beings and other beings, everything that lives and grows in its own time and according to its own nature, is pulsing with a vital life force that is sacred, that is eternal, that is God. Reactualizing the power of this vital force in my morning contemplative ritual is a daily reminder to me that the earth is sacred and should therefore be protected as the place that God indwells and maintains for the well being of all of us, humankind and otherkind together.

We all need some way to experience a deep sense of belonging to the earth, whether or not we are denominationally religious. Indeed, unless we have that sense of relationship, I fear that the prospects for our continual habitation on this planet are not good. Without a spiritual basis for ecology—without a deeply felt sense of kinship with other life forms—it will be difficult for us to feel motivated to exercise concern for the welfare of the planet and its inhabitants. Reawakening our spiritual relationship to animals, land, and water forges that primal sense of connection to the lifeweb that is necessary for long-term commitments to sustainable living.

When I travel out-of-doors in the early morning to perform my sacred hoop ritual, I express thanks for my wife and children, our two dogs, and the many life forms that populate the forest preserve where I live: wood thrush and red-bellied woodpecker, red fox and whitetailed deer, American toad and Eastern garter snake. My goal is to integrate my heart and my head, both in my devotional practice and my wider professional commitments, specifically, my role as a teacher. In this way, I also look for ways in my teaching to bring together practice and theory in order to inculcate in my students love for all of our earthen relations.

Trained in religious studies, I was mentored to avoid any contemplative practice in the classroom lest students confuse the academic study of religion with particular sectarian rituals. It is one thing to study Christian monasticism as an

Photo by Roban Kramer / courtesy of Flickr

ost mornings I get out of bed and walk into my front yard where I turn and face the four cardinal directions. I weave a circle of gratitude and praise as I turn and look in each direction, and I thank God for the day that is about to begin. As I celebrate the bounty of the good earth, I pray that I may be a person of compassion who lives in balance and harmony with his surroundings—even as the animals and plants around me perform their own important and complementary roles in sustaining the web of life. When I first started this ritual, I didn’t know east from west or north from south. I didn’t know in which direction the sun rose; or where the migrating birds flying above me were headed; or where the day ended in the twilight of summer evenings; or in which direction the first blasts of winter originated. One morning as I spun my circle under a black walnut tree close to the edge of the yard, a squirrel dropped a large woody nut down on top of my head. A random mistake? A sign of greeting? A gesture of irritation? I wasn’t sure, but the feeling that I was connected to other life forms deepened my sense of relationship with the wider earth community during my morning ritual. I am a college professor, so I have a lot of facts in my head. But prior to beginning this ritual, there was not much music in my heart, or juice in my body; now this simple inaugural routine, sometimes accompanied by

The Crum Woods in winter

intellectual exercise, so the argument runs, but quite another to practice the daily office as a spiritual exercise. But I have found my students increasingly hungry not only for theological study but also for the actual lived experiences that underlie and shape such study. Now I use contemplative rituals with students as integral to their academic studies. These exercises affectively ground the analytically discursive work of writing papers and taking exams in my classes. These two modes of learning—heartfelt mindfulness and academic analysis—provide the sonic baseline that shapes the rhythms of my pedagogy.

In the early 2000s I first began to re-imagine my teaching vocation, in line with my daily practice, as a type of soulcraft, not just as a way of learning intellectual content but, moreover, as a form of knowledge acquisition fundamentally grounded in ritual formation. To that end, and, as luck would have it, on the day of September 12, 2001, one day after what we now call 9/11, I had scheduled to teach the second session of my class, “Religion, the Environment, and Contemplative Practice,” as an integrated head-and-heart class. I planned that afternoon for a three-hour class meeting in the Crum Woods, the forest preserve adjacent to the Swarthmore campus and my home where I do morning devotions. In addition to discussing the assigned readings I planned that class members would begin a series of group meditation and ritual practices that I had envisioned for this particular day in the semester. Under any circumstances, asking students to take the chance of practicing various meditation disciplines in an open classroom environment, in full view of their peers, is a risky proposition.

But to ask them to take this risk immediately following such a traumatic event as 9/11 now felt to be especially We ill timed.

So I emailed the class proceeded before our meeting to see what wanted to do, assuming they INto the they would prefer to cancel class for that crum day and make it up later. To my surprise the students wanted to go woods, ahead with the class as planned.

We first met in our regular classpracticing room and then, without speaking, we proceeded into the Crum a kind of Woods as a group, practicing a silent kind of silent walking meditaAlong the way I asked each walking tion. member of the group to experience meditation. being “summoned” by a particular life form found in the forest— red-tailed hawk, clod of dirt, water-strider, flatworm, gray squirrel, red oak, skunk-cabbage, and so on—and then to reimagine themselves as becoming that life form.

After the walk through the woods we gathered

in a circle, thirty or so students and me, within a grove of sycamore trees in a meadow next to a creek.

At this juncture I asked the students to use the first person in conveying a message to our group from the perspective of the individual life form they had assumed. I explained that this was a voluntary exercise; no one should feel compelled to speak if he or she did not want to. If you imagine yourself, for example, as a brook trout or morning dove or dragonfly living in and around the Crum Creek, with the creek threatened by suburban storm water runoff and other problems, what would you like to say to this circle of human beings? This group activity is a variation on a deep ecology, neo-Pagan ritual called “A Council of All Beings,” in which participants enact a mystical oneness with the flora and fauna in an area by speaking out in the first person on behalf of the being or place with which they have chosen to identify. A Council of All Beings ritual enables members of the group to speak “as” and “for” other natural beings, imaginatively feeling what it might be like to be bacterium, bottle-nosed dolphin, alligator, old growth forest, or gray wolf. Participants imaginatively shape-shift into this or that animal or plant or natural place and then share a message to the other human persons in the circle. The purpose of a Council is to foster compassion for other life forms by ritually bridging the differences that separate human beings from the natural world.

In principle, this sort of group activity seemed like a good idea for inaugurating a new class format that I had learned about from other colleagues, one that grafted Earth-centered meditation practices onto an academic religious studies foundation. As we sat quietly, waiting for someone in the circle to speak “as” his or her adopted life form, it became awkwardly clear to me that no one was ready to take on this sort of task—at least not on this particular day. Shocked and traumatized by the previous day’s events in New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington D.C., I silently wondered how I could expect my students to perform a strange ritual openly, especially since it appeared that some were, understandably, uncomfortable becoming other life forms in the first place. Some of the students were shy, of course, while others did not want to do or say anything that might embarrass them in a group setting. As the minutes went by I was certain I had been asking too much of them. After a half hour no one had spoken and I could feel the perspiration running down the inside of my shirt. I had been preparing this class for weeks, yet now I felt I should have proposed a more conventional alternative to a Council of All Beings ritual, at least in the light of the sad events at the World Trade Center and elsewhere the Swarthmore review

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day before.

Then something happened. “I am blue heron,” said one member of the class. “I glide though the creek in the early morning looking for something to eat. I break the calm of the afternoon with my big wings as I take flight over the water and travel to new destinations.

Humans, keep this watershed clean so that I can grace this place for years to come.”

Soon other life forms began to speak as well.

“I am red-backed salamander. I live under rocks and deep down in the fertile ground. I need the protection of this forest to dig for food and raise my young. I am worried that contaminants in the soil will make us sick to the point of death. Please care for the earth so that I can live.”

“I am monarch butterfly. I migrate through the open meadows in your forest looking for the milkweed plant on which I lay my eggs and my caterpillars feed. I brighten your day with my beautiful orange and black wings; I help other plants grow and pollinate with my nectar here and there. Please do not pave over the meadows and cut down the milkweed that I need for my survival.”

“I am black walnut tree. I add to the protective canopy of this forest. My heartwood is favored for your furniture making. The large nuts I drop to the ground are food for squirrels and mice and other forest creatures. I purify the air by absorbing the carbon dioxide you produce, and I produce oxygen so that everyone can breathe. Protect this forest and all its inhabitants.”

And the litany of voices continued: “I am lichen . . . ,” “I am holly bush . . . ,” “I am crayfish . . .,” “I am forest wildflower . . . ,” “I am worm . . .,” “I am morning dove . . .,” “I am furry caterpillar . . .,” “I am tulip tree . . .,” and so forth.

After that long silence, the members of the class shared their eco-stories in a polyphony of proclamations, soft-spoken entreaties, tears, and laughter. We discussed how to care for this forest. In turn, we were learning to care for ourselves. After the previous day’s violent attacks we were beginning the process of mourning—of mourning for ourselves, our endangered forest friends, and for the lives lost in the 9/11 attacks. I feared the initial silence had signaled too much unease with the group ritual. Now I realized that the time of silence at the beginning of class allowed participants to gather their thoughts in a new vein, and discern what they should say as they assumed the identity of the particular life form that had originally summoned them during our forest walk.

Like the pattern of puzzle-like pieces of bark flaking off the trunk of the sycamore tree next to me, I became encircled by a medley of voices that reminded me and the others of our obliga8

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tions to care for the forest, and one another.

Sitting cross-legged in the open meadow, amid the occasional yellow jackets buzzing low as they foraged for food, my skin felt warmed by the mid-afternoon sunlight; the low gurgle of the creek nearby provided background music for our ritual gathering. Soon the class would end and we would be back on campus, far from the forest. Yet Daily confor a moment here, we enacted our identities as fellow and sister templative members of this forest preserve practice is in communion with the other life forms found there. We felt ourthe ground selves embedded in a sacred hoop greater than ourselves—much like tone that the hoop I circumambulate each shapes my morning in my devotional practice.

As human citizens of a wider bilife. otic community—and as political citizens of a county at war with, and now victimized by, its many enemies, real and imagined—we found ourselves surrounded by a cloud of witnesses who were calling us to our responsibilities for preserving the woods, preserving ourselves, preserving the world.

Daily contemplative practice is the ground tone that shapes my life. As a Christian deeply molded by first peoples’ beliefs and practices; as a husband and father experiencing the joys and challenges of intimate family live; as a teacher who aims to inspire in students thoughtful and affective yearning for the health of their own, and the wider, biosphere, I regularly aspire to root my life in the deep soil of God’s good creation through mindful practice and living.

This is difficult to do. I feel pressed by family struggles and workplace responsibilities.

And it sometimes seems easier to go about the day without taking time out to practice my contemplative grounding exercise. But without this practice, as the day grinds on, I feel physically and spiritually exhausted. The Protestant Reformer Martin Luther said, “The less I pray, the harder it gets; the more I pray, the better it goes.” Whatever one calls one’s day-by-day contemplative ritual—sacred hoop ritual, reciting mantras, labyrinth walking, obligatory prayer, sitting meditation, Torah study, or daily rounds—life cannot be meaningfully lived and maintained without some regular devotional practice. Now over a decade in the past, my desire to teach students the Council of All Beings ritual, the day after 9/11, welled up organically from my own circadian medicine wheel ritual.

These contemplative practices are different in detail, but their goal is the same: to help us all rediscover for ourselves what we find to be the primal spiritual bonds to the wider community of living beings that makes our existence on earth joyously possible and sustainable. u

Portrait of a Woman photos and text by Erin Ching In Ezra Pound’s “Portrait d’une femme” he speaks of the woman who resides within history, who captivates the minds of men, and who never ceases to mystify. However, when I first read that piece, my mind strayed from the traditional female that Pound intended to describe. I envisioned the fierce, bright, independent, and simply lovely women within my life that inspire me to embrace the moment and seek adventure. This collection of photos documents what my understanding of a portrait of a woman ought to look like—one whose presence snags your attention like the Sargasso Sea. Many thanks to the friends who are allowing me to use these photos.

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State of Marxism

INTRODUCTION by Izzy Kornblatt

Marxism seems in a very bad way these days. If you were to identify yourself as a Marxist to a typical American, Democrat or Republican, he or she would probably consider you mightily selfrighteous, and possibly willfully complicit in totalitarianism.

There are somewhat good reasons for this, not least the fiasco that was the Soviet Union. When I came to Swarthmore I was surprised to find myself reading the Communist Manifesto in my sociology class, and even more surprised to find it being treated as any old generally mainstream political argument. I particularly minded the way people usually so good at sniffing out injustices saw fit to, as I saw it, turn a blind eye to the horrors done in the name of Marxism over the past century.

I now see that I was being stubborn and reactionary and was myself turning a blind eyes to the horrors done in the name of liberalism and capitalism. There are, after all, billions of people living on less than $2 a day. What changed my mind is a conviction I had had for a long time, but for some reason had not connected to Marxism until I came across it in an argument for Marxism of Terry Eagleton’s: “however hard one tries, one simply cannot shake off the primitive conviction that this is not how it [i.e. the world] is supposed to be.” Believing in socialism means believing that we haven’t reached the end of history, that liberal capitalism, which is rife with injustice, is not yet the best we can do. Socialism, for Marx as for Eagleton, is a dream that can be realized. It is neither utopian nor a matter of technicalities, though if it is ever to succeed, technicalities such as how totalitarianism is to be avoided will have to be dealt with properly. I think a successful socialist society is indeed conceivable, if not likely to come about anytime soon. It would not entail everyone starving in identical Soviet apartment blocks.

Its point would not be to enforce any kind of false equality but rather to ensure equal standard of living and equal opportunity. Otherwise ingenious people are apt, at this point, to declare without hesitation that such a society is impossible.

But why should that be the case? Capitalism is surely not structurally necessary for democracy, and self-interest is not the only reason people do things, even in capitalism. Families, and all manner of other groups, operate without the vicious inequality that is inherent to capitalism.

Terry Eagleton and Michael Hardt are two of world’s most prominent committed socialists. I hope readers will take them much more seriously than I would have up until rather uncomfortably recently.

STATE of MARXISM

Terry Eagleton on socialism in tough times, terror in Boston, the follies of cultural studies, and more interviewed by Izzy Kornblatt

[Terry Eagleton is an English literary and cultural theorist. He is Distinguished Professor of English Literature at Lancaster University, Professor of Cultural Theory at the National University of Ireland, and Distinguished Visiting Professor of English Literature at The University of Notre Dame.

He has written more than forty books, including the newly released “How to Read Literature.” This interview was conducted over the phone on April 20. It has been lightly edited for speech tics, redundancies, and the like.]

There’s a moment in the third chapter [of your book “Why Marx Was Right” (2011)] when you say that exploitation is inherent in liberalism [and capitalism].

I’m wondering if the success stories of capitalism, in Southeast Asia and in some ways in the United States, can be held up as models as models of capitalism working without exploitation being necessary. As in, can we separate the exploitation that’s gone on in capitalism from the system itself?

Well, exploitation is a pretty technical concept in Marx himself, and in that sense, in the technical Marxist sense, then capitalism is intrinsically, inherently exploitative, in that it deprives the workers of some of what is theirs by right. Of course different capitalisms have different degrees of success, and as I say in the book, Marx had undying admiration for

the enormous wealth that capitalism has created and accumulated, but his point is that that can’t be done without equally generating poverty, and that’s part of what he means by exploitation. He means it’s just part of the nature of the capitalist system that there’s a struggle over the wealth between those who create it—the working class—and those who own the means of production. It’s in the interest of those who own the means of production that... they keep [workers’] wages as low as they can, so they can make more profits... [Marx’s] point is, you could have a system that would be equally successful for everybody, but that’s not possible with capitalism.

You don’t think it’s possible for there to be companies that are structured in a way where there’s an ethic built into them that removes some of that exploitation?

It isn’t a state of mind; it’s not a matter of ethics. It’s a matter of economic fact.

It’s a matter of the fact that for a capitalist company to be successful it must augment its profits, and that means trying to keep its wages down, so what’s good for the employer is not necessarily good for the employees. That doesn’t mean that the employees have to be starving, or whipped, or beaten, or any other terrible scenario like that. Of course not. It just means that there’s an inequality that’s built into the capitalist system. In every

conceivable capitalist society, some people are highly successful, prosperous, and so on, but they’re successful on the backs of other people who aren’t so successful...

So you’re not so friendly to the claims made by economists that capitalism done right is going to spread the wealth.

Well, it never has. How long do we have to wait for that to happen? Capitalism is some 200 years old. It never has spread the wealth, right? The world’s capitalist system is today more unequal [than it has been] in a long time. Inequalities between the rich and the poor on a global scale are growing at a rapid pace, and it seems to me highly naive to imagine that’s just an accident that could be put right. I mean, how long does the system have to correct that? Capitalism has always generated poverty and inequality...

One thing that those who remain critical of Marxism point out is that poverty in the U.S. has, aside from the more recent economic crisis has gone down in the past 50 years. Though there’s a bigger gap, it’s not as if those on the lower end are getting poorer.

First of all, there’s tremendous poverty in the United States. Some economists talk about the Third World within the United States and within the West.

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STATE of MARXISM I don’t mean to deny that.

But as I said, in order for the system to be exploitative, it doesn’t mean that the workers have to be poor and depressed and beaten and shackled and so on. They certainly have been at times, and they certainly were in the States—African Americans. But the point is, Marx’s point is that inequality is intrinsic to the system. Sometimes it will be dramatic and spectacular, other times it will be less so.

Sometimes those on the losing end will be reasonably well off, other times they will be almost destitute. It will change from one time to another. Marx’s point is, why does it have to be so? Is it just a natural fact, or could we change it?

Could I just, before you ask the next question, make a comment on the Boston situation, if I may.

Yeah.

Well, someone on CNN News, some commentator, said, last night, in the wake of bombings, “What kind of person could actually kill innocent civilians?”

Well, could I suggest an answer to that?

One kind of person who does that is the American military, in Afghanistan, who deliberately set out with the drones to kill people, and have succeeded in killing far more innocent men, women, and children than the paltry two or three who were murdered in Boston. Whenever will you hear that in American media? Who in the public sphere in America would actually say that? When 9/11 happened, I don’t know if anybody in the United States pointed out publicly that this was the second 9/11. You know about the first 9/11— In Latin America.

Do you know about the first 9/11?

Yeah, I saw you talk about it in an interview. But go ahead.

Oh good. Well the first 9/11 happened exactly thirty years before the recent 9/11, when the United States violently overthrew the democratically elected government of [Salvador] Allende in Chile, and installed in its place a dictator who went on to kill far more people than died in the World Trade Center. And one could multiply examples of that.

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But one of the reasons that America doesn’t take that fact in is of course its extraordinary blindness to what goes on elsewhere in the world. I mean, over the past few days there’s been really nothing in the American media other than the Boston media, which would in one sense be understandable—it was a dramatic and tragic event—but one almost feels the second world war could’ve broken

out and America wouldn’t even have noticed. To an outsider like myself one of the frightening facts about this country is its enormous narcissism, its inward gaze, its exclusion of whole ranges of global experience, of what’s happening elsewhere, its almost obsessional navelgazing, its concentration on itself. You would’ve thought that the Boston tragedy is the only thing that’s happened in the Photo courtesy of Octopus Magazine

STATE of MARXISM past few days. Even as we speak the United States military forces are using drones to kill innocent people.

And it just seems to me that there’s something hypocritical about the way Americans, you know, throw up their hands in despair when they’re attacked but never even mention the fact that they spend much of their time attacking other people. Somebody else on CNN, in speaking of the two brothers, the two Chechen brothers, said, “Why do they do this? Would there have been some kind of trauma in their past?” Well, yes.

It’s known as Western foreign policy.

And they of course are thinking in some psychologistic way about, you know, were these kids dropped on their heads. No. Terrorists do what they do—and what they do are extremely bad and wicked and evil things, such as the Boston massacre— they’re doing it because their own nations have been systematically exploited and humiliated by the West. Now I don’t think that’s adequate reason for what they do. But it is a reason for what they do, whereas so often in the West people act as if they’re crazy, as if they have no reason at all, just as if they were dropped on their heads as children... [Terrorists are] lashing back in deeply objectionable ways, morally speaking, but nevertheless there’s a context to this that one has to try to understand.

But I guarantee that if you went on American TV and said that, you’d have to avoid the lynching party. You’ll be misunderstood, misrepresented firstly as supporting what those Chechen terrorists did, and secondly as trying to excuse them in some way, which is not what I mean at all. But the United States still systematically refuses to attend to the way its foreign policy in the past is a very important element in the circle of terrorist backlash, and until it understands that, it won’t be able to solve it.

I agree with most of all of what you’ve said. The one question that I have is, can there not be some room, particularly in the aftermath of an event like this, or 9/11, for a country to take some time to grieve and indeed just talk about what’s just happened to it?... I’m not sure it seems to me that right now the U.S. needs to be talking about drones right now.

What it’s actually doing in the wake of Boston is congratulating itself, which is a

well established American habit: “What a great nation we are”; We’re so resilient and strong”; We’re pulling together.”

[America is] cheering itself up instead of asking the real questions: what does this say about our policies? Should we reshape those? It’s doing its own kind of macho [thing] which is so offensive to many non-Americans. It’s sort of “We’re still the greatest nation, and this, our response to these events, goes to show that we are.” As long as [America] takes that kind of naive attitude, it’s not going to learn anything. It took that attitude after 9/11, and it’s taking it again, and so this hopelessness is likely to go on.

You’ve defended a lot of what’s at the heart of Western religion in some of your recent work. I’m wondering whether this very different attitude that you take to religion, where you’re willing to acknowledge—I think at the beginning of your book of lectures on religion [“Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate” (2009)]—the horrible things that have happened in the name of religions and under the aegis of blind faith, but... it seems like you’re less willing to take that same attitude toward America, and say, yes, bad things have happened in America, but at the same time America is perhaps an excellent model of democracy in many respects.

I think that there are many excellent things about America. I don’t think that democracy is one of them. First of all, as I point out in my book on Marx, it’s a one party state—the capitalist party.

It might go under two names—the Republicans and the Democrats—but it’s basically a one-party state. And the United States, like most Western nations, is run essentially by the masters of the Universe: the bankers, the financiers, the executives, the power elite [who] control the global economy. Political democracy is very subservient to the goals defined by those people, and that’s true of my society as much as it is of yours. But as far as recognizing what’s positive about the States goes... I point out, in my book on Marx, what praise Marx lavishes upon capitalism and all its magnificent achievements—the way it’s dragged people out of slavery, and so on. Of course that’s not... true of the United States, just as it’s true of where I come from. And a truly dialectical assessment has to say both

things, and I do try to do that in my book.

In “Why Marx Was Right” you suggest... more concrete manifestations of Marxism and what it might look like—you talk about market socialism and all the rest, but unless I missed something, you’re never very specific in the book about the Marxist society you would most want to live in, what it would look like, and I’m wondering if you could talk a little about that.

Well, first of all, I think that the term Marxist society is wrong... Marxism is one among several theories and practices for attaining socialism. You can talk about a socialist society, if you like. I don’t regard Marxism as a be-all-and-end-all... for example I don’t think it’s very important whether somebody is a Marxist or not.

I think it’s important whether they’re a socialist. Marxism is one very important, very mainstream, way of being that, but there are many other ways of being that, and I wouldn’t want to impose Marxism in that sense on anybody.

Yes, it’s true, returning to your question, that Marx himself as I say is notoriously vague about the shape that the perfect socialist society will take, although he has some ideas about it. The great dangers, as I say in the book, involve trying to be a prophet, trying to predict the future.

Marx is a prophet in the Old Testament sense. He denounces the injustices of the present, and only out of that movement would something new grow. Anybody can create blueprints and discuss abstract ideas, and so Marx is very impatient with that, because it so easily leads to a rather false kind of utopia...

I think there are certain things one must say about the forms of the socialist future. As I argue in the book socialism is perhaps best seen as the completion of democracy. We can object to liberal capitalism because it’s not democratic enough. And so you would have to work out the forms of popular democracy— the forms of a popular, decentralized political and economic democracy... of cooperatives, which Marx talks about—self-governing units of producers and cooperators, and how they would be coordinated. Now the thing is, an enormous amount of work has been done on the left about that. It isn’t actually true that the left has been vague about a socialist future. Socialist economists have done great work on a feasible alternative Swarthmore review

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STATE of MARXISM to capitalism. It’s just that that’s among many concepts that the book doesn’t have time to cover. I’m not actually dealing with that, and I’m not an economist anyway. I think on the whole that the left has not been vague: it has talked about the nuts and bolts of the situation in many ways.

I didn’t mean to suggest otherwise. I meant more to go in the direction of what your Marxism would look like... [and to continue] on that point, what steps do you think Western governments now could take toward a more just society?

Well, get out of the way, first of all.

Western governments from a socialist point of view can’t take steps toward socialism because they spend so much time opposing it. Of course, they could take steps toward social democracy. They could be more socially democratic, but how far they can be socially democratic depends on [whether] capitalism happens at that point to be booming or busting.

At the moment it’s busting pretty fast.

And then one of the things that pretty much instantly goes to the wall is social democracy: social welfare, a caring society, care for the deprived, and so on. That [is] instantly sacrificed to the imperatives of profit, [which is] exactly what we’re seeing at the moment. And that will always happen when capitalism hits a crisis...

There’s a degree of self-interest in the way that the capitalist system, when it can afford to, tries to fund and placate people who might otherwise [protest against it], but at the moment, of course, in creating mass unemployment and misery and deprivation, capitalism isn’t able to do that. And the fact that it should be [creating those things] in the 21st century is surely in itself an indictment of the system—that humanity in general has never been more advanced, with more technology and so on, and yet in the midst of that we have this kind of devastation.

It seems to me that in itself is a pretty critical point about the system.

What do you see as the most interesting Marxist thought that’s being published and coming out now?

Well, Marxism has been on the descent for quite some time for a number of

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reasons. This isn’t a good Get The Fuck Away time for Marxism, ironically, From Me, Or, Please because in a sense a crisis of the capitalist system ought Take Your Arm Off My to be an opportunity for the Shoulder left. But on the whole the left hasn’t got its stuff together

by Anna Gonzales very well in this situation, and that for a reason. The very out-of-control-ness Things you don’t know about: of the system, which led to Hand like a branding iron on my arm its implosion—its partial The same hand clutching thigh implosion, this enormous The lips, the teeth, the tip of the tongue crisis—were also the forces which drove back the left, Skin though gaps in the shower curtain so that when the system The ghosts, pinning my wrists to the bed. was feeling comfortable and triumphant in its postwar phase in the 1990s and so on, it was very effective at rolling the left back, but that same triumphalism also resulted You’ve written a readable and in a huge crisis. entertaining book that seems like it could Another reason is because of the maybe change some otherwise stubborn Stalinist heritage, the fact that quite minds on Marxism... What else do you understandably Marxism has been think should be done to help Marxist discredited in the eyes of many people thought break out of its small pockets because of the Soviet experiment. I try and out of humanities departments in the and explain in the book what Marxism academy? has to say about Stalinism, why that happened and so on, but the fact is that That’s all dependent on history, as quite rightly... lots of people who might it were. It’s not a matter of individual otherwise have been more favorable to intellectuals like myself asking what more the left have been turned off it by some we can do. The contours are set by the of the historical realities of trying to do historical and political situation. There socialism in backward situations, which is are times when the left can be and has really what’s happened. been extremely active and engaged and Of course there’s good work coming interventionist and so on, and there are out in Marxism, but it’s not, you know... other times, and as I say at the moment, Back in the 1970s, certainly when I was in that it’s driven back. I’m to some extent Britain, in Europe in general, when the left rather fatalistic about that. I don’t think was much more in ascendancy, there was that individuals, whether intellectuals an enormous amount of fertile intellectual or politicians, set the pace. It’s part of and cultural work being produced. There my materialist beliefs that they don’t. was certainly in Britain an entire socialist They themselves are dependent on much culture. That’s not to say that everyone deeper currents: political and economic in Britain was a Marxist... it’s to say that and global and so on, and their power radical and socialist ideas made sense. The is very constrained. So it’s not a matter difference from that period to the period of “we haven’t taken enough initiative.” now is that a much more aggressive The agenda, or the possible agenda, is capitalism, which had to restructure itself usually set by history itself. And then through Reagan and Thatcher and so on, one can try and take advantage of it or has made the intellectual climate much not. But one has to try to be realistic less seditious, from a left point of view. about these things. It’s not just a matter And so it’s not a time one would expect a of willpower or just having more bright lot of left ideas to be pouring out. At the ideas around, or selling more books. All same time, of course, because of the crisis of those things may help in a modest kind there’s been quite a lot of grassroots forms of way. But fundamentally we’re talking of ideas and organizations... the future of about enormously deep global powers, which remains to be seen. and the clash of powers. I mean, generally

STATE of MARXISM speaking, of course the initiative would be with the dominant powers. As I say in the book, I think, they have more tanks than we do. The left is quite realistic about that.

We don’t expect to score many victories. If we did we’d be in power.

But basically you go on trying to do the right thing. And sometimes it will seem to work out to some extent, and sometimes it won’t. It can be a very dispiriting kind of project. What one must beware of are fair-weather socialists who leap on the bandwagon when it’s rolling and leap off and cry in despair when it’s stuck and the wheels come off. There are a lot of people like that around. I mean, a lot of the people I knew back in the 1970s are now... conservatives. And the reason for that is not because they suddenly turned all wicked and right-wing and mean and cruel and nasty, but because they concluded, basically, that the left had little or no chance of success. And whether one agrees with that judgment or not, at least it’s a rational kind of judgment.

On the other hand, you see, it’s always a very dodgy thing to try to as it were, you know, predict historical developments. I mean, who would have thought ten years ago that there would be almighty crisis of global capitalism? In the 80s, the 90s, the period just after the Cold War, that would have seemed very remote indeed, either to the proponents or the opponents of the system. And then, you know, who would have guessed at the point when people were saying “History is over,” “It’s the end of history,” “There’ll be nothing but capitalism and liberalism from now on,” that airplanes would hit the World Trade Center? And suddenly a whole new grand narrative started to unroll...

There was a new political enemy on the prowl. Nobody would have predicted it even five years before. That’s not to say of course that history will get better. It’s perfectly consonant with socialist thought to believe that it might get a great deal worse. This is only to say that one needs to take into account the realistic facts of the change. I’m not going to extrapolate from the situation [we’re] in that this is going to go on forever and there’s no chance of it changing. I think that is unduly pessimistic. Socialists should be neither pessimistic nor optimistic. They should be realistic, and sometimes realism is on your side and sometimes it’s not. It depends where you are, and when.

There are some socialists who have abandoned Marxism. For instance... there’s a piece from the 1970s by Michael Walzer, which talks about Jon Elster’s book “Making Sense of Marx,” which I think you quote in your book. [I am grateful to Professor Richard Eldridge for assigning this essay to me in class.] And Walzer concludes from Elster’s study that so much of Marxism— and you talk about this too—or really what we associate with Marxism, is not really original to Marx. You say what’s most distinct... about Marxism is also what’s most problematic [about it]. But... you maintain that “Marxist” is a reasonable term to describe yourself. So you disagree with Walzer?

Oh yes, yes. But it’s also a problematic term. It’s not immediately clear what it means, what it includes, and what it excludes. As I think I say in my book, there are people who’ve claimed the title of Marxism while contesting central proposals in Marx. It’s a little bit like Christianity: how many individual articles do you have to sign onto to be a cardcarrying Christian?... Marxism is a term of debate and contention. It’s not an absolute certainty. And yes, this goes back to the point you were making earlier. And as I said before, what’s really important is not the label of Marxism, what’s important is socialist practice. Marxism has been a mainstream one, but it’s not as I said before the only one. People like Walzer, to that extent they’re quite right... Marxism has never been exhaustive of leftist or socialist ideas. Although I would claim the title of Marxist, I think that I’m fairly relaxed about the business of labeling oneself in that way.

It’s been, what, more than 15 years since your “The Illusions of Postmodernism” was published. [That book was published in 1996.] And you’ve certainly taken a lot more shots at postmodernism since then in your work. I’m wondering, how is your critique of postmodernism fairing? Has there been progress in eradicating the more extreme forms of it?

Well, I don’t know if my own particular critique has done that, but I do feel like saying, whatever happened to postmodernism?... Another related question is, whatever happened to poststructuralism? [Someone could try to] track that down. I haven’t myself, and

I don’t know anybody who has. There was certainly a point, I think in the 1990s, when suddenly poststructuralism was sort of over, without any dramatic declaration, or any... trumpets, or any... rituals. I mean, postmodernism is a different kind of thing than poststructuralism. Postmodernism is a whole kind of culture; poststructuralism is a set of theories. When I travel the world talking to people I hear less and less of the arguments of postmodernism. I mean, it was becoming very a militant and dogmatic even movement in the 1980s, and to some degree in the 1990s. I really don’t hear sort of militant apologists for postmodernism anymore.

And I think that partly is because of the terms of the historical argument.

You know, these things rise and fall, and their rise and fall is never simply an intellectual matter. It’s a matter of a wider historical context.... As I said before, just when postmodernists were announcing the end of grand narratives, and the end of history and so on, then the World Trade Center collapsed, and it looked as if we had a rather new and ugly grand narrative stretching as far into the future as we could see. We’re in the middle of it now. At the same time, whereas people had been talking about pragmatism and relativism and culturalism, you know setting their sights very low, suddenly in the wake of 9/11 a lot of people came out defending big... ideas. You know, the Sam Harrises of this world, Richard Dawkins and Hitchens and so on. Suddenly a lot of ideas which postmodernism had thought it had discredited, ideas of science, progress, Enlightenment, truth, were back on the agenda, at least for some people, particularly the kind of militant secularists. Now I think that can only be seen in the context of 9/11, where the West had in a sense ideologically disarmed... And suddenly postmodernism and relativism and pragmatism were not any longer ideologically powerful or resourceful enough. [People were] turning to all kinds of things, rather kind of off-the-peg versions of Enlightenment, setting their sights on religion or whatever it happened to be. I think there may be a sense in which postmodernism became increasingly outmoded by historical developments. [Postmodernists] may not be totally aware of that yet, but I think its voice has become much more muted, and not, I must say, because of my little critique of it...

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STATE of MARXISM It seems to me, and to others, that certain tenets of postmodernism are engrained pretty deeply in American academic culture. I want to ask about a specific issue at Swarthmore. [Here the essential facts of what might be termed the Zoellick affair were laid out. I explained to Eagleton that Robert Zoellick supported, but was not an architect of, the Iraq War.] This led to a kind of hullaballoo on campus over the question of what tolerance really means... do we really tolerate intellectual diversity if someone who’s not even that far to the right by American standards is not allowed to speak? This seems to get at [one of the issues] with postmodernism: its kind of shallow idea of diversity and tolerance.

Yeah.

What’s your take on an issue like that?

Yes, well first of all I think it’s quite right to refuse an honorary degree to anyone who’s supported anything as disgraceful as the Iraq adventure. On the wider question, yes, I think you’re right. Postmodernism on the whole buys its tolerance on the cheap, because basically it doesn’t really like conviction in the first place. A typical postmodern prejudice is to imagine that convictions are intrinsically dogmatic.

Postmodernism doesn’t really like too much belief, and therefore it’s easy for it to tolerate opinions and so on because it’s not terribly passionate or militant about them... Tolerance, to have any value, means tolerating views that make you feel sick in the pit of your stomach...

There’s a whole question here about the status of belief, which is a big part of the argument. There’s a kind of cheap tolerance which is sort-of exchange-value at the level of the mind. All opinions are equal and exchangeable and therefore indifferent. One reason that they are that, on this view, is that what’s important is just that somebody holds them. You have this ridiculous idea, this truly crazed idea, that an opinion is to be respected just because somebody holds it. How does that work out with antisemitism, for example?

How would it have worked out with the Nazis? The idea is ridiculous. So debased the culture becomes, or this part of the culture anyway, that people are prepared to keep quiet about or respect views simply because they happen to be people’s views, which seems to me about as absurd 18

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as to say, you should respect people simply because of the color of their hair, or whether they have freckles or mustaches or not...

The fact is that this is a world of contradictions, and sometimes one simply has to choose between two different sets of values. And not all of those values go together all the time. Sometimes one has to choose between conviction and the importance of tolerating the opposing conviction, and one simply has to make

You have this ridiculous idea, this truly crazed idea, that an opinion is to be respected just because somebody holds it. How does that work out with antisemitism, for example? a judgment, I think, in that particular context.

You’ve defended a lot of [literary and cultural] theory, [though you’ve also] been very critical of [certain elements] of theory.

One criticism that’s been raised against theory that seems to me and to others quite compelling is that it’s been hostile to claims of value in art... You clearly have books that you like and respect and consider important and better [than other ones]... but many theorists don’t seem to hold such views. Hierarchy itself is seen as oppressive.

Is it not reasonable to be critical of theory [on these grounds]?

Yeah. Well, I’ve said many times in my work that valuing is a part of everyday existence. It’d very strange if people didn’t carry that practice into literature as well. Of course value is important... I think the important issue is not whether value is important. It’s what are the grounds of valuation. And that is a

properly theoretical question. There’s a lot of theory that has devoted itself to the question of what are the grounds, criteria, conventions, institutions, of valuation— how do they change? how are they historical? are they absolute or relative?

Now all of these are proper and absolutely legitimate theoretical questions— questions about value. I think that theory has contributed an enormous amount to that, because previously value was the thing that kind of brought arguments to an end. You said you liked Dickens, and I said I hated him, and that was that. It was a matter of taste. I think it’s enormously important to say no, we can go much further than that. We can have exciting and interesting arguments about the grounds and nature and practice of value.

Now I think it’s true—to get back to your point—that certain currents of theory put the value question aside, mainly, I would say, high structuralism. High structuralists were very impatient, I should say, with the question of value. But that was only one current within the whole universe of discourse that was theory.... Certainly political criticism (feminism, Marxism) wasn’t hostile to the question. It tried to relocate the question of value. It didn’t on the whole try to eradicate it... I think it’s a much more complex question than saying simply that theory was against value.

It lays out a lot of new questions about value, basically. Reader response theory also had elements of value judgment and so on. I would like to bring all kinds of criticism against literary theory, and I am, you know, a card-carrying literary theorist, but I don’t think that’s the most important. I don’t feel that’s a pivotal criticism of it.

Well, for example, I’m in a film and media studies class in a department at Swarthmore that [like most departments like it] was created out of certain currents in theory, and even if [my class] is not explicitly theoretical it seems to carry a lot of the assumptions that go with theory. And by the way I don’t mean to dismiss theory in any way.

No, no.

In my class we watch reality TV shows and we watch [renowned movies], and never once have we discussed whether one might be of more cultural value than the other.

STATE of MARXISM Oh, yeah.

That seems to me to go a little deeper than just 1970s structuralism.

You’re right, you’re right. In some areas of cultural studies, you’re right, the question of value has been suspended in rather kind of what strikes me as a rather prudish and puritanical kind of way. It’s something slightly obscene and indecent that one shouldn’t discuss. And I think that’s enormously ironic because, you know, cultural studies is supposed to be very popular and democratic and antielitist, and nothing is more elitist than saying valuing isn’t important. It’s elitist because everyday people do it all the time.

So to refuse to value is actually to take a very nonpopular, nondemocratic, as it were intellectualist stance, I think. As far as cultural studies goes as well, let’s just point out that there are many works of socalled high or canonical literature which are much more politically progressive and enlightened than many works of popular culture, yeah?

Michael Hardt on socialism’s critics, democracy, resisting power, and his own time at Swarthmore interviewed by Izzy Kornblatt, Vinay Pai, and Alec Pillsbury

Yeah.

Cultural studies people don’t like saying that, but it’s a fact. Just as the axis “high and popular” doesn’t correspond to the axis “good and bad,” because there’s a lot of bad high culture and a lot of very good popular culture, equally the axis “high and popular” doesn’t correspond to “conservative and radical.” No way does it do that. The conservative political axis cuts right through the division between popular and elitist culture. There are many popular culture artifacts that are deeply reactionary and many canonical works— think of Shelley, think of Blake, think of Dickens, think of all kinds of people— which are far more radical than any of the stuff on American television. So those people in cultural theory who think there’s something radical about simply looking at popular culture are simply mistaken.

There may be radical ways of doing that...

There may be radical arguments. But it seems to me serially naive to assume that there’s something inherently progressive, politically enlightened, about looking at the arena of popular culture. Just look at some popular newspapers. They are direct agents of capitalist power. So one must at all costs avoid a kind of... populism. u

[Michael Hardt is an American literary and cultural theorist. He is Professor of Literature and Italian Studies at Duke University and Professor of Political Literature at the European Graduate School. He is best known for his books “Empire” (2000), “Multitude” (2004), and “Commonwealth” (2009), all cowritten with Antonio Negri. This interview was conducted via email over the course of several weeks in late April and early May.] Marxism remains important in academic literary and cultural theory but has largely disappeared from mainstream American political thought. Are there any good reasons for that? Do you have any ideas for addressing it?

Well, I don’t think that Marxist thought has ever played a significant role in mainstream US political thought—and maybe that’s not a bad thing. Marx’s thought has been and continues to be useful for those who are trying to challenge the current ruling powers and struggle for a different, better world.

That said, however, I think it would be better to treat Marx a little more like other

radical political thinkers of the past—to normalize him, so to speak. I do find it useful continually to return Marx’s work because I find it helps me understand better how our world works, but I find the same true of a whole series of other thinkers, like Machiavelli, Spinoza, and Jefferson. All of them are limited in all kinds of ways, by their historical situations, by their blind spots, and so forth. And yet together they form a kind of toolbox that helps me think better.

Marx is notoriously vague about precisely what his ideal socialist society would look like. What would yours look like?

You are right that Marx says little about communism and the future. I would say, rather than vague, he is reticent or even prudent. I see this as a methodological principle for him: do not make blueprints of some utopian society but instead, through critique of the current social order, try to grasp the seeds of our possible future. If you want to understand communism, in other words, you should focus on a critique of capital, because capitalist development will pose not only the means of its own Swarthmore review

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STATE of MARXISM

destruction but also the conditions of possibility for a better future.

You’ve written about the new capitalist order you call “Empire” and about how it can be resisted. What’s the starting point for resistance? How do you envision that resistance growing?

My first instinct when someone poses the questions “what is to be done?” is to turn it around and ask instead “what are people already doing?” People don’t need to be told to revolt. Resistance, refusal, and rebellion come naturally to people when they are faced with exploitation and domination. That’s the starting point.

But once one recognizes and engages with how people are rebelling, one has to ask how best can the rebellion be organized? How can a democratic process be effective against the ruling powers?

How can it create lasting relationships and structures? And, perhaps most important, how can moments of resistance be transformed into projects to constitute an 20

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alternative, better society?

These are big questions, I know. But they are some of the ones that interest me most today.

The writer Evgeny Morozov has argued that the conventional wisdom about the internet and social media—that they are great forces for democracy—has things backward. “Modern communications technologies are already being deployed as new forms of repression... Washington’s utopian plan to liberate the world one tweet at a time could also turn American innovation into a tool for the world’s subjugation,” he argues. How do you think about this?

Of course Morozov is right that the internet and social media are not necessarily or immediately liberating. They can be used to repress us: the internet is a powerful tool for surveillance, for example, and social media often function as a means for corporations to make profit on your activity.

But that does not negate the fact that the internet and social media can function, in certain situations, as part of projects of liberation. Social media have played very important roles in the most interesting contemporary social movements, including the 2009 protests in Iran, the 2011 uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, the indignados in Spain, and Occupy.

I think Morozov is asking the wrong question. We need to understand how these kinds of tools can contribute to democratic projects.

One thing is certain: despite that we often hear terms like Twitter revolution, these media did not create or cause any of these uprisings or movements, or dictate how they are organized. What comes first, instead, is that the movements organize themselves in a horizontal, network form, without leaders or centralized structures.

Only then and for that reason do activists find the internet and social media to be useful tools—because the structure of the technologies matches the structure of the movements.

Photo courtesy of The Conversant

STATE of MARXISM But that structural correspondence only indicates a potential. The real question, it seems to me, is how can movements for democracy be carried further, and how can technologies such as these make the movements more powerful?

Francis Fukuyama criticized your idea that what is needed are new nonhierarchical networks that bring out the diverse capabilities of the multitude: “The difficulty with this line of reasoning is that there is a whole class of issues networks can’t resolve.

This is why hierarchies, from nation-states to corporations to university departments, persist, and why so many left-wing movements claiming to speak on behalf of the people have ended up monopolizing power.”

How do you respond to this line of fire?

It’s an honor, of course, to be criticized by someone like Fukuyama. But to respond to that statement I have to step back to get a broader perspective on democracy.

Several decades after independence from England, Thomas Jefferson expresses in a letter his hope that the result of our revolution will be one day that we are capable of ruling ourselves without masters.

That aspiration seems to me a good guide for any theory of democracy. By democracy, of course, I don’t mean anything like the current state of affairs, characterized by the rule of private property and the spectacle of periodic elections (themselves largely influenced by money). That still involves the rule of masters. By democracy instead I mean a social arrangement by which we equally and collectively rule ourselves.

From the passage that you cite, it does not appear that Francis Fukuyama shares my (and Jefferson’s) desire for democracy.

Or, perhaps, I should read his remark about the persistence of hierarchies and the continuing rule of masters in a melancholy key, as if he regrets the lack of democracy but simply thinks collective self-governance is an unrealistic goal.

In either case, I suppose a response to such challenges has to involve not only an expression of my own political desire, but also an argument that people are, given adequate conditions, actually capable of ruling themselves. That’s something Toni Negri and I attempt to do in our books.

There is much talk about the cynicism of young voters—how they are too disgusted by the system to even bother trying to change it.

How do you think about this malaise?

I certainly don’t blame anyone for being apathetic and cynical regarding electoral politics! But it’s important to recognize that this is not a necessary or natural condition.

The current system trains us to be apathetic and cynical—that there is no alternative, you cannot change things, and so forth.

And, perhaps worse, it makes politics into something boring and hateful.

We need to discover ways to make doing politics together an integral and joyful part of our lives.

I certainly don’t blame anyone for being apathetic and cynical regarding electoral politics!

But it’s important to recognize that this is not a necessary or natural condition.

In your 2004 book “Multitude” you borrow Carl Schmitt’s idea of “spaces of exception” for the likes of Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and CIA black sites. Since then the U.S. has moved away from away from black sites and toward the use of unmanned drones. How do you think about this shift? In what ways is Schmitt’s concept still useful?

Carl Schmitt’s proposal is to consider the sovereign as the one who rules over the exception. He thus situates the sovereign both inside and outside the law. Schmitt’s concept has given many contemporary theorists—Giorgio Agamben is the most interesting among them—a framework for analyzing and protesting against the functioning of power in sites or states of exception like those you cite. I see how the use of unmanned drones is different, as you suggest, in that the application of such exceptional power is mobile rather than fixed as a camp, but it seems to me that the logic of sovereignty as exception proves

useful in that case too.

In my view, however, although such analyses have certainly generated important debates, political theorists have focused too much in the last decade on sovereignty and its states of exception. (As your question makes clear this is as much a self-criticism as a criticism of anyone else.) Yes, of course, one should protest the existence and functioning of the Guantanamo detention center, Abu Graib, and CIA black sites, but I find that many analyses, by concentrating on such exceptional, dramatic cases, fail to engage and critique the everyday, unexceptional functioning of power. It seems most important to me to focus on the rule of property and the force of the governing legal structures. They carry a violence of their own, perhaps less spectacular than that of the exceptional states but no less severe.

At Swarthmore you were an engineering major. What got you interested in radical political theory?

I am attracted to practical action and strategies. I entered Swarthmore in the late 70s during a period of energy crisis and gas shortages in the US. The largescale development of alternative energy sources—solar energy, in particular— seemed like a real possibility to me. I was also excited by the idea of developing appropriate technologies for third world countries. So, engineering seemed to me a practical route to political change.

I was also discouraged by the forms of student politics that existed on campus.

At the time I thought there was a lot of posturing and little effect. But in retrospect I don’t really think that was the issue. I had not yet found a way that I could participate happily and effectively.

Only after graduating, when I got involved with Central American solidarity networks in the US and, especially, when I learned about Central American political movements themselves, did I really learn the joys of political struggle in a collective movement. I also realized then the need for creative political thought. I realized I didn’t understand the way power functions in the world and the nature of the global hierarchies and forms of domination that confront us—not to mention, how we could transform it and make something better. Doing theory thus seems to me now, paradoxically, the most practical thing to do. u Swarthmore review

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FICTION: Three Short Stories

Stutter

by Jeanette Leopold

T

hey told me to go sit on the steps and wait for my dad, so here I am, squatting, chin in my hands. Except my chin’s not in my hands. I’m standing, leaning against the brick building.

My hood is up over my head and I’m wearing a leather jacket and smoking a cigarette.

Long, slow drags. Irresistible. Except I’m not really smoking a cigarette because my dad won’t let me. He says it will make me “even more jittery.” Smoking calms people down. My dad doesn’t know shit.

They told me to sit outside and think about what I did wrong, but I’ll show them—I don’t have to be miserable if I don’t want to. It’s a beautiful early fall day and I feel warm through my sweatshirt and my heart is light as a bird! I’m not really wearing a leather jacket. It’s a UNH sweatshirt, because that’s where my brother’s going. My older brother, Peter—my stepbrother. My real brother, Jordan, he’s eleven.

They told me to write an apology letter while I wait but the air is too nice for that. I’m watching the seventh grade gym class play lacrosse instead. They’re not very good. I’m good at lacrosse. I’m not supposed to play but sometimes I steal Jordan’s stick and throw a ball against the garage. I throw it really hard. I might break the door if I’m not careful.

The stoner kids come out the door behind me. The guys have blond hair that hangs down in their eyes and they always wear long pants even in warm weather. The girls wear really tight clothes and dye their hair weird colors. That’s how they fit in with each other. They laugh and push each other as they wander over to the woods. I can smell them smoking weed as they’re walking.

I dress well. I look good, I don’t look like a weird stoner kid or a lacrosse girl or anything. I don’t have a natural sense of style but I read all the magazines and my mom takes me shopping whenever I want to go. She hands me some cash and tells me to run in and pick out whatever I want. While I’m in the store she sits in her car and listens to Simon and Garfunkel. I know because once I came back out and she was asleep and “The Boxer” was playing, really softly, almost imperceptibly.

I know words like “imperceptibly” because I’m really smart, my reading level is way beyond my age. I let my mom sleep that time in the car even though I wanted to go home. I’m really stunningly attractive and I’m really kind, I let people sleep when they’re tired even when it’s not convenient for me and I have a Latin test to study for and my flute to practice.

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I hate flute. Everyone acts all happy and excited when they find out that I play flute because they’re like, “Oh, how wonderful, Nathalie can communicate through music.” I want to kill them. Sometimes, I really just want to kill them.

It’s not really a beautiful day. It’s pretty chilly. It’s not so much early fall as late autumn, when you’re never quite sure if you’ll wake up to a frost or dew. That’s a line from a poem I wrote for class last spring. My teacher told me it was one of the best poems she’d read by a student in years. I don’t show anyone my poetry, though, except when it’s an assignment. They get annoying with that, too, like “Oh, Nathalie can communicate through writing,” you know, it’s like fuck off, like they said don’t go apologize to Ms. Bitch-Face, write her an apology letter or maybe come up with a minuet to play on your flute to show her your true, heartfelt sorrow for her pain.

I’ll have to remember that line in case I write another poem.

It’s not exactly convenient for my dad to come pick me up right now. He has work and he hates leaving early so I feel bad. I wouldn’t have called him at all if they’d left it up to me but they knew I wouldn’t so they called him themselves, told him I couldn’t be here anymore. Then they told me to sit on the steps and sent Mr. Dreat to spy on me from inside. I know he’s watching me through the window in the door to make sure I’m not doing anything bad. I know because I stared at the window and he looked out of it and then ducked down really quick.

They all think I’m stupid. They think I don’t look, think I don’t listen. “Retard,” they called me. I heard them.

Mr. Coleman blows his whistle and the gym-class lacrosse players gather around him. He gives them a pep talk. I’m used to his pep talks—he’s telling them that it’s important to go for a run every day and eat only whole grains. He’s really fit for an older man. His assistant gym teacher is this sort of fat younger woman. She also gives lectures about health. I saw them eating their lunches together in their office, once. He was eating turkey and cheese on whole grain bread. She was eating a chicken Caesar salad. The room was completely silent and the tension was so thick that I thought it would crush me if I went in.

The door opens behind me and my math teacher comes out. Her name is Carol Gordon. She has shoulder-length reddish-blonde hair, sort of curly. She’s short and stout, not fat.

“Waiting for your ride, Nathalie?” she asks me.

I tell her yes, I’m waiting for my dad.

“What is this, the third time this semester?” she says.

She gives me a long, appraising look. I tug on the bottom

of my leather jacket and smooth my hair to the side of my head. I manage to look down at her even though I’m sitting and she’s standing. I tilt my head to the side so that the sunlight creates perfect shadows along the contours of my beautiful features. Then I look up and away from Ms. Gordon.

“It might be a good idea to study your algebra while you wait, Nathalie,” she says. “Your latest test grade was not up to par.”

I blush. I feel hot in my sweatshirt. I look down. Ms. Gordon touches my shoulder gently, then she turns away and walks down the steps towards the parking lot.

That’s one thing I like about Ms. Gordon. She doesn’t give me any special treatment.

“You wait outside, now, like a good girl,” they said to me. “You wait outside for your daddy and don’t you budge from those steps. If you budge from those steps we will give you a four day suspension.” That’s what they said. So here I am, wasting my Wednesday afternoon watching seventh graders try to play lacrosse.

At morning break I walked around the halls with my best friend Sarah and she told me about this club she wants to start, “C.A.R.E.” It stands for Carefully Arranging Restful Events. Sarah has anxiety.

That’s what she says, like it’s some disorder. “I suffer from anxiety.” Everyone has anxiety.

It’s a tough world. But because a psychiatrist told her it’s a real thing she gets to skip her homework whenever she wants and organize “relaxing” events.

“Event number one will be nap-time. It’ll be like when we were kids, Nat,” she told me. She uses her hands a lot when she talks. Her hands are very small and pale, chapped. Her nails are always painted pink. “It’ll be just like preschool. Who didn’t like preschool? It’s perfect.”

I told her there was no way we would get any number of kids to stay after school for nap-time. I told her that most people have interesting things to do with their lives. I told her I didn’t like naptime in preschool anyway.

She looked uncomfortable. She’s always trying to cut me off. She’s dying to jump in and finish a sentence or a word for me. I talk slower just to bother her.

Sarah’s not really my best friend. Or, it’s hard to say.

We don’t get along all that well, especially not now that she’s with Mike. Mike tries to look like one of the cool kids, but he’s a dweeb. I bet he has a small penis. He’s older than us, though, so Sarah is all in love with him.

She’s trying to move up in the social circles. You should have seen her trying to get herself invited to Amanda D’s Halloween party. It was pathetic.

A car horn honks and I almost fall off the steps. I look

Illustration by Nyantee Asherman up at the window to make sure Mr. Dreat didn’t see. The door swings open behind me and the boy with acne from homeroom comes out. He’s holding a practice SAT book under his arm and he trips over his own feet as he stumbles down the steps. I sit up straighter and smooth my skirt over my thighs.

I’m not a virgin. I had sex this past summer with a guy I worked with at Stop and Shop. We only had sex one Swarthmore review

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23

time. We weren’t dating or anything, but after work one day he invited me over and we had a few beers and then did it on his couch. His parents weren’t home.

They told me to wait for my dad. Wait for him to do what? Pick me up? Home-school me? Fix me?

I draw my sweatshirt tighter around myself.

Sarah doesn’t know that I had sex. She’s only friends with me because she doesn’t see me as competition, and she’s still working up the courage to get to second base with dweeb-face. She sees befriending me as doing a good deed. She’s probably planning on writing her college essay about me.

I didn’t really lose my virginity to that guy from work.

I mean, I had sex with him, but it wasn’t the first time I’ve done it. The first time was with my speech therapist. I was younger then. He said so many nice things to me and when I tried to reply he put his finger on my lips and said, “Shh.” And then he caressed my face and told me how beautiful I was. When I tried to respond he slapped my cheek. “No, no,” he whispered. He was breathing on my neck. “We’ll talk in a different way, now.

It’s easier. Nicer.” That was the gist of it. I don’t remember exactly what he said. Then he pushed me up onto the table and pulled his pants down.

He didn’t, you know, really slap me. I made that part up because his words felt like a slap and I wanted to get the point across. But just so you know. He didn’t hit me.

A breeze is picking up and settling a coldness into the air. I hold my backpack on my lap and hug it to keep warm. The lawn is covered in autumn leaves that form a jumbled pattern—they’re dark colors, forest colors, browns and burnt oranges and reds. The wind stirs them up and they flutter across the grass. They sweep around the feet of the gym class kids who are jogging to the locker room. One of the girls lags behind. Her cheeks are deep red and her grey shirt is soaking wet around the armpits. She’s chugging along as fast as she can. Every few steps she tries to pick up the pace, tips perilously forward, and stops, bends over with her hands on her knees. Mr. Coleman watches her, arms crossed over his chest, frowning.

OK, fine, here’s what happened. Today in English Ms. Kapsand announced our next project: an oral presentation on a theme in “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Then she said, “Okay, silent reading, now,” and strutted herself over to my desk. She wears too-tight clothing and keeps giving herself different hairstyles, like a bit of selfalteration will give some purpose to her pathetic life.

Today her hair was really curly and reeked of hairspray.

She bent over my desk with her stupidly low-cut shirt and too much eye makeup and she stage-whispered to me, “Don’t worry, Nathalie, I won’t make you do an oral presentation. You can write a report instead.”

I slapped her hard across the face. She thinks she’s such a fucking saint.

They told me to wait for my dad, so I am. I’m a good kid. I’m leaning against the building, my leather jacket buttoned under the chin. I take a long drag of my cigarette and slowly blow out smoke. The wind picks up and blows my hair out behind me, and I turn my face into it, close my eyes and let the air caress me. They don’t get it, none of them, none of them get it but they will. My 24

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Teeth

by Sara Blazevic I am Remus and you, mother, will carry me home in your teeth.

The room brims with the sound of locusts.

Every good sky mirrors Baka’s whipped cream, made for strawberries picked off the road.

Every good strawberry smells the same sweet of mown grass under night bike whirrs. The clicking spokes.

One more thing about H: that even suited-up he had the handwriting of a little kid.

The look of someone’s computational statistics notes slanting a legal pad hands you a million things.

There is nothing more to tell about him.

His body tasted the same as his hair.

I’d drink that water which made me thirstiest if only to convince you.

One day he will stand smiling wide on my porch and Blazevic he kissed me there You’re really something, Blazevic, ‘cause I gave him that name at 6:30 in the morning before either of us had fallen asleep yet.

You’re really something, Blazevic, cause I was.

When I was small I’d go back to the bowl all through the afternoon dipping two, three fingers in even after the cream stopped looking like clouds, began cloying so I couldn’t ever shake the smell from someplace between throat and teeth.

phone is buzzing and I open it up to see seven new text messages, half of which invite me to Amanda D’s party tomorrow. I lazily type back that I have other plans.

Over by the car pick-up spot, a guy and a girl sit on a bench really close together. She leans against him and he strokes her hair. His other hand draws a picture in the air for her.

I look away, towards the street. I pull the strings tighter on the hood of my sweatshirt so that only my face is visible. I clutch my phone with hands between my knees and wait for my dad. u This story was the winner of this year's William Plumer Potter fiction contest.

FICTION: Three Short Stories

1250

by Paul LaFreniere

T

homys looks out his window and see crops that are not his, surrounded by fallow fields that are not his, and in the distance a small keep slumped against a smaller hill. This is also not his. There is a church in the town that’s not his, and a monastary ten miles distant that he has never seen because he is not allowed to travel so far from his place of birth. The monastary is obviously not his either. His body is not his.

That belongs to God and the lord who owns the keep, in equal measure. Thomys has no last name.

Thomys has just returned from the church where a man clad in cloth finer than any Thomys has ever touched said something incomprehensible with his back turned to Thomys and the other serfs. He knows that if he does not sit still and look at the preacher’s back he will go to hell. If he does something his lord doesn’t like he will go to hell.

Sometimes, when the sadness and grief become too great, he beats his wife, but thankfully Thomys knows he will not go to hell for this.

Thomys has never seen a book. He knows almost nothing.

But he has seen the sun set and the sun rise for seventeen years, and he hopes he will outlive his father and grandfather and survive to thirty. He sits on his single chair which was passed down to him from his father, in his hut that must hold himself and his wife and in two months a child, though likely only for a few days until it sickens and dies. He can span the space between the walls of his hut with the length of his hands. When he sees the lord out across the fields in dyed cloth on a great horse with a bow on his back and hounds at his feet, he feels no resentment. The concept of injustice has never entered his mind. He looks out across the fallow fields past the ripe wheat to the trees that are beginning to turn red.

Thomys will die in three years of an infection from an ingrown toenail that spreads and causes him to rave and scream before he dies, leaving behind him a wife who will die within another two months, and a child who will be raised by relatives to have a life much like Thomys’s.

But Thomys has felt the dew though the cracked callus of his feet, he has seen a fox catch a salmon and rip its guts open in a delicate explosion of red to rip out the wriggling unborn roe. He has felt a thousand shades of anger, hatred, love, amusement, happiness.

He was born a sensitive man, to a fine and caring mother with a vocabulary of two hunred words, and though his life has predisposed him to fits and stops of brutality he is still capable of sliding his hammer-hard hand along the side of his wife’s jaw and around the back of her neck until it touches the soft downy black below the main mass of her hair, and not pulling her to him, but bending down gently to her and parting her lips with his own and standing with her like that in the morning for a full fifteen minutes before he goes out in the field. He is capable of imagining heaven as a place where he feels no rage and holds his wife always in a cool spring morning and before he dies screaming and goes down forever into the black, his last thoughts are of her. There are a hundred million like him. Say his name. u

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FICTION: Three Short Stories

Pudding v. Popsicle

by Olivia Ortiz

O

n the sultry afternoon of Tuesday, August 3, the members of Humanized Pudding—an underachieving fourpointed, shooting-and-crashing star of bass (Nathan), drums1, guitar (Robert), and keyboard (Lissy) launching from the Philadelphia area without aim, fame, or appropriate management—had to convene in the studio on the corner of East Street and High Nine in the city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, for an undetermined period of time to construct and record a series of musical ballads in preparation for their audition for the theme song of the pilot episode of what could become an inconsequential late-night sitcom. The future of Humanized Pudding depended on their ability to succeed in obtaining the musical responsibility of the pilot.2 Martin, their manager, arrived first that afternoon (two p.m.) at the corner office of East Street and High Nine, unlocked the door with the key under the mat, and fell into a musty couch. He waited. # On this particular Tuesday morning, roughly threefourths of the band3 slept in an apartment building two blocks from the corner of East Street and High Nine. At eight a.m., Lissy exited the apartment’s minimal air conditioning for the heat, breaking through 1

(Pat)

At the last band meeting, Pat had announced that, without any success in the immediate future, he would withdraw his membership in Humanized Pudding to assume responsibility of his father’s corporation, Wande, Inc., in Cairo. Aside from being an astute drummer, Pat also held the majority of the band’s financial resources in his personal accounts.

2

3 Specifically Lissy, Nathan, and Robert; Pat’s bed was mysteriously made, but his standard worn-in loafers were missing from their place on the shoe rack.

4 Across the hall, Pat’s alarm began a regimented cycle of ringing at alternating volumes and pitches and hibernating for ten to thirty minute intervals.

5 Twelve hours and eight minutes before having to arrive at the corner of East Street and High Nine, Patrick Mullerby Wande (so it said on his driver’s license) emerged from the pantry of his (it was owned by Wande, Inc.) apartment. Slowly, he lifted his leftmost loafer from its foot and set it on the counter. The right loafer followed. Bare feet against cool tile, Pat turned to the fridge. The doors flung open: bluish spaghetti, faded lettuce, rooting potatoes. They were radioactive, sending unstable frozen particles (Fz) in every direction. It had a half-life of less than ten seconds, and the atoms faded into oxygen, argon, and cobalt, staining the dining table and

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the city like the sweat breaking under her harem pants. With a fistful of posters, a manila folder of selfrecorded CDs, and her second favorite pair of sunnies, Lissy caught a cab to the 30th Street station and paid her way onto the earliest AMTRAK train running direct to New York City. Seat found, Lissy fell under the influence of sound-blocking headphones and began fingering an invisible mixer on her lap.

8:15 a.m. found the apartment somewhere between one-quarter and one-half empty.

In its backmost room, Nathan slept unmoving from one in the morning until five minutes before ten, mosquitoes buzzing to life on his windowsill. At precisely that time, he rolled from right to left, the rest of his body dragging behind his pelvis gracelessly. One eye opened, hesitated, and shut again. At the bed’s edge Robert blocked the glare of the sun leaking into the room and remained still until 40 seconds before eleven a.m. With sincerity that surfaces only while asleep, Nathan closed the gap between himself and his bedmate by resting his palm on Robert’s hip.

The mosquitoes began examining the perimeter of the window, promising themselves the destiny of landing on the stagnant bodies. They imagined Nathan and Robert as a single, ripple-less water, ripe and ready for the laying of their eggs.4 #5 There is a certain inertia that comes from summer days. Like the popsicles pooling on the sidewalk coating the kitchen floor in rough particulate matter.

Pat basked in the radioactive glory for a hundred thousand halflives (human or Fz, he wasn’t sure) or more. He wasn’t sure. The hunger—a leftover from spending the evening in their pantry—began exploring the depths of the Fz-pit that was the frigidare. Vegetable lo mein and potstickers, Nathan’s aunt’s blackberry cobbler, three dozen purple carrots, half a birthday cake left in the apartment building’s lounge, quarter-full bottles of pulp-free orange juice, empty pints of gelato were all examined and hesitantly passed over.

He wasn’t sure. The hunger deposited each failure on the counter, ignoring the repercussions of its actions for future inhabitants.

Spinning from the Fz fumes and radioactivity, Pat and his hunger uncovered a ceramic bowl of guacamole in Easter-themed plastic wrap. Clinging to the guac with his left, he dove into the dishwasher for a spoon with his right.

Nothing. Was the dishwasher empty?

He wasn’t sure.

Pat turned to the silverware drawer.

The silverware drawer had chopsticks and bendy straws.

Pat turned to the dining room table.

Mysterious. (He would never be sure.) The table was set with cloth napkins, bread knives, salad forks, teaspoons, tablespoons, silverspoons, engravedspoons—“They fell from the sky,” he intoned but, in all truth, he wasn’t sure because Wande, Inc. had recently acquired a silverware company, and Pat frequently let delivery men into the apartment .

Pat, the guac, his spoon, cobalt streaks, the memory of his

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under the supervision of unobservant helicopter mothers, they spread in gooey lethargy, color vision strawberry pink, and attract ants. Someday, you may dream of a tidal wave, and the greatest fear of all is that it will be composed of the inescapable motion of a cherry popsicle transformed from the trophy in a child’s hand to a bestial red sludge. # Churchbells struck the city like heat thunder.

The apartment rang before the third (of eleven) hit finished filling the air. Nathan sat straight in bed, his hand lingering on Robert’s thigh. Robert rolled a quarter turn, his third movement in the past two minutes. Nathan inhaled, held the breath, and launched from bed into the salty waves of shag carpet lining his floor. He used the walls as a guide to the door, along the hall, into the kitchen. His stubbly cheeks blued from the distinct absence of oxygen entering his blood. Only when his still-stroking arms slammed into the counter did Nathan surface, dizzy from the intense concentration of oxygen entering his lungs.

His hazy vision—a shade of cobalt—gradually faded.

The counter was strewn with litter, and the dishwasher was empty in spite of the recent silverware delivery.

He grabbed a container of bread ends and added milk, leaving them on the counter’s edge.

The tile was warm and gritty under his toes. His feet remembered sand. Maybe their kitchen was the beach, maybe he was wearing swimming trunks, maybe they had all gone to the deep end and left him here, among the sandcastles and diapers of musicianhood, so Nathan, taking another gasp of breath, abandoned his bread and swam through the hall, treading water heavily in front of Lissy’s empty room,6 lapping about Robert’s sleeping form in his own room until the remembering stretched from his feet to his other body parts. He was either convinced that they had not all left him or that he was not, in fact, at the beach. One was as good as the other.7 Heralded by the realization, clarity struck for the briefest of seconds in Nathan’s headspace. Louder than churchbells it asked Nathan how he felt about the leftover-soggy loafers, and premonitions of Egyptian sands left the apartment, now eleven and one-quarter hours from Humanized Pudding’s promised convergence.

6

straining to hear over Pat’s insistent alarm

7

In light of Pat’s ultimatum.

8

Fz particles still clogged the air.

Nathan’s milky crisis masked the sound of the apartment door opening and closing, as well as the footsteps moving towards the laundry room, which held their cleaning supplies. The soggy crusts, combined with the sun’s brightness, inhibited him from making out the form who crossed in front of him to the sink. Pat began scrubbing.

9

10 Would ice cream keep Pat from maybe leaving after the recording session? (He wasn’t sure.)

11

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Or Pat?

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dissolution of his livelihood, apartment, and friends.

Nathan, clinging to the moment of clarity in his skull, collapsed his brow in resolute firmness and quavered his lip in unconquerable affirmation of the future of Humanized Pudding.

The swarming air swallowed Nathan again and distracted him for an additional thirty minutes, giving his bread ends enough time to converge with milk and become a defined series of positive integers politely swollen and floating in a plastic bowl. Nathan took the bowl and smelled the bread intently, his nose focusing on the bowl’s dumpling-like contents as the mosquitos would later focus on Robert’s body.8 Nathan coughed, choking on fumes. His hand jerked, and his face became immersed in the bowl.

He set the bowl at the edge of the counter, its contents uneaten, and began coughing in earnest, cleaning his face with the hem of his shirt.9 Undaunted, Nathan instinctually cold-shouldered the sink, slid into his roller skates, through the door frame, down the stairs, and past two blocks of buildings—landing four blocks away from the corner of East Street and High Nine. Now in the freezer section of the local grocery, Nathan pondered: the strawberry with or without the strawberry chunks? Was the floor slick enough for his roller skates to slip?10 And were they real strawberries? Should he have taken them off? Should he give the ice cream to Robert instead?

But what if he had to share with everyone? What if they don’t let shoeless people in the store? Does Robert even like strawberry ice cream? Or Lissy? 11 Better to grab the popsicle six-pack: fruit-punch cherry wild-berry lemon-lime orange grape. His wheels left rubber marks on the tiles. That will do. #12 The intense fragility of a popsicle is nothing short of astounding. It is a symbol of the momentary ambivalence of life, of the ponderingly transformative instances in which time, spatial reasoning, and one’s understanding of the flavor orange seemingly melt into the weedy cracks of a nearby sidewalk.

12 In the remaining eleven and a quarter hours before two p.m.

Patrick Mullerby Wande spent seven hours on the hood of a stalling car five miles west of the Philadelphia city limits, one hour driving five miles west of Philadelphia, twenty minutes driving into Philadelphia again, five minutes purchasing three one dollar lottery tickets, five minutes entering the apartment, twelve minutes cleaning the kitchen, three minutes inserting his feet into the loafers, and fifteen minutes arriving at the studio, in no particular order. He finished his guacamole within the first ten minutes of leaving Philadelphia.

When Pat arrived at the corner of East Street and High Nine, he had an oppressive feeling of being the black-hatted cowboy in Western but brushed it off because he wasn’t sure. Without looking for cars, he passed from one corner to the other, taking root on a muddy bench directly in front of the studio windows. It was thirty seconds before noon. The nearby bell-tower began to strike, having only just finished ringing for the previous hour. Pat bent down and set the guacamole bowl under his seat. Sliding an anonymous paper form underneath the bench in return, he straightened and leaned into the aging gum behind him. Twelve strikes. The bench fell part in shadow and part in light; he sat on the crux of the issue, held the brittle pages to his eyes in defense, and put as much effort into being unaware of his sweat or the proximity of heat to his skin as he could.

# Morning was falling into afternoon with a casual yawn. Lissy slouched in a café across the street from a post office. Address, insert, lick, close, stamp. Repeat.

Kiss it for good luck. Her leg jittered against the uneven table. Twenty three thick-papered envelops later, she gathered the thicket of bleached paper, patiently untangled it, and carefully placed each one inside a mailbox. Twenty-three CDs: to be seen or heard from again, she did not know.

Coffee in hand, she walked the streets, gliding from poster board to empty window to electric wire, and stapled posters. A Preliminary Showing (her face) DJ Liss (the date, location) Please contact at (her address, phone number) for further booking information. Another handful of the posters came out of her backpack. She wallpapered over a mural with her face, covered an intersection in the times and days of her show, collapsed a power line with sincerity of her plea.

Though it should have been minimal in the midday sun, Lissy’s shadow stretched from one end of the street to the other. In her self-made dusk, she surveyed her handiwork, making out the shape of her face in the very locations of the posters. Another fistful of papers surfaced; Lissy crossed to the next block, stapler in hand, and began again. # One p.m. found Robert lying awake, Nathan dazedly pining and carrying a box of popsicles vaguely towards the studio, Lissy yawning in a train car.13 Robert had not moved himself more than a foot since sitting in his private armchair the night past.

He woke in bed. Not his bed. A bed. He hadn’t come to conclusions as to which quite yet, and a question fell to him: if you begin, Like starlight I wake up and you’re there and we’re not, is it safe to continue, but the meteors come crashing, so all you’re left to do is take hold, hold of my hand?

Less importantly: would this be fitting for a show on the sexual encounters of post-college city-dwelling office-breathing pseudo-adults? More importantly: would the bassline work best in six-eight or four-four for the hemiola?

The mosquitoes, ever patient, had found a space between the window and its frame. Single-filed, they overtook the airspace.14 Fifteen minutes after their entry, Nathan skated into the kitchen, popsicles in hand.

He snatched his tennys from the shoe rack, grabbed his bass, lifted it across his back, and exited. Only the scent of fluorescent fruit remained.15 13

and articles crossing Pat’s chest.

14

They buzzed under the cover of Pat’s alarm.

15 Bleached lemon-scent lingered over the cleared countertop and scrubbed sink and mingled with the aftereffects of cleaning products.

16 Pat looked to his watch (one-thirty p.m.) without moving either hand from the eighteenth page of the two-week old Inquirer and

A perfumed woman caught Lissy’s attention just as her eyes were settling closed on the AMTRAK train from New York City to 30th Street in Philadelphia.

The honey-lemon lulled her eyes further and erased the heated, caffeinated black-top scent left from New York City. # In certain circles there exists a debate as to whether it is worse to let a popsicle drop or to let it melt.

There are, naturally, fringe groups that occupy the idea-space that a melting popsicle drops as well, but most mainstream debaters stay to the outskirts of the dichotomy. There is the immediate, un-savable, split-second collapsing action of flavored ice splattering mid-floor and the tired, repetitive, draining cruelty coming from the drip down the popsicle stick, the sugary stream coursing over your hand. Consider Frost’s Fire and Ice: it is not the parallel of opposites bridged that matters in the end but that the popsicle is destroyed. Fire or ice, dropped or melted, its sticky orange clutches, those that turn energy to ennui in everything they touch, disappear from the surface of the every day. #16 Paper and pen in hand, Robert had transitioned from reclining in bed to letting the dining room table support his prostrate form. Through a strenuous algebraic proof that referenced the boyish scent on his clothes and the blocks under his pillows, he concluded in writing that it was Nathan’s room, that he must have been carried there like last time, and that he was in need of breakfast. He wrote lightly, careful not to puncture the unsupported paper with the pen. The proof faded into the crumbs of earlier thoughts. meteors, hands, hand holding. meteors and hands A kettle whistled.17 Robert rolled into the kitchen and spooned loose tea into a mug. He poured the boiling water and watched the steam rise. As was custom, on the edge of the counter was a breaded and defined series of positive integers politely swollen and floating in a plastic bowl. His eyes passed over the microwave—one thirty-five p.m. He took the tea and soggy bread in hand and walked back to the dining table, now seating himself at its head.

A deep breath.

Robert currently had two frustrations in life, and from these frustrations his thoughts, emotional or otherwise, rarely strayed. The almost-fated ability to predict prime numbers—Robert had made a pilgrimdeftly stood with only minimal changes to the angle of his spine.

With similarly stringent movement, he crossed the space between the bench and his drumsticks and back, settling into the crux of shadow and light (now several inches further along the bench) without looking past the tenth paragraph of an op-ed on the elementary school across the way. His ears rang with the beeps of his alarm clock.

17

momentarily taking precedence over Pat’s alarm

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age to Breselenz wearing nothing but an ashen zeta on his forehead—he had counted the primes individually through three trillion, but would misplace 1 in the great stack, and the whole thing would collapse in on itself. His dreams were told in the language of a surreal number system with occasional visits to the complex and irrational.

The future of Humanized Pudding occupied the remainder of his time. This translated to an eternal slew of half-baked lyrics, tunes that no one was present to play, and the inadvertent attendance of concerts every night, as though increased musicality would change the course of the band when, he felt, Humanized Pudding’s future was as predetermined as the existence of zeta-zeros on the critical line.18 Therefore, Robert took the paper, half-covered in inky-blue penmanship, and tore it into two strips: one for Riemann.19 One strip in each hand, he brought the mug of tea closer and submerged the papers in its fragrant waters. He left each strip in the mug, shoved it away, stood up, and left for the shower. # Nathan clambered across the sidewalk, box and skates in hand. Six popsicles, five people. There’d be an extra—a sacrifice for the song, perhaps? Five popsicles, then, one for each of them.20 They had to.

Otherwise—otherwise the band would be hung out to dry on the beaches in their kitchen.

Nathan wasn’t sure where to move from there except that there would have to be an end for the popsicles as well. With a clarity greater than the light he had found that morning, he realized that, if Humanized Pudding broke into a handful of shards, the popsicles would have to melt. # Two ten. Martin, their manager, refrained from looking at the figure on the bench. Robert entered without ringing the bell on the door-hinge. “Where did the armchair go?” “... What armchair?”

Robert sat and covered the space between Martin and the other side of the couch with his paper clippings. Cosmic vocabulary and Greek letters ascended from their pages and maneuvered to fill the airspace between Robert and the coffee table. # The sidewalks lining East Street and High Nine were stationary like the air in the apartment. Hanging just 18

In light of Pat’s ultimatum.

19

and one for Patrick

20

Popsicles would convince Patrick otherwise.

21

loafers

22 From outside, the patient taps of drumsticks on a plastic bowl sounded.

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out of sight, Robert knew, were clouds of mosquitoes ready to swarm his languid corner of the studio if only they could find him in it. He countered their imagined buzzing with a steady, melodic hum. Glancing out the window for them, he recognized a pair of shoes21 and immediately averted his eyes.

“The riffs should be a bit catchier than that, shouldn’t they?”

“Should they be catchy at all?”22 # Ultimately, the plight of the popsicle and its eventual surrender to the summer day—whether the beast goes by drop or melt, it matters not—is only fair.

What goes up must come down; all good things must end. You’ll zig when you should have zagged, and the red crystals will splay across the driveway, or you’ll hold on too long, clinging like a high school sophomore in her first real romance. Either way, it comes to an end: it defeated by the sun, fate dampened by time and weather, death cushioned by the concrete under a child’s tricycle. # Lissy arrived in 30th Street Station five minutes ahead of schedule. Before the passengers were allowed to exit the train, she extracted herself from her car and skipped down the platform. A cab came that left her in front of the apartment and stood in front of the studio’s, looking in at Martin and Robert, wondering where Nathan had lost himself this afternoon.23 “Well, come in! Come in. Twenty minutes late. Let’s start, or try to.” Ceremoniously, Lissy turned from the glass to the door and marched right-left-right left-right-left under the studio sign to the center of the room, stringently holding her back orthogonal to the carpet. She kept her eyes steadfastly directed to her left.24 Martin scratched the back of his neck and nodded.25 Robert, facing the studio wall, sighed and impatiently rhythmed the couch’s arm to the beat of his hum. # The tangential conclusion, you should note, is that the popsicle, in being the summer day and its indolence, can only be defeated by the summer day—itself. Melting, dropping, the slide from a toddler’s sweaty palm—all are inherent to the popsicle. Selfdestructive cannibal, you say. It’s bestial red sludge at heart—but there is a heart. Human example illustrates continued on page 39 23 Pat lowered the paper from his face and crossed to the other corner of East Street and High Nine. He stopped an appropriate distance from Lissy’s reflection.

24 Pat stood to Lissy’s right. With his sticks, spoon, and the forlorn but empty bowl of guacamole he followed Lissy’s march with a crumpled shuffle.

25

at Pat.

SCREENPLAY

“This Side of Here”

by Patrick Hackeling FADE IN: INT. NEATLY ARRANGED BEDROOM – MORNING SAL DELIFERNO, 23, is getting dressed in front of a three-faced mirror. He’s got on his pants, shoes, socks, and is in the middle of buttoning his cuffs when his inner monologue begins. The shot is of Sal, not his reflection.

SAL (monologue) There’s a crowd out there somewhere, and they’re so full of it you wouldn’t believe me if I told you – if I told you just how incredibly full of themselves they managed to be at the same time.

The shot redirects to Sal’s reflection. From this point on, all shots of Sal are via his reflection.

SAL (monologue) And I greet them with a curt nod, then begin.

Sal begins to speak into the mirror, and as he does a single person enters each frame.

In the first, there’s an ATTRACTIVE YOUNG WOMAN, no more than 23. In the second, there’s a BUSINESSMAN, about 35. In the third, there’s a twenty-something year old JUNKY who looks 50.

SAL Do any of you know what pain is?

The camera cuts from an image of each of the three apathetically dismissing Sal’s comment. As it does, Sal’s monologue continues.

SAL (monologue) And their eyes roll the same way they do in death, and all I can think of are fields full of dead butterflies and drunk vagrants; and this inspires me.

The montage of the three dismissals concludes. The camera returns to Sal’s reflection.

SAL Maybe someone you know, someone close to you – a friend – died; maybe a parent committed suicide, maybe both. Yeah, that’s tough; that hurts. But that’s not pain.

The camera cuts to the girl whipping her hair, laughing good-naturedly, the businessman shaking his head in amicable disbelief, and the junky blowing it off with an eclectic grin. As this happens, Sal’s monologue continues.

SAL (monologue) And they chuckle since they’re too pompous to boo; and I grow.

The montage of the three’s antics concludes. The camera returns to Sal’s reflection.

SAL Pain is choking to death on your own blood for five hours in the freezing rain, as your

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snapped leg – a leg that just a couple days earlier boosted a quarter ton from a bar – rustles in a backstreet’s wash, imbecilic in its cowardice.

The camera shows the girl texting on her phone, before cutting back to Sal’s reflection.

SAL Pain is a tube in your throat clogged with so much blood and mucus the only solution is to drain it round the clock, the foreign nurse like a cornerman who forgot to bring an endswell, and so the vomit is insufflated and incessant – and you imagine God sucking the breath right back out of Adam before continuing this purge…

The camera shows the businessman checking his watch with restrained angst before cutting back to Sal’s reflection.

SAL …which is nothing new to you since the antibiotics they have you on you’re so allergic to you’re throwing up fifty times a day just to break even – twenty through fifty involving more gagged blood unplugged than whatever else might be inside you, which definitely isn’t food since you haven’t had that in over two months.

The camera cuts to the junky getting antsy and pushing down the pockets of his hoodie as he looks down, before cutting back to Sal’s reflection.

SAL Pain’s having a tube up your c*ck for fifty days, and they don’t change it so it gets infected and you’re skin’s crawling and you can’t sleep so all you do is sit there and listen, listen to anything that’ll murmur, anything that’ll lull you.

The camera cuts from the girl on her phone to the businessman on his; it seems as though their in the midst of a conversation, both of them smiling as they go along free of care.

Then it cuts back to Sal’s reflection.

SAL And the fan swings, and the guy in the bed next to you dies, and the monitor beeps; and you’re all alone and you pray to a God who you know has his hands tied, tied so tight he can’t even afford to sneak up behind you and lasso your melancholia, asphyxiate your inhibitions so you can just let go of all this make-believe fanfare that you’re a miracle and everything’s going to be okay.

The camera cuts to the junky who seems to have gotten in on this three-way conference call. The camera continues to cut back and forth between Sal’s reflection and the trio.

SAL And you’re nothing to anyone and you wonder why you’re here; and all of a sudden it hits you, but before you can process it you’re back asleep, and the guy dying next to you is in the middle of telling a joke you’ve told yourself a million times but would never dare tell another living soul…

The camera shows the businessman telling a joke as the woman and junky to his sides listen in, waiting for any punch line to jump on and start howling.

SAL …and the fan’s broken so you’re all sweating…

The camera shows the trio standing there, as they begin to sweat. As it cuts back and forth between Sal’s reflection and the trio, the trio becomes more and more affected by the room’s escalating temperature. They begin to enter a nod-like state.

SAL …and everyone’s bobbing their head to the ambient beeping noise coming from either the radiator or the speakers, and then it stops.

The trio looks up, startled then catatonic.

SAL And everyone’s staring at you and you laugh, because you realize you’re a king again, and the guy next to you is your fool…

The camera shows the businessman and junky getting on their hands and knees, looking

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up in awe.

SAL …and everyone in this crowd of millions is your loyal subject…

The camera shows the girl holding out hands her to Sal with tears in her eyes, as though they were in love.

SAL …and you raise a glass that’s now a chalice and the toast you make is exactly what hit you before: so this is the nuthouse.

The camera shows the trio covered in blood, laughing in heaves as they cheer Sal on through rock symbols and noisemakers.

SAL And they roar with anguished delight until sound overpowers all sight and you’re blind to all but you’re reflection…

The camera manically passes back and forth amongst the trio until it spins out of control and crashes, exposing Sal’s broken reflection as all that remains.

SAL …and you smile and wink – bracing yourself for the insufferable melee that’s to come as sweat that’s not your own trickles down your spine, and all your childhood fears resurface.

Sal’s broken reflection becomes dense with fog as three sets of hands loom over his shoulders and a rapid montage of Sal’s childhood rushes between fogged frames. Then it’s black and silent.

SAL (monologue) And they seem to get it, if only for a moment.

The camera shows the trio as they were in the beginning, only now they’re looking inquisitively at Sal with no biases. Then it cuts back to black.

SAL (monologue) And you’re given one last opportunity to run, to run to the light calling you up ahead…

An ostensible light begins to emerge through the darkness. Just as this image gains prominence, we cut to Sal adjusting his tie and making sure his appearance is adequate.

The camera faces Sal, not his reflection.

SAL (monologue) But for some reason you turn to the black. (beat) For some reason, you choose to live.

Sal walks away from the mirror and out of the room. As he does this, the camera picks up only the mirror’s black backside. A moment later, as the ensuing monologue is read: SAL And they disperse with far more important things on their mind.

The camera captures the trio as each member walks out of their individual frame. The final shot is of a three-faced mirror facing a tidy, somewhat barren room. It lingers for a moment.

SMASH CUT Credits roll.

THE END

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BOOKS Korea and Imperialism

ESSAY

A poet bridges the divide between north and south

Dancers perform at a gala in Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea, on April 16, 2012

I came back/to where hatred clumps like dry dung —this is the world I longed for: Where I spit and swear at the grey sky, where the scavengers and gangs hustle, yell all night Ko Un

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by Alec Pillsbury

U

ntil recently, the 24-hour news cycle had its attention settled on the issue of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. It was intent on reminding the Western world about one of the last surviving relics of the Cold War. Since the end of the Cold War, the media’s fascination with “rogue states” has been rather frivolous T h e T h r e e W a y T a v e r n selected poems by Ko Un and exploitive: it has tended to University of California press portray these various nationstates as on the verge of collapse 1 8 4 p a g e s | $ 2 2 ( p a p e r b a c k ) or as existential threats to the international community. In the case of North Korea, media coverage of the hermit kingdom has become something of a parody of itself, with an announcement every five or so years of the eastern Pacific’s being on the “verge” of thermonuclear war. In this way North Korea has become less a nation state than a force of nature, a geopolitical El Nino.

Photo by Bobby Yip / courtesy of Reuters

Students at Kim Il Sung University in Pyongyang on April 11, 2012

News outlets are obsessed with the new and current, and so they perpetually ignore the North-South divide’s 60-year history.

North Korea is often typecast as a traditional post-Cold War country that has yet to enter the warm embrace of international capitalism, as an anachronism. The DPRK is presented as a cartoon character standing midair over a chasm, ignorant of the fact that it should have fallen a long time ago. Because it has stayed in this position in the media for over half a century, there have been virtually no calls to reevaluate how Korea is understood by the international community, but instead a sort of perpetual amnesia so as not to disrupt the logic of realism (the concept in foreign policy that international relations are driven by competitive self-interest). This logic is so prevalent that the little knowledge we do have about the hermit kingdom is of the self-serving kind: Korea has been run by a series of corrupt dictators who keep their people in perpetual poverty while going about international relations like a spoiled five-year-old.

But how do we conceptualize South Korea? Tellingly, we often compare it to Photo by Pedro Ugarte / courtesy of AFP and Getty Images

Japan. Its so-called “tiger economy” has often been portrayed as the “good” Korea.

In complete accordance with the amnesia the international community has suffered, South Korea has had no problem allying with its old oppressor—Japan—as soon as World War II ended. The horrific stories of “comfort women” enslaved during Japan’s colonial expansion, a piece of history not yet even recognized by Japan itself, are still open wounds in a country where prostitution sanctioned by the United States’s and South Korea’s governments equals almost two percent of national GDP. Ironically, South Korea’s rampant misogyny and dalliances with totalitarianism are precisely what make the nation-state more palatable to international capitalism.

Recent scholarship from the likes of David Hundt and Roland Bleiker has countered the media narrative on Korea in important ways. Instead of understanding North Korea’s “irrational” actions as the consequence of its having irrational leaders, this scholarship sees these actions are a result of North Korea being in a state of war since the conflict in Korea after World War

II. Only recently has there been widespread acknowledgement that the extreme trauma suffered by Korea over the last hundred years is relevant to our understanding of Korea today, in large part because of the peninsula’s history of colonization and exploitation by multiple international actors. The sorry result of this situation is that nowadays the people in Korea who remember a unified Korea, a Korea which suffered through World War II and the Korean War, are vastly outnumbered by a population who grew up knowing two Koreas, “good” Korea and “bad” Korea. One of these few people is Ko Un, arguably the most important poet in South Korea.

Ko Un was born in a small, poor village in 1933. He suffered through the Japanese occupation of Korea, the Korean War, and widespread oppression caused by the South Korean government. Much of his poetry is political: the rampant corruption, poverty, and violence of South Korea’s history left its mark on him, as did the sublime beauty of Korea and its people. The intensely personal element of his poetry presents the history of Korea as a Greek tragedy: a nation doomed Swarthmore review

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to suffer at the hands of outside forces. As such, Ko Un has been providing an important counter-narrative to the one presented to the West and to South Koreans, speaking out against the latter’s obstruction of reunification and silencing of political dissidents.

Ko Un’s experience in South Korea runs counter to the narrative that the South always was the more advanced and democratic of the two Koreas. Having been jailed as a political dissident under the dictatorship of Park Chung Hee (1972-1981), Ko Un notes that only recently have there been distinct differences in the standards of living in the two Koreas. In his poem “Tavern Justice,” he laments that authoritarian administration while finding peace in knowing that the memories of unified Korea under the Song and Won dynasties only intensified in the face of oppression. Instead of as a slow recovery from previous colonial wars, Ko Un sees recent Korean history as a slow process of division, with the South becoming a crony to its previous oppressors (the United States and Japan) and the North isolating itself from the rest of the world. In its proper historical context, the isolationism of the DPRK seems to be less a matter of the whim of a crazy dictator than the product of collective fear of the outside world, sustained through propaganda but substantiated by those old enough to remember the horror of World War II and the war in Korea.

As some contemporary academics have suggested, the problem facing the global community—North Korea’s poverty, isolation, and threats—cannot be addressed through traditional policy and international relations channels. Voices and narratives such as the one presented by Ko Un seek to understand the issue of Korea from an intensely personal perspective, and to come to a solution to the “problem” of North Korea by looking backward, making sure that memories of intense sadness and happiness aren’t ignored by a largely disinterested international community. Most importantly, however, Ko Un and others like him are bold enough to avoid the cynicism of the realist politik: they dare to remember a Korea without a schism and without the baggage of years of exploitation and suffering.

Though the dream of reunification seems to grow dimmer as generations pass, Ko Un seems to remain optimistic. As he writes in “Song of Innocence,” “In a time of tear gas and poison gas/a time of blazes set by flying fire bombs/don’t look for the love of innocence...Though tired and weak/we had strength to rise up/Today is another day like that/just that tomorrow’s faces will be different/The love of innocence is there.” u 36

Swarthmore review

MAY 2013

The Humorist

REVIEW

The worst and the best of David Sedaris

David Sedaris in Charlotte in 2010

by Hannah Grunwald

D

avid Sedaris’s new collection, fancifully titled “Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls,” is a surprising and engaging hodge-podge of new essays which exemplify some of the best and also, sadly, some of the worst of Sedaris’s work. To the worst first: “Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls” is a self-proclaimed mixture of “Essays, Etc.” where “Etc.” stands primarily for six short pieces intended as monologues, a new format with which, according to the Author’s Note, Sedaris has recently begun experimenting. Instead of being told in the goofy, thoughtful, and absolutely real voice that Sedaris fans have come to know and love, each of these monologues appear from the point of view of imaginary characters, all extremely different from Sedaris in gender, Photo by Anne Fishbein / courtesy of Best Books Blog

Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls

by David Sedaris LiTTLE , B RO W N 288 pages | $27

background, and political views.

While I applaud the bold experimentation, delving into new territory and telling stories in new voices, something which is especially unexpected and difficult in an author who has developed and maintained such a unique and recognizable style, I have to admit that these pieces are without a doubt the weakest of the contributions to this collection. Five out of the six are enormously overzealous attempts to make rather predictable political statements. In “Health-Care Freedoms and Why I Want My Country Back,” a tea party enthusiast’s ignorance is taken advantage of by

RECOMMENDED VIEWING IAN HOFFMAN Boogie Nights written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

I first saw “Boogie Nights” in a friend’s basement. I have had a few other formative movie-experiences in that basement cluttered with power-tools and workout equipment: in third grade, I watched “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” to my surprise and horror; later, I fell asleep halfway through “Capote”; and I probably saw either “The Matrix” or “Memento” for the first time down there. “Boogie Nights” is a worthy addition to the pantheon.

Written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson (“There Will Be Blood,” “Magnolia”), “Boogie Nights” is expanded from a thirty-minute mockumentary, called “The Dirk Diggler Story” and produced when the director was in high school, into the hundred-plus page phenomenon Anderson released when 27. Eddie Adams, a highschool dropout with a huge cock, is discovered by Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds), a porn director, and goes to live with him in the San Fernando Valley.

From there, Eddie is transformed into the crime-fighting porn star “Dirk Diggler,” who almost loses his life and his morals.

In the meantime there are shootouts, New Year’s parties, panning shots of Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s ass—usually timed to scene transitions—custody battles, marriages, awards, and a heartfelt, moving reconciliation between Eddie and Jack. Which is not to give away the hilarious, larger-than-expected ending.

The characters are incredible: Don Cheadle as the impeccable, white-breasted Buck Swope, who must see a shooting in order to realize his dream of opening a record shop; the red-haired Amber Waves (Julianne Moore) who cannot see her daughter on account of her dirty profession; Reed Rothschild (John C. Reilly), Eddie’s best friend and partner-in-crime, literally; and “Rollergirl” (Heather Graham), a porn star best known for wearing roller-skates. Everyone is trying to make a better life; no one—on account of their industry—can. No matter how successful “Dirk” is, he will never be respected for anything other than his junk.

That’s OK, though. The characters go on to form their own society, outside of mainstream norms, in which Amber remains “the foxiest bitch alive,” Jack is still kingpin of a porn industry that has long since moved on, and Eddie is the great, infamous Dirk Diggler. It is a community out of time—but one very worth our time. u

her liberal son. In “I Break for Traditional Marriage,” a conservative man shoots his family after his state legislature passes a law allowing gay marriage. In “If I Ruled the World,” a grandmother explains her version of a perfect world, where she rules side by side with Jesus, and institutes mandatory prayer in schools and (no joke) crucifixions for homosexuals and communists. Are you starting to see a trend here?

Despite the potential here for humanizing the political, the depictions of conservatives as violent and ignorant buffoons are so heavy-handed as to appear cartoonish and flat. None of these characters experiences emotion; they are not even capable of experiencing—as one might expect—genuine outrage. Instead, they pontificate in increasingly outrageous manners about the hellishness of non-Christian religions, Democrats, and gays. They act in identically outrageous ways, and despite being, in theory, different personalities, they all speak with nearly identical voices. They are formulaic to a point that goes beyond caricature: rather than being outrageous and hilarious indicators of a flawed way of thinking, they are repetitive and robotic to the core.

Not only are the characters overdone, but the format of the essays itself seeks to drive the political agenda into the reader’s head with only force and repetition, as though Sedaris were trying to push a nail through a pumpkin with a cinder-block. Despite being at most six pages long, nearly all of these stories could have been cut in half without any damage to content. Reading these pieces, you find yourself disgusted—not by the incredibly insensitive and ridiculous viewpoints of these characters, but by the desperate need of the author to depict them this way. Rather than being compelling arguments, they make you suspicious, until all you can do is ask over and over in your head, Why are you so desperate for me to believe you?

All of the bad, however, is not only squished into less than 40 pages of reading, but is also genuinely outweighed by the good aspects of Sedaris’s other essays. If the monologues fail at being human, and real, the essays succeed on all counts, passing with flying colors. In fact, “Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls” not only does everything we expect from Sedaris, but pushes further.

Sedaris’s greatest charm is also his greatest gimmick: he has no shame. All of his stories have some aspect (whether it be a concept, a digression, or even a single sentence) that makes the reader literally cringe. Sedaris is a master of embarrass-

ment—the awkward situations he imparts to us are what make us roar with laughter, what provoke the involuntary exclamations that have riddled my life for the past few days (“Oh my God,” “Are you kidding me?”

“No!” and at least once, “Girrrrrrl!”). There is a remark which seems appropriate to all of Sedaris’s work in “Understanding Understanding Owls,” a story which explores the underlying motivations of Valentine’s Day gift-giving and also delves seriously into taxidermy. It is this: “This sounds super grisly, but is, I propose, only medium grisly,” which is to say, his stories strike a nerve, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The thing that makes these stories so remarkable is not only how unexpected the embarrassment is, and not only how hilariously written it may be, but also how unflinchingly honest Sedaris remains. Sedaris exposes his every weakness, chronicles every sick thought that has passed through his head, every unkind word he’s ever spoken. And in him, though it may sound clichéd, we see ourselves, naked in a world of shame and guilt and fear. We see ourselves, and we recognize that we are not alone, that we are not somehow uniquely sinful.

This communal recognition is, in fact, what makes Sedaris’s work so powerful, so engaging, so compelling. Sedaris is adored by fans the world over, not only because he is hilarious, but because he is human.

Remarkably, “Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls” takes the humanity side of his work much farther than Sedaris has ever before dared to go. Amid goofy tales of capturing baby turtles as a child and bonding with periodontal specialists as an adult are scattered a number of stories that delve into deeper subject matter. It’s easy to laugh at Sedaris’s never-ending witticisms and clever analogies, but reading this book, I found myself just as easily on the brink of tears as on the edge of laughter.

Sedaris writes without any self-pity of his desire for his father’s approval, of his inability to accept an ugly world, of his fear of rejection. He speaks to the child in all of us, the adult in all of us, that piece of us desperate for approval and sanctuary and love. Never maudlin, never flippant, Sedaris strikes a perfect balance, allowing the reader to focus on what he or she may choose, whether it be the hilarity of his storytelling style or the gravity of his content. In either case, this book is worth every moment you spend reading it. Sedaris changes the world into a place where you are all the more human because you are terrified of not fitting in, where you are all the more loved because you fear its loss. u Swarthmore review

MAY 2013

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MUSIC Post-Post-Dubstep

REVIEW

A new album from James Blake

by Taylor Hodges

J

ames Blake isn’t the creator of dubstep eccentricities that he once seemed to be. While it isn’t long before “Overgrown,” the first song on Blake’s latest album of the same name, shudders with the sub-bass frequencies of Blake’s precise rhythmic programming, the singer/producer begins the song with a different tact, humming softly over watery piano arpeggios. This isn’t meant to be a bait-and-switch, but rather an immediate statement of musical intention.

This album, created by an artist music critics once problematically called one of the leading lights of “post-dubstep,” isn’t about referencing the dubstep at all. Sure, the LP includes clear moments of rhythms informed by the genre, yet this isn’t a rhythm-centered record, but a melody-based affair. “Overgrown,” like Blake’s 2011 full-length debut, finds the singer and producer moving further from his first dancefloor-focused singles and deeper into soulful singer-songwriter territory with greater nuance than before.

Though Blake began his musical career as a London-based dubstep DJ and electronic producer, his subsequent releases have shown that he’s essentially left that portion of his career behind him. In 2011 he released his first album, “James Blake,” a watershed moment for the musician’s progression toward his current sound.

The album clarified where Blake had been heading throughout his last few twelve inches and EPs. Suddenly, after a series of rhythmically complex dance floor tunes and a single, ephemeral EP of distorted vocal snippets and otherworldly chords, Blake revealed he’d had been withholding a soulful falsetto this whole time. His debut placed his unmanipulated voice front and center in order to move into a direction utilizing the forms and norms of traditional songwriting.

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Swarthmore review

MAY 2013

James Blake

“Overgrown” is at the least a confirmation of this progression, collecting many songs in the same vein as those on his previous album. But while this latest release heads down the same path as its predecessor, Blake’s songcraft has progressed considerably in the interim. His newest work is even more structurally complex while still centered around the same sort of melodic simplicity as the best cuts from his previous album.

Like many others on the album, the standout track “Digital Lion” marries the same honeyed, introspective songwriting with lurching and rolling bass-centric percussion. But the result is not the previous album’s more straightforward mash-ups that married a dubby, digital palette to a lyrical focused song form.

Instead, the track’s organic and electric sounds are much more complexly intertwined in a way that feels sonically natural. There’s no tension between the two worlds, but instead an unmitigated blend.

“Digital Lion,” a collaboration with Brian Eno, is underpinned by a rhythm that a dubstep DJ could easily work into a set, but that rhythm is understated,

Overgrown

by James Blake ATLAS , A & M , P o l y d o r

woven into the song as only one of many textures. The song’s beat is not its focus, but only part of its fusion of electronic and acoustic elements. “Overgrown” has brought Blake to a place where he’s no longer concerned with the novelty of new meets old—electronic sounds in more traditional. Even if dubstep’s sounds may not be well-worn to all consumers, electronic music isn’t exactly a revelation anymore, so there’s really nothing at stake in fusing its sounds with older forms.

When Blake and his sonic peers the duo Mount Kimbie were both making their rise a few years ago, music critics donned both artists the pioneers of “postdubstep,” a genre that referenced the sounds and structures of dubstep, while clearly working in a direction that was more avant-garde. At the beginning of both artists’ careers—a time when Blake was playing keyboards for Kimbie’s live ensemble—this designation seemed to capture the off-center rhythmic experi-

ments both artists were releasing. Both were creating songs that sounded like dubstep turned inside out, or perhaps the sound of a nightclub heard through a concrete wall.

Yet in retrospect, it seems that postdubstep was never really a genre at all.

Firstly, other than Kimbie and Blake, there weren’t any artists working in the genre. Sure, at the time the term was useful shorthand to describe the sounds these two artists were tinkering with, but since then, both artists have carried those sounds toward more traditional songwriting.

It’s likely that post-dubstep was not the beginning of a genre, but rather a signpost of a broader musical generation that will take the explosion of club culture and dance music as an influence in their own music. James Blake and Mount Kimbie grew up going to London’s early dubstep parties and were merely filtering this experience into their own creations.

American Top 40 radio has already proved fertile ground for the repurposing of club beats into more malleable nondance forms as producers reflect the proliferation of dance music in songs written for pop divas. Whereas those songs emulated the long prevalent 4/4 thump of house music, Blake and Kimbie were the first to repurpose dubstep because they were there when the underground phenomenon started, going to see little known dubstep DJs back in 2006, before the sound had broken through to the mainstream.

For Blake, it looks like he will never deliver another dance floor revelation like his 2010 breakout “CMYK.” The production work he’s done on “Overgrown,” even on what is essentially a singer-songwriter album, makes clear that he still has the skill to produce functional club material, but Blake is way beyond dubstep. And well beyond post-dubstep. He’s clearly not concerned with the elements of his musical palette, merely with achieving nuanced emotive expression with the tools he has.

At its best, “Overgrown” is a wash of texture of unknown origin. It doesn’t matter what tradition Blake is working in.

He uses sound indiscriminately in order to capture a nuance of melancholy at the nexus between the ballad’s honesty and the drum machine’s revelation through repetition. Even if it takes years to see if Blake will continue down this path, he’s left an LP interesting enough for the interim. u

Letters continued from page 5 its depiction of life. It is true that there is a political dimension to all art, and that all art has at least some minimal level of political responsibility (movies should not, for example, implicitly or explicitly claim that one race is superior to others). But if there is room for political readings of stories, as I believe there is, there is also room for readings that examine what I want to call the human dimension of stories—the way they come to life. Sometimes that too is politically fraught, but Lumetta has no argument for why it is in this case.

I think Lumetta is right about one thing: this is not just about me, and not just about him. Above all, I want to defend the idea that there is enough common ground between most stereotypically privileged people and most marginalized people in modern society for stories to cross that division and speak to just about anyone.

The kind of oppression faced by Alike— where natural traits, in this case lesbianness and blackness, are taken first to be fundamental to a person’s existence and then to be somehow inferior to a set of accepted, “normal” traits—may reach its cruelest

and most systematic form in oppression based on race and gender identity, but it is hardly unique to those cases. It is endemic in modern society. To see Alike’s experience as entirely Other, as incommensurable with those of white men, is to fail to see the ways in which oppression is polymorphous and far-reaching, consisting in shades of grey, not black and white. It is also to fall back on another imperialist notion: that the native is mystically unknowable and experiences the world in a way the white man cannot understand. It is just that colonists put it to much less appealing use. And the reason that they were able to do that is that this notion occludes empathy. But empathy, or the communicability of experiences of oppression, should not be so easily dismissed.

It has historically been one of the great tools for movements against oppression. It is also what underlies the very idea of representing reality in fictional art. It is what allows someone like me to criticize a movie like “Pariah” on artistic grounds: not because I didn’t understand it or see what it was trying to do, but because for me, it didn’t come to life. I don’t expect, or want, everyone to share that opinion, but I would like to be able to express it without being called racist.

Izzy Kornblatt ’16

Pudding v. Popsicle continued from page 30 that lethargy is a choice, and the popsicle’s indulgence in lethargy should be read as chosen as well. Lethargy is a process selected among others for its various perceived benefits that, like all processes, leads somewhere. You just have to keep the patience to follow it through. # Closing in on three p.m., a silhouette stopped in front of the glass. It held a grocery bag in one hand, a stray popsicle stick in the other. A guitar neck stuck out behind his own. Inside, Robert slept. The coffee table reverently held a newfound pizza box, and Lissy26 bowed to its greasy form on bent knees. Martin remained in the couch.27 26

and, at a distance, Pat

By his feet was the bowl, long empty of guacamole.

27

28 Undaunted by and in spite of Nathan’s pronunciation, Pat walked out of the studio, tore the box of popsicles from Nathan’s hands, threw the box to

“For God’s sake, Christ and Jesus, I’ve been here since two, and you’re only here now? Come in, come in. Nathan, come in.”

The silhouette motioned to the grocery bag. The might of his strength in the situation weighed momentarily on the shoulders of Humanized Pudding. One step through the threshold would unite them, the culmination of their thirteenhour battle against the heat waves and glaring sun of the summer day, a popsicle in its own right, but Nathan gave them a long, sheepish glance and shook his head.

“Can’t. Popsicles won’t melt if I bring them in.”28 Nathan took the blow and edged into the studio.29 Martin, followed by Lissy, Robert, and Nathan, walked to the back of the studio. No one looked at the doorway.30 u the sidewalk, took Nathan by the shoulders, and slammed his body into the window glass.

29 Pat followed him into the studio and hung by the door.

30 Again, Pat followed. He turned off the lights and walked into the recording room.

Swarthmore review

MAY 2013

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