Issue 6

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The painting of Philly’s Germantown Avenue

AND Talking about money at Swarthmore Philip Weinstein on the liberal arts

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CONTRIBUTORS Nyantee Asherman is a junior trying to major in both art and sociology.

Nora Battelle ’17 is a prospective English major from New York. She likes sweets and cats and lying on the grass.

Yenny Cheung ’16 is a computer science major from Hong Kong. She misses the food there every second.

Liliana Frankel ’17 is a prospective comp lit major celebrating her sesquicentennial this year.

Philip Harris ’16 is an honors English major and but so he enjoys “cinema” and long walks on the desert of the real.

Josh Gregory is a junior from Philadelphia, PA studying religion and interpretation theory.

Izzy Kornblatt ‘16 is from Western Massachusetts and is currently interested in architecture and cities.

Mike Lumetta is a junior from St. Louis, Missouri.

He aspires to be more like Matt Saracen from the TV show “Friday Night Lights.”

Sophie Miller ’16 is a double major in English and art history. Contrary to popular belief, she is not dating Patrick Ross ’15.

Kenny Ning is a senior from Chicago, Illinois who likes computers, statistics, music, pop culture, and Drake.

Cecilia Paasche is a sophomore from New York, majoring in neuroscience, and reading everything she can get her hands on.

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 ikornbl1 or agonzal4 or pqueen1, all @swarthmore. edu.

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.

Contact: ikornbl1 or agonzal4 or pqueen1, all @swarthmore. edu.

Patrick Ross ’15 studies storytelling for stage and page.

Contrary to popular belief, he is in fact dating Sophie Miller ’16.

EDITORS IN CHIEF ANNA GONZALES IZZY KORNBLATT PHILIP QUEEN

Steve Sekula is a freshman from Richboro, PA planning to major in computer science and studio art. He enjoys designing graphics and is a member of the swim team. Steve will lead Swarthmore Graphic Design next year. Visit sgd.swarthmore.edu to make graphics requests.

ART NYANTEE ASHERMAN YENNY CHEUNG

Ashlen Sepulveda ‘17 is a prospective psychology major from San Diego, California. She hopes one day to adopt a small, adorable black kitten and name it Satan.

BOOKS PHILIP HARRIS

Philip Weinstein is the Cummins Professor of English. Since he is retiring from the college this spring, after teaching here for over 40 years, his brief essay reflects some valedictory musings about the stakes of a Swarthmore education.

Rose Wunrow grew up in the Fiji Islands and, as a sophomore, studies English, history, and French. Her parents in New Zealand have her eternal thanks for filling her life with cool places, optimism, and love.

Ben Xie is a sophomore from Boston studying computer science and English. Besides poetry, Ben enjoys singing in Offbeat, lifting with the boys, and playing pranks on his roommate Gib.

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FICTION PATRICK ROSS

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Founded 2012 | Vol. 2, No. 4

PERSONAL ESSAYS LILIANA FRANKEL PHOTO RAZI SHABAN POETRY MIKE LUMETTA VICTORIA STITT Z.L. ZHOU REPORTING MARINA MARTINEZ

Published by the Swarthmore Phoenix swarthmorephoenix.com Design © 2014 the Swarthmore Phoenix. All content © 2014 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. Printed at Bartash Printing, Philadelphia, PA. Please recycle this magazine.

“No matter how much cats fight, there always seem to be plenty of kittens.”

Abraham Lincoln, allegedly

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Arts TELEVISION

A finale in violation of a show 31 Was the ending of ‘How I Met Your Mother’ happy?

by Mike Lumetta

MUSIC

Where does Pharrell belong? 33 What ‘G I R L’ can tell us about one of the industry’s celebrated veterans

ESSAY

Parenthesis of infinitesimal 5 brevity

Talking about money at Swarthmore

After 40 years of teaching, a reflection on the importance and role of the liberal arts

A discussion with 13 students about the classes we don’t usually talk about

by Philip Weinstein

by Liliana Frankel

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The painting of Philadelphia’s Germantown Avenue

by Kenny Ning

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Literary one-liners 34 Lydia Davis’s witty new short story collection

by Cecilia Paasche

A tale of two time periods 35 Donna Tartt goes Dickensian

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photo essay by Izzy Kornblatt and Ashlen Sepulveda

by Philip Harris

Editors’ picks 39 Brief arts recommendations ILLUSTRATIONS Steve Sekula 6 Nyantee Asherman 17 Yenny Cheung 24 Cover photo by Ashlen Sepulveda

FICTION: THREE SHORT STORIES

At the party by Nora Battelle 22 The mystery by Sophie Miller 23 Edmund by Patrick Ross 26

Seas

POETRY

by Josh Gregory

Henna

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by Rose Wunrow

After Tea and Cakes, Mr. Prufrock

by Ben Xie

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ESSAY ON THE LIBERAL ARTS

Parenthesis of infinitesimal brevity

by Philip Weinstein

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hat follows is a series of related thoughts, in four different keys, about your lives as students here, in relation to the current questioning of the liberal arts. All four keys circulate around the idea of time.

Changing computers I recently upgraded my email program to Thunderbird 24. Likewise I bought a new Mac whose OS X system made mincemeat of my out-of-date OS X 10.5.8: I advanced to OS X 10.9—probably the highest I’ll ever have, though there remains a chance I’ll get to the 11 series.

This familiar scenario involves the technological world we operate in (verb deliberately chosen). Such a scenario uses only one tense, the future, and is concerned with only one kind of activity, progressive. Moving invariably from outmoded system to updated one, it enacts a temporality of unceasing improvement. Its model of time is amnesiac—the past is to be junked, the future is its replacement. Eventually that future will likewise be junked—to make room for a yet more efficient one. The temporality enacted here is no loss, all gain. The pursuit of science is in large part modeled on this temporality.

It lives in the future, battening on ever more successful experiments and procedures. Its banner is progress.

3 a.m. voice Several days ago—while thinking about the invitation to write something for the Swarthmore Review—I decided not to use the contrastive example I had earlier planned on: a meditation on my 3 a.m. voice. On certain nights, unpredictably, I’m liable to wake up about that time, suddenly bolt awake. My mind is working hard, sending me messages it wants me to hear, even though I’d prefer to be asleep and dreaming. These uninvit-

ed messages compose my 3am voice. I had planned to claim that any model of liberal arts education that fails to acknowledge the 3 a.m. voice is a failed model. But I decided to scrap it when I realized that no model of education could justify itself by addressing that voice. More about this later.

I soon realized that choosing to scrap this contrastive example was itself the revealing thing. I scrapped it because other more pertinent scenarios came into my mind and seemed more rewarding. This mental activity—juxtaposing earlier thought-processes and scenarios against later ones; working out the trade-off of loss as well as gain—actually captures something of the real life of thinking, feeling, and living, as well as the real life of most disciplines. The key distinction between the two scenarios is how they address time.

In the computer scenario, the passage of time is magically reconfigured. Upgrades are always superior, nothing is lost. Is there any wonder we cling to this romance of progress always in the wings? But our lives themselves take place in unrepeatable time; advances co-exist with losses, help to make the losses bearable. Even first-year students are laden with such losses, and many seniors are currently facing losses of a magnitude they haven’t yet figured out how to accommodate.

The computer model is of limited help for thinking the realities of life-time. What we sorely need are intricate negotiations, balancing acts, smarter trade-offs. We need—all throughout our lives—to manage life-decisions for which no OS X exists.

Spending and spending It is mandatory today to speak of how much money parents spend to send their children to a liberal arts college like Swarthmore. How can this spending be justified?

One hard-to-resist justification involves recourse to the computer model of time.

It urges young people to figure themselves out swiftly and then, as much as possible, to

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Graphic by Steve Sekula

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instrumentalize themselves into productive entities that will rise and thereafter succeed.

As though all that money spent on your education could be recuperated only by the even greater amount of money you’ll make after college, thanks to that education. On this model, the curriculum figures as the runway you need for the take-off you require to justify the money that has been spent on getting you here in the first place The curriculum becomes that which you will most effectively make use of—later—when all that spending will eventually be recouped and converted into profit.

But there is another kind of spending that is diffuse and beyond recuperation; none of you is unfamiliar with it. It is the ongoing spending of your life, your irrepressible sense that the choices you make now have consequences, and those consequences will have further consequences, and you may run out of time before you have handled all the consequences. I see this concern as not just or even mainly about recouping earlier spending. It is rather about getting what you came here to get—although “getting” is the wrong verb because what you want to get is ultimately immaterial. Qualitative rather than quantitative, it has no dollar coefficient. It involves becoming a more resourceful, more valuable version of who you were when you entered at eighteen. It involves as much exposure as you can manage to the wide range of pursuits for making sense of the world and your position in it—pursuits that compose the curriculum. It concerns how the natural and human worlds have been understood, and how they might yet be understood (so many models for this, so many angles of entry), as well as how the self has been understood, and how it might make yet be understood. Four years is barely enough time to engage such a curriculum. If quality is on your mind, you want to engage the curriculum liberally rather than instrumentally—as an opportunity to open your mind and enlarge your heart, rather than a blueprint for eventually recouping your family’s spending. The deeper kind of spending is beyond recuperation anyway. Is that ongoing loss the reason why so many engage in retributive fantasies of monetary recuperation?

Parenthesis of infinitesimal brevity James Joyce penned (in “Ulysses”) that gorgeous phrase about the brevity of human life, before he was 40. Now that I am some

You would not worry about which curricular choices to make if you weren’t aware—even in your first September here—that your time is irreversible. You are spending it without cease, and that’s fine, you’ve got lots of it to spend. But you don’t have limitless time.

15 years older than Joyce when he died, I am keenly aware of the truth of his phrase. The remarkable thing is that you recognize this as urgently as I do or Joyce did. You would not worry about which curricular choices to make if you weren’t aware—even in your first September here—that your time is irreversible. You are spending it without cease, and that’s fine, you’ve got lots of it to spend. But you don’t have limitless time, and that 3 a.m. voice tends to be a wake-up call asking you if you’re spending it right—if you’re making the best choices (intellectual, emotional, spiritual), if you’re developing into more than the person you were when you arrived, if you’re learning to engage more rewardingly the people, pursuits, and ideas that surround you. This “more” is revisionary and qualitative, both backwards and forwards looking.

Only revision and qualitative reckoning can engage the nonstop spending of your lives.

Such engaging can’t stop the spending—nothing can do that—but it can make it more valuable. You will devote much of your lives to learning how to do, and these four years at Swarthmore will contribute—massively but indirectly and unpredictably—to that activity.

Fundamentally, though, the parenthesis of infinitesimal brevity that is your time here centers on your learning better how to be. u

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The painting of North Philadelphia’s Germantown Avenue text by Izzy Kornblatt, photos by Ashlen Sepulveda Philadelphia’s Mural Arts Program turns 30 this year. It began as an effort to fight graffiti, and has since evolved into a high-powered city agency/nonprofit combination that is adored by everyone from corporate foundations and politicians to community activists. It has produced 3,600 murals since its inception and keeps going at a rate of approximately 40 per year. It’s helped earn Philadelphia the moniker “City of Murals.”

Like works of art in a museum, most murals are relatively self-contained: the distinction between the work of art and the surrounding place is clear. “Philly Painting,” the Mural Arts Program’s biggest project to date, challenges that: it sprawls across an entire neighborhood, encompassing the facades of whatever buildings the artists could get permission to paint, and its abstract, colorful pieces don’t fit neatly into any kind of finished whole.

The location: a few blocks of the distressed Germantown Avenue commercial corridor (known locally as “the Avenue”) in North Philadelphia. The artists: the Dutch duo Jeroen Koolhaas and Dre Urhahn, or Haas & Hahn, best known for their similar favela painting projects in Rio de Janeiro. And the goals: to produce a great work of contemporary art, of course, though also to bring the neighborhood together, revitalize a struggling retail strip, and provide residents with jobs (albeit mostly temporary ones).

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From an artistic, or architectural, perspective, “Philly Painting” works beautifully. It reflects, abstracts, and amplifies the life of the street: the groups of pedestrians, the vendors set up outdoors, the clashing business signs of different eras and various building uses, the busy route 23 bus and abandoned trolley tracks. It does so because it manages the wonderful feat of feeling at once unifying, a collection of artistic effort targeted at a particular place, and disparate, with gaps in the painted facades and abrupt transitions between color schemes.

It’s a thoroughly urban work of art: necessarily a little messy. That’s what makes it work with an active street.

The bright, neat painting contrasts sharply with the condition of the buildings. At the project’s start, 65 percent of upper floors and 24 percent of bottom floors were vacant along the blocks at the center of the project. Vacant land and buildings make up one third of the neighborhood; North Philadelphia has the city’s largest concentration of vacant buildings, with hundreds considered by the city so unsafe as to require immediate demolition.

Before visiting the project in person, I expected the painting to highlight the contrast between the project’s aspirations to make the neighborhood lively and beautiful, and the sad state of the actual buildings, but in person the effect is almost the opposite: the vacant buildings seem more hopeful with paint on them. It seems to matter a little less that so many of the upper stories are sealed up.

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One of the Mural Arts Program’s most prominent and vocal critics, Philadelphia Inquirer architecture critic Inga Saffron, has argued that the project is unlikely to spur a real retail renaissance, since no amount of painting can bring back the thousands of residents the area has lost in recent decades, and since the corridor has no manager in charge of implementing a plan to transform it. She’s not entirely wrong—the case study document produced by the Mural Arts Program about the project is disturbingly devoid of concrete evidence of longterm change in the neighborhood—but there is evidence to suggest that murals in general help spark neighborhood improvement, and Saffron undervalues what projects like this can mean for neighborhood residents.

Reggie Johnson, a neighborhood resident and painter on the project who we ran into when we visited, told us that he thinks the community cares about the project. “People who’ve lived here for years think it’s good that we’re doing something for the Avenue,” he told us. He said that some people find the colors garish, but on the whole he thinks the project has done good for the neighborhood, helping to attract five new stores. “Girls used to be afraid to walk here at night, but now there are so many colors they say they don’t feel as afraid anymore,” he said. u

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REPORT

Talking about money at Swarthmore

by Liliana Frankel

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n 2005, a New York Times survey of randomly selected Americans revealed that no less than 92% believed themselves part of the middle/working class. Of the 8% who identified otherwise, 7% said they belonged to the lower class and 1% to the upper. The Times is a city paper, but it’s distributed and consumed nationwide. Many of the readers skimming Sunday Styles for the latest normcore cotton t-shirts (only $155!) belong to the 92% of Americans who say they are middle class.

Swarthmore College data collection was performed in a series of informal interviews conducted by a white, “middle-class” female, aged 19. Sample size of 13, plus occasional interjections by eavesdropping friends.

Nine students (69.2%) say they are middle class. Of these, two say they are “working-” or “lower-middle class,” and one is here on a complete scholarship. Four others say they are “upper-middle class,” and two of those pay full tuition. The remaining students are split, with two who say they are from lower class backgrounds and two who say they are from the upper class.

Although my survey is hardly scientific, it seems to reflect the trend found by the New York Times, where people with a range of family incomes and lifestyles are claiming middle class status rather than choosing labels which allow them to be mapped onto a class-privilege spectrum. According to the US Department of Commerce, this is in part because there are “certain values and expectations, primarily about economic security, safety, and protection, [which] are strongly associated with the middle class. Examples of middle class values…include: strong orientation toward planning for the future; control over one’s destiny; [and] movement up the socioeconomic ladder through hard work and education.”

We assume that the nation, the New York Times readership, and the Swarthmore student body aim to espouse these middle class values. However, none of the students I interviewed focused on values when trying to define the middle class. A more common theme was context. Those who called themselves middle class had known many people richer and poorer than they were and saw that they didn’t belong to either extreme.

Again from the US Department of Commerce: “[Middle class families] want economic opportunities for their children and therefore want to provide them with a college education…”

Eli describes his background as solidly middle class. His parents are “very hardworking people” who together hold a total of five jobs. Eli himself spent all of high school working part time so that he could have his own spending money. Although his parents agreed to give him $40 in allowance for each weekend, the family was living paycheck to paycheck, so they couldn’t always keep the promise.

Eli attended a public magnet high school where nearly everyone expected to continue on to college. When it came time for him to apply to schools, his parents urged him to consider institutions known for their good financial aid.

He chose to apply ED II to Swarthmore and was accepted.

The family was first delighted, then distressed. Although they had always expected Eli’s higher education to be a huge financial burden, the concrete costs were shockingly steep.

Eli’s parents contacted the Swarthmore financial aid office and made an appeal. Several weeks of fighting and anxiety followed as they waited for a response. Eli’s parents spent some of the time looking into loans, but warned him that if they weren’t offered a better deal, he would have to rescind the offer of admission.

Luckily, Swarthmore came through with a little more money. Eli’s parents took out the loans they had researched and told him they could make it work.

Joe thinks of himself as upper middle class. His parents used to say that they could only guarantee him two things (and everything else he’d have to get on his own): straight teeth and a good education. Actually, he now has three things: an even smile, one semester left at Swat, and the satisfaction of a kept promise.

Both of Joe’s parents worked in government for most of his life. He didn’t need to consider financial aid as a factor when he was applying to college. However, in order to send him here, his family took out loans that he expects will require decades to pay off. Joe himself doesn’t anticipate making a whole lot of money after college; he only wants moral satisfaction and the security of not living paycheck to paycheck.

These students agreed to be interviewed with the understanding that they would remain completely anonymous. While there were a few who said they would be willing, even glad, to have their names published with their stories, they were the minority. To make things uniform, I’ve given everyone pseudonyms, and any resemblance to the names of actual Swarthmore students is unintentional.

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how much is it?!? well...what if I had two more siblings?

Illustration by Nyantee Asherman One of the things Joe appreciates about Swarthmore is that it’s easy to avoid spending on a day to day basis. With events free of charge and an implied distaste for displays of wealth, he finds that it’s usually hard to guess people’s financial backgrounds.

I asked him if he thought that a de-emphasis of class differences was, overall, a good thing. Well of course he did!

Had he ever been in a situation where a professor made a wrong assumption about the homogeneity of his/her students’ class status? He wasn’t sure, but he had the impression that the professors in his department were generally sensitive to these issues.

In fact, he’d recently heard a professor give a very fair assessment of class at Swarthmore, which defined status in terms of power rather than economics.

“Is there a political or ruling class in our so-called egalitarian nation? Well, yes. Who is it? It’s you guys. Regardless of where you all came from before Swarthmore, by virtue of being here, and graduating from here with a Swarthmore degree, that makes you part of the political class of this country.”

“Hm.” It was the most animated I’d seen Joe during our

conversation. He went on: “I’ve heard from other professors that while we may all come from different backgrounds in terms of class and societal power, by the time we leave Swarthmore, we are all in the political class.”

Gabe has always identified as part of the middle class. His family has been living in their same region for some six generations and providing for themselves comfortably without any higher education. He is the first one to come to college.

Gabe didn’t undertake his college search with the notion that future success would be dependent on an name-brand degree, so his application process was comparatively lowkey. He sent his materials off to a few schools known for giving good financial aid, and during the wait to hear back, he started looking around town for jobs.

“My family is definitely middle class,” he told me, “but while I’m here it’s very easy to feel like everyone is telling us that we’re not, because a lot of us don’t have college, or don’t have high school degrees, because we can’t afford to do things like go to Europe during the summer. Here the perspective on everything is shifted up.”

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In high school, Gabe worked with a professor from a nearby university who gave him a lot of advice on how to be successful. It was a first taste of what it felt like to be in an environment where the widely agreed upon definition of “success” was far beyond his family’s aspirations. Still, when Gabe was offered a full scholarship to come to Swarthmore, his relatives were very excited. A few might consider his educational goals “uppity,” but the majority congratulated him: “Good job getting out.”

Gabe arrived at Swarthmore without clear expectations.

No one had ever told him what college would be like. He was coming for the money, with the idea that getting a degree would allow him to live an easy life. His attitude aligned with general expectations back home, where people sought jobs that would allow them to support their families.

“My family is definitely middle class, but while I’m here it’s very easy to feel like everyone is telling us that we’re not...Here the perspective on everything is shifted up.”

He soon realized that many Swarthmore students were more concerned with jobs that could move the world forward.

“Laudable jobs,” he called them.

Gabe has told most of his good friends about his background, and he is surprised to find that it’s not more self evident. It’s often simple for him to guess a person’s means by observing style, technology, and casual conversation about summer plans. In interactions with other self-reported members of the middle class, even standard complaints about Sharples food reveal a degree of entitlement different from his own.

Swarthmore is an “elite” school, but Gabe doesn’t feel part of the “elite.” This is especially confusing because by most outside definitions, he is now the most “elite” member of his family.

According to Joe’s professor, we will all leave Swarthmore endowed with political power, but what about the goal of economic opportunity? Will the advantages we receive actually leverage the sacrifices some families are making just to pay their way through graduation?

Cara’s mother was a McCabe scholar here at Swarthmore in her day. After years as an investment banker, she’s now employed in the nonprofit sector and traveling the world for her job. Her father has taught for a long time now, but before that, there was a period when he stayed at home working on personal projects.

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parents have set. She anticipates majoring in something practical, and then choosing a minor which allows her to explore other interests. It’s pretty important to her that she be able to support herself as an adult.

Cara knows that she is lucky to not have to worry about financial aid. When she was applying to college, it was already off the table and didn’t factor into her decision at all.

Her parents are paying her Swarthmore tuition full price and with no loans.

Dylan’s mother used to be the primary breadwinner for his family. Her earnings allowed them to live comfortably and to send his older siblings to their top-choice colleges.

His father has always worked as well, but that job doesn’t pay very much; the major advantage it provided was discounted entry to an excellent private high school.

For Dylan, admission to Swarthmore was at first just a small victory. He’d also been accepted to another liberal arts college higher on his list and was planning to go there in the fall. However, as his family compared the two financial aid packages, Dylan realized that he had to rethink his decision.

Swarthmore’s offer would cover nearly half his costs, a much better deal than the other school. He couldn’t afford to pass this up.

By the end of Dylan’s freshman year, it seemed that everything had worked out for the best. He reported feeling happy and settled at Swat, with good grades and a solid group of friends. Back home, things were more stressful; during Dylan’s second semester, his mother had lost her job. However, no one in the family was seriously worried yet. She was already looking for work, and so far Swarthmore’s financial aid policies had proved flexible and generous.

Midway through summer, the family received a brief note from Admissions and Aid which said that Dylan’s scholarship had been cut to just $6,000 for the coming year.

Dylan’s mother called the office. Dylan’s father wrote a letter. Dylan got in touch with one of his professors and asked if he’d vouch for him, affirming that he deserved to be at Swat.

Upon receiving these messages, the financial aid office initiated what would become a tense and frustrating exchange with Dylan’s family. First, they explained to his mother that they’d cut his scholarship because his sister had just graduated college. Without the cost of her tuition, wouldn’t there be more money to spare for Dylan’s?

Actually, Dylan’s mother replied, his sister had attended college on a fairly generous scholarship herself, so the situation really hadn’t changed enough to justify the cuts.

How odd! The words seemed to leer from the final email.

There must have been a misunderstanding. If the school had known about his sister’s scholarship before, he wouldn’t have been given such good financial aid in the first place.

At the end of the summer Dylan’s award was doubled to $12,000. It didn’t seem like a great improvement, but it was also better than nothing, and he had old plans to finish his break on a road trip with his siblings. He left home vaguely optimistic and resolved to put everything out of his mind.

When Dylan got back, there were just three days left before the start of school. In his absence his mother had done some serious reckoning. She sat him down and told him that if after one last phone call the school didn’t improve their aid offer, he was going to have to take the semester off to fill out

transfer applications and look for a job.

In the end, the school did not improve their aid offer.

Dylan is here at Swarthmore only because his older siblings stepped up. Each agreed to take an unwanted job so that together they can contribute the difference between his parents’ contribution, his loans, and Swarthmore’s asking price.

This way, Dylan can enjoy the same opportunity they had, to go to a school that he feels excited about.

Dylan arrived as a first-year with clear ideas about what he wanted to study. He also thought that he might go to graduate school and eventually become an academic, which his family encouraged. Now he’s much less sure, but he feels a lot of pressure to live up to expectations, given the sacrifices being made on his behalf.

Angela’s family immigrated to the US when she was 8 years old, following her father’s work. For most of her childhood they lived fairly well, and she always expected to go to college. The wrench in the plans didn’t come until senior year of high school, when her father left.

At first Angela’s father seemed willing to help pay for her education from a distance. Before her freshman year, he filled out the required forms about his assets so that she and her mother could apply for financial aid. However, soon afterward, he changed his mind: he wasn’t going to contribute.

The aid award, when it came, did not account for her father’s missing portion. The costs were now far greater than what her mother could afford alone.

Angela and her mother tried to explain to Admissions & Aid why they should no longer consider her father’s earnings when making their scholarship decision. However, Swarthmore has no official procedure for evaluating single-parent households except in cases where one spouse has died. The school can only promise to meet “demonstrated financial need.” Angela had no way to demonstrate the truth, that her father was gone for good.

“We had a very frustrating meeting with [a representative of the office] where they basically told us that they were doing us a favor by even still considering me for financial aid, because I wasn’t submitting new information for my dad; that they were doing me a favor by using old information from him, which I obviously disagree with. Obviously I would’ve much preferred for them to acknowledge my situation as it was… which is that he’s not going to contribute at all.”

Angela is glad that Swarthmore’s financial aid policies are so much better than those of most other schools. She was pushed to apply in the first place when she learned that coming here could be cheaper than going to a community college. But even as she gets ready to graduate, she isn’t sure what to make of this community. A lot of her peers have spent the last four years chasing self-actualization, while she’s struggled with the responsibilities she brought along from home. It’s hard to feel communal in a clutter of individualists.

The Swarthmore Admissions homepage doesn’t mention money at all in a statement to prospective students explaining why they should study the liberal arts.

“A liberal arts education fuels lives of purpose and creativity. Its variety and vitality empower students to excel in a rapidly changing world, fostering civic and social engage-

ment, personal growth, and happiness.”

I like the invocation of the Declaration of Independence at the end there. It made me laugh.

Here’s an interesting statistic: 0 out of 13 subjects interviewed said that they felt like Swarthmore was preparing them adequately for the financial realities of the outside world. I asked them why they thought this was. Some told me it just wasn’t the school’s responsibility to talk students through the basics of paying taxes, buying a house, getting a credit card, budgeting for groceries. Others said the oversight had more troubling implications.

Career Services, for instance, promotes a certain kind of success as the Endgame through their advertisement of unpaid internships, summer classes at prestigious universities, and expensive volunteer positions abroad. These things are only viable options if a student already enjoys some degree of financial security. Can the Endgame, then, only be achieved if students start out on solid footing? And if more practical issues aren’t discussed, is it because there’s an assumption that they aren’t issues at all? That after we graduate, we won’t have to worry about money?

“Most people here, no matter what, will probably be fine because of what they started with,” said Gabe.

“And you don’t have that feeling?” I asked.

He looked startled, then laughed. “No!” Swarthmore has been advertising its need-blind admissions policy since 1957. Now, only foreign nationals are evaluated during the admissions process for their ability to pay.

The office figures aid using a fairly standardized procedure, which weighs different pieces of information to calculate the family’s fair share of expenses. However, the school says it also aims to engage families in a dialogue about what “fair” means.

“Swarthmore makes many generous extra allowances for families’ special circumstances,” said Director of Financial Aid Laura Talbot. “Among those special allowances are eldercare and childcare expenses; the higher cost of living in some areas of the country; a reduced influence of home equity;…medical expenses, including the cost of insurance premiums; younger siblings’ private school tuitions;…parents’ repayment of loans for their own educations; job loss; loss of overtime hours; and ill health.”

The college’s aid awards have been completely loan-free since 2007. Yet for some reason, “some families choose to borrow to pay their shares of Swarthmore expenses rather than spend from assets or from current income. The debt burden of the Class of ’13 was an average of $5,993.”

None of the students I spoke with who were taking out loans thought of them as a choice. If there was a choice, it was between loans and no Swarthmore.

A major goal of need-blind admissions is to make the school as inclusive and diverse as possible. According to Dean of Admissions Jim Bock, a need-blind admission policy and full-needs met/loan-free financial aid have moved things forward in this direction. However, he also acknowledges that “we still have to work to do to get out the word that we are affordable to all deserving students, and promot[e] the values of a residential liberal arts education.”

(Recall: It’s the middle class who is defined by wanting a SWARTHMORE REVIEW

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college education for its children. For children who don’t come from the middle class, the chances of being deemed “deserving” so late in the game are not very good.)

Right now, most outreach is conducted through community-based organizations. The admissions office will pay to fly the contacted students to its biggest campus events, DiscoSwat and Ride the Tide. For the first time this year, DiscoSwat, designed to introduce Swarthmore to prospective students from under-represented groups, included the socioeconomically disadvantaged as a target demographic.

Class background is not a choice, but rather an admissions-validated identity, much like race, gender or sexual orientation. Still, Emily always feels wary of judgment when she’s asked, even in passing, what her parents do. The answer (her father works in a factory, and her mom stays at home) distinguishes her immediately as being from a different class, since her friends’ parents are often doctors, lawyers, or professionals of some kind. Her town didn’t have a lot of socioeconomic diversity. Growing up, she believed her parents when they told her they were middle class, but now she sees things differently.

Emily’s high school was very small because her town was very small. Teachers were recruited from the community and stretched thin over multiple subject areas. AP classes were conducted using distance learning, which operates through a TV. Most years, only the valedictorian and salutatorian of a graduating class could advance to a four year college, usually an in-state public university. Emily’s class year was an anomaly: she, the valedictorian, left the state to come to Swat, and the salutatorian (who was her boyfriend at the time) left for the Ivy League.

Emily found out about Swarthmore by becoming a Questbridge scholar. The program seeks to “connect the world’s brightest low-income students to America’s best universities and opportunities.” Most of the people she’s met who can relate to her background here are connected with Questbridge as well, or came here through a similar program.

While Emily was in high school, the only recruiters who ever visited were from small state schools, two-year community colleges, or the military. Although not many students wanted to serve, the military had what she describes as a “strong presence.” Everyone was required to take their entrance test, the ASVAB, in school.

(The upper middle class people to whom I recounted this last detail reacted uniformly with shock and horror.)

Most of the friends Emily has made at Swarthmore are very motivated academically; in her department, almost everyone aspires to go to graduate school. Emily would like to go too, but she feels apprehensive about what she will have to leave behind. When she was applying to college, she fully expected to stay in-state. She knew what public school she wanted to attend and looked forward to making it home most weekends. She defied her own expectations by ending up here, where she can travel back no more than once a semester.

Many of the graduate schools Emily’s friends talk about are on the West Coast. Although she knows she can look for opportunities closer to home, professors have told her that if she wants to pursue research in the future, she’ll need to be 20

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flexible and move where there’s work.

In her junior year, Emily feels pleased to have adapted so well to Swarthmore. She’s sure she could cope just as well with new changes, but she isn’t sure she wants to.

“I feel like I am moving into a different social class, one that my parents never were in, and that’s strange, definitely unpleasant at times. There’s a sense of guilt because my parents gave up just about everything so that I could go to college, and then – what, am I going to leave them? I could end up really far away and never see them again… It’s not what I want… [but] it feels like achieving the highest form of success is going to put me at a great physical distance, and other distances as well, from my family.”

Emily has found it fairly easy to find understanding friends through the campus group for Questbridge scholars,

“We still have to work to do to get out the word that we are affordable to all deserving students, and promot[e] the values of a residential liberal arts education.” but she isn’t sure how she would’ve found them on her own.

Last year the Intercultural Center began hosting a group for first-generation college students, to mixed reviews. The students I spoke with said that while they appreciated having a safe space to talk about class issues, they didn’t want to section themselves off.

As Dylan and I walked out of McCabe after his interview, we passed his roommate, who’s international and a self-identified member of the upper class. The three of us stopped to chat.

“Americans are really afraid of acknowledging what they are,” said the roommate, after some reflection. “It’s like, there’s this really strong idea of the middle class, but a Swarthmore education costs $60,000 [to be exact, an estimated $62,050 and rising]. If you’re looking at median income, that’s more than the average American family makes in a year.”

(What percentage of Swarthmore students have financial aid helping to pay their 60k? Admissions materials assure us that it’s “over half,” but later on in the same brochure, tucked shyly in parentheses, they clarify “52%.”)

Conversation turned to a campus event we all planned to attend later that day.

“What time is it, again?” asked Dylan.

“Dude, don’t you EVER check the RSD?” “It’s funny, actually. I think I’ve stopped getting it.”

“Aren’t all enrolled students supposed to get the RSD?” Dylan’s roommate joked. “Maybe this is the school’s way of saying you can’t go here anymore.”

Dylan laughed, but I didn’t feel up to it. We bid our goodbyes and continued downstairs.

“Does he know that you almost really were un-enrolled?”

“No, of course not.”

Sophie’s situation and Dylan’s have a lot in common. Like him, she was offered excellent financial aid her first year, a deciding factor in her college choice. The following year, her aid was cut by $20,000 because her older sister graduated from college. Again, the sister had actually been on a full scholarship, and that spring her mother had lost her job.

After a few summer weeks of indecision over whether she’d be able to return to Swat, Sophie ended up taking out a lot of loans.

Unlike Dylan, Sophie decided to confide in her friends during the piece of the summer she spent worrying that she might not make it back to Swat. Her group is a good sample of Swarthmore’s near-even split of students on and off financial aid. The ones who had their own struggles to report with the financial office seemed to know what to say, but the sympathy she received from the others felt almost trite to her.

The choice to take out loans allowed Sophie to continue at Swarthmore, but she’s now on track to graduate with $45,000 in debt and still thinking about how the discussion of money factors into her relationships. “[Some of my friends might] care about spending $100, but it’s because [they] are intellectually aware that it’s a big sum of money, and not because they’re watching it diminish…Everybody knows that they don’t want to spend $100, but some people don’t want to spend it because they’ll need it for the summer, and some people are just like, ‘Oh, I can’t really justify this.’”

Last spring, a letter in the Daily Princetonian garnered attention nationwide for what many perceived as a crude display of elitism and entitlement. It was written by Susan Patton, a member of one of the school’s first coed graduating classes, and titled “Advice to the young women of Princeton: the daughters I never had.” Patton used her platform mainly to urge current Princeton undergraduates to search for a spouse before they left the college. Her rationale was that after graduation, women would be unlikely to encounter men of their own intellectual caliber who weren’t intimidated by their power and drive. She went on to make several other frustrating assumptions, such as suggesting that it was too late for senior girls to take her advice because men are incapable of romantic feeling for women a year or two older than them.

Patton was widely criticized by liberal thinkers for her outdated analysis of women’s issues and the seeming flimsiness of her central conceit. However, Ross Douthat, a columnist for popular middle class newspaper the New York Times, had an interesting take on the backlash. “[Susan Patton’s] betrayal [to liberal media] consists of being gauche enough to acknowledge publicly a truth that everyone who’s come up through Ivy League culture knows intuitively — that elite universities are about connecting more than learning, that the social world matters far more than the classroom to undergraduates, and that rather than an escalator elevating the best and brightest from every walk of life, the meritocracy as we know it mostly works to per-

petuate the existing upper class [through methods like Ivy League intermarriage, or, say, the Quaker Matchbox].”

So, is college really just a tool of social mobility? And if so, is it an effective one?

The students I interviewed mostly hedged these questions, which produced interesting results.

“College is good for putting you in contact with people you wouldn’t have had contact with before,” said JB, a member of the middle class. “Social mobility: understanding people of other backgrounds. I actually really dislike the other way of thinking about social mobility, which is like, climbing upwards…”

“Because it doesn’t go both ways? If you start at the top, then you never learn what’s underneath?”

“Exactly.”

Writer and liberal arts graduate David Foster Wallace once said that “the real value of a real education…has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves [of it] over and over...”

Think of all the myths that surround college! The one I grew up with, for instance, was about freedom, with college featured as a natural first step towards adult life. “Once you make it to college, you can have ice cream with your waffles whenever you want,” my mother would tell me when I whined to her about my lack of agency in breakfast choice.

(Sharples doesn’t actually serve ice cream until lunch, but I keep the faith).

Other college myths abound. One which is popular here is about finding yourself. This couples neatly with the myth of ascendancy: that is, that by obtaining a college education (and hopefully finding yourself in the process) you will end up becoming someone better. And the world will open itself to you.

Ascendancy is worth different things to different people.

The “lower-middle class” and “working class” students I interviewed, for whom the mainstream goals of college represent a move away from their original communities, were all here on full-rides or something close. If they hadn’t been admitted to Swarthmore with such generous scholarships, their options were limited to attending a cheaper state school or joining the workforce. In those cases, these students would have just learned to enjoy a different version of success. Nobody even considered taking out thousands in loans to have more freedom of choice.

The “upper-middle class” students, by contrast, who stand to gain much less from a Swarthmore education, are paradoxically the ones now making huge sacrifices because they believe it’s worth it. Most were raised expecting to come a school like this, so they quickly become angry when logistics prove challenging. Why should Swat make it so hard for them when this is clearly what they deserve?

Maybe the problem with trying to understand Swarthmore as a community is that at its core, it’s something more individualistic, a business. But it wouldn’t be fair to say that we’re just a school full of individualists, when we can only hope to make our families proud. u SWARTHMORE REVIEW

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FICTION: Three Short Stories

At the party

by Nora Battelle

O

pen up the longing I am offering you; give me that velvet you wrap around your head with sickening tightness; let me pull on the strands I see you left hanging off, so that you’ll look down at me and rip me apart, into shreds of your calm.

I watch you lie there on the bed, eyes glassy, fingers twitching as you gaze at yourself; my tongue wants to snap at you, my teeth bite, the anger and fear and fascinated horror in my little prim heart want a reason to stay.

She was a sunshine girl; but lolling black pulls her towards him, and I watch. My hair smells stale with smoke, its rough texture demands I take it with me, but the silence leaves me in milieu, in ambiance, in the quiet position of a pale face.

Color blends into snide expression and pride and nervous pleasure; this is where we all are at once, and do we hate each other a little bit? I can’t remember how I decided to be satisfied, but I’m laughing, I’m pulling you into my arms so we can dance among the clusters of insecurity.

Buy me a mason jar full of liquor so I can look at it and watch the amber color reflect on your pale arms and legs and animate your face. If you give it to me I won’t drink it, I’ll let you drink it, I’ll let you smoke away the promise of fire. Acknowledge that you are here with me.

If I pry my arms around another stiff back and shifting urgent vertebrae I will surely die; I will surely fall into the trap that says I must stay silent, must not ask questions, must not reveal I wasn’t here all along. You are surprised; you don’t care. You want me to go now, I’ll fall away from you.

I want to look into the hole that gapes between you and thrust myself there, I want to force a meaning into the emptiness that looks like it is full of time. Give it to me and I will transform it, let me knit a scarf of the illusion and wrap you up in it and bind you to me; be mine.

Hold the explosion; I can’t do it, it is coming out, it will demand things of you and of me and we can’t stop them. Coat me in velvet so I can’t move; feel the desire that oozes out of me towards you and scratches at your perfect face and cries into your little eyes because if you don’t it will consume reality in fantasy and I will lose myself to a kaleidoscope.

I step into an elevator and descend away, but I have to hurry and in my hurry I don’t leave everything behind; how do I leave behind the hurry? No one will take it from me and I refuse so rabidly to give it up. But I cannot keep it, I need you to have it. u

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FICTION: Three short stories

The mystery

by Sophie Miller

​I

sat down on my brother Wolff ’s bed.

“Wolffie wake up.”

I was worried I had cut it too close.

Our parents had only gone to bed a half hour ago—I had watched the red numbers on my clock flip, painfully, counting out every minute to thirty before I crept from my room next door to Wolff ’s. It was only 11:30, and if they heard us up, and then found me in Wolff ’s room? Then we were in big trouble.

But this was important.

I said Wolffie’s name again, shaking his thin shoulder this time. He whined in his sleep, and I paused for a few seconds to make sure my parents hadn’t woken up.

Then I covered my brother’s mouth with one hand and pinched his nose closed with the other. Up in no time.

“You can breathe if you’re silent,” I told his wide eyes. They bobbed up and down as he nodded. The nice thing about little brothers is they’ll listen to just about anything. I let go and he took an exaggerated breath. “Greenwich! Why did you do that?” he asked. He gets pretty worked up when I do stuff like that because he has asthma. But it works. I told him so. He wasn’t grumpy. He likes having me in his room. “What’re ya doing here, man?” he asked.

I wasn’t sure how to answer. I let my eyes roll around the dark shadows of his room at night instead. He let me sit in silence. I waited to make sure he would listen to me. He needed to know I was serious.

“I got something to tell you.”

“Okay, I’m listening.”

“You’re not gonna believe me.”

“I will! If it’s true, I’ll believe it.”

I paused, watching his eyes flash white in the dark.

“I think Santa Claus isn’t real.”

I couldn’t see so well in the dark, but Wolff ’s silence was pretty telling. His shadowy form was very still. “That’s not possible,” he said. “Where would all the presents come from?”

Here was the kicker. I didn’t know how the little guy was gonna take this one. I

handed him his inhaler in preparation. “I think it’s Mom and Dad.” Wolff was sitting up now, shaking his head in the dark. “That doesn’t make any sense.” He was getting worked up. I thought about sitting back down on the bed, but pacing felt better. I wasn’t in such a great state of mind myself. “How would Mom and Dad get all that stuff?”

“Listen, I know it sounds crazy! But I’ve been thinking about it a lot. Just listen: I found something. And this is the only explanation.”

“Okay,” said my brother. “I’m listening.”

I sighed. “This morning, I went into the cupboard to get more cereal. I know—” I said, cutting Wolff off, “—we’re not supposed to. That’s not the point. The point is—” I paused to make sure he’d listen.

“There was a bag of peanuts in there.”

“So what?” asked my little brother.

“Dad eats those all the time! He eats them when he watches football games!”

“Not that kind, you idiot!” I hissed. We still had to be careful about our parents.

“The kind still in the shell. The kind we only get…”

“In our stockings.” Wolff gasped. “What the heck. What were they doing there?”

“I don’t know. I thought the same thing.

Only Santa can get us those. And then I thought—what if they’re not only from Santa? What if anyone can get them?

And then I thought—well, it’s just sort of weird, if you think about it, don’t you think?”

“What is? What’s weird?” Wolff was leaning so far over the edge of his bed I thought he might fall onto floor.

“Just, everything. Everything about Santa. The letters? Those things need stamps, but Mom never lets me put one on.”

“She let me put a sticker on mine.”

“Not the point, Wolff. Letters need stamps. Or else they don’t go anywhere.

And the cookies? We put out cookies for Santa.”

“So what? What’s wrong with that?”

“Well, I was just thinking—Mom and Dad could eat those. Dad’s favorite kind and Santa’s favorite kind are even the same. That doesn’t seem weird to you?”

My brother was quiet for a little, and

when he did speak his voice was strangled. “That explains why they wouldn’t get us the Super Star Destroyer.”

I sighed. I hadn’t even thought of that.

Wolff and I had agreed that we would both put the Lego Super Star Destroyer at the top of our Christmas lists this year. With double the requests for it, we figured, there was no way Santa wouldn’t bring it. But when our mother looked at our lists, “Don’t get your hopes up, boys,” she told us. It hadn’t made a lot of sense until now, when things were all starting to fall into place. “Yeah, Wolffie,” I told him.

“That explains it.”

Wolff was quiet again, but I felt him shaking the bed as he started to cry. I had to get him hooked on my idea before he started blubbering like an idiot. “You really think Mom and Dad are Santa?” he asked me.

“I’m not sure, Wolff,” I said, sitting down on his bed again, rubbing the bridge of my nose. “But I have a way of finding out. Are you in?”

My baby brother would be in on anything as long as I was there.

T

he hardest part was getting Chloe not to follow us upstairs. She always played with us after she drove us home from school. But the next day, when she started up the steps after us, I turned around to face her matter-of-factly. “Actually, Chloe, my brother and I would like some privacy today.”

Chloe looked surprised. “You guys aren’t planning something sneaky, are you?” she asked, narrowing her eyes at us. Wolff hiccuped nervously, but I was pretty sure she was just playing.

“Nope. Just need to do some guy stuff.

You understand.”

She looked like she needed to laugh.

“All right, have fun. I’ll be watching tv. No scissors or anything okay? And no mess we can’t clean up.”

“Wait, you get to watch tv? No fair!”

Wolffie burst out. I glared at him. He quieted down with another burpy hiccup. We went upstairs, faking like we were going to my room or Wolff ’s. But instead, we headed past them and slowly opened the door to our parents’ room.

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Illustration by Yenny Cheung 24

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We weren’t allowed in our parents’ room unless one of them was with us. We weren’t even allowed in there with Chloe.

That’s because their room was full of Nice Things. It also meant, though, that if our mom and dad were hiding something, this is where it would be.

“Okay, Wolff, spread out. There’s gotta be some evidence somewhere. Check anywhere you can think of. If you see anything you asked for on your Christmas list, tell me right away.”

“All right,” said Wolff. He looked ready to wet himself with nervousness. We needed to get this stuff quick and get out of there before Chloe came to check on us.

I headed for my mom’s closet. It was so big that even she could walk around in there. I looked in all the corners and behind all her shirts and dresses. I looked through all her shoe boxes. I was standing on top of her hamper trying to see onto the highest shelf when I heard my brother speak.

“Oh. My. God.” My mom would kill him if she heard him say that.

“Greenwich. Come here. Now.” His voice was dead serious and really wobbling. I was already scrambling my way off the hamper. I burst out of the closet.

Wolff stood by our mom’s bedside table.

The drawer of it hung open, and in his hand my brother held a small cloth bag. I ran over as quietly as I could.

Wolff was basically crying. “Look,” he choked out. “Look inside.”’

I took the bag from him. It was too little to be anything I asked for. But when I stuck my fingers inside its puckered top and peered inside, I knew why he had reacted the way he did.

A tumbly little sackful of tiny baby teeth.

“Why does she have this?” Wolff asked me breathlessly. I needed to go snag his inhaler quick. “What does it mean?”

“It means,” I said, “that this is bigger than we ever could have imagined.”

C

hloe could tell something was wrong when we came downstairs, but I guess she knew better than to ask what we’d been up to. I’m pretty sure she went and checked around in our parents’ room after she’d gotten us set up for dinner, but we’d cleaned up really well in there...other than the teeth, which sat shifting around in the pocket of my pants.

We were still eating dinner when our mom and dad came home from work.

Chloe went to the front hall to say hi to them and get her coat. Wolffie couldn’t look up from his hotdog. I kicked his foot.

“Keep it together,” I told him.

Our parents came into the dining room.

“Hi, boys!” my mom said, leaning down to kiss my head, but I wormed away. She moved on to Wolffie, who sat petrified in his seat. “What did you do today?”

Neither of us said anything.

“Everything okay, guys?” my dad said, sitting down at the table across from my brother. My mom looked a little concerned.

I figured it was up to me to start this one.

“Mom. Dad. We have something we need to talk to you about.”

My mom sat down. I looked over at Wolff. He was about to start crying. I pulled the little bag out of my pocket and set it on the table. My mom went white.

Wolff started letting out little snuffles.

“You guys aren’t allowed into our room, you know that,” my mom said, going to snatch the sack off of the table. I didn’t bother to stop her. “It’s a little too late for that, Mom,” I said.

My mom stood up to comfort Wolff.

She walked over to try and hug him, but he pulled away sharply—not like Wolffie at all. He was red and his tears and snot were mixing halfway down his face.

“Don’t touch me!” he yelled. Even I froze.

“Wolff—” my dad said.

“Shut up!” my brother screamed, words that would usually get him in huge trouble. But neither of our parents moved.

Wolff was breaking down. “I can’t believe you did this! Why? Why?!” he demanded of our parents, who remained motionless and silent. “How could you lie to us like that? The Tooth Fairy? Santa Claus?” He was really bawling.

“Listen, Wolff, honey,” my mom said, trying to reason with the kid. “Those things—Santa, the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny—” “Oh God, the Easter Bunny?!” Wolff collapsed into a new wave of tears.

“—honey, those are things that parents do to get closer to their kids. We do those things to make you boys happy!”

“Does he look happy, Mom?” I said, standing up to put my hand on Wolff ’s shoulder, help him get it together a little bit, but he had really lost it, his sobs rolling out of his body without control. I tried to continue our case. “I just can’t believe it. All the lies!”

My mom spoke up, “Honey, we never lied to you—”

I took the bag from him. It was too little to be anything I asked for. But when I stuck my fingers inside its puckered top and peered inside, I knew why he had reacted the way he did.

“Oh, really?” I countered. “Then what did you mean when you told us how Santa climbs down the chimney? Hmm? What did you mean? What did you mean when you told us that he gives us all the presents and fills our stockings up?”

“Yeah!” Wolff chimed in. “What did you mean when you said Santa couldn’t afford the Lego Super Star Destroyer?”

Even I knew he’d gone too far.

My dad stood up, his body stiff like a tree. “Go to your rooms. Both of you. This conversation is over.” We stood very still.

“Boys, now.”

We turned, together, to go, and I laid my arm across my baby brother’s shoulders. “Don’t worry, Wolff,” I said to him, glaring back at our parents. “They can’t hurt us more than they already have.”

T

he next few days till Christmas were pretty bleak. Wolff and I spent a lot of time together alone, but not really doing anything. None of our games seemed fun anymore, and playing with toys left us feeling sick. Our parents tried to talk to us both a bunch of times, but every time we went to our rooms and shut the doors. And with all that Christmas music playing all the time, I have to admit even I lost my composure a few times. I had to ask Chloe to turn off the radio in the car on a couple of occasions.

On Christmas Eve my parents made a big show of hanging the stockings and setting out milk and cookies, encouraging us every step of the way to help them.

Wolff and I ignored them. We went to bed solemnly, and I definitely heard Wolffie wheezing in his room that night as he fell asleep. The next morning, I made sure to SWARTHMORE REVIEW

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be in his room when he woke up, with a comic book ready for him. We sat in our beanbag chairs and ignored Christmas.

“Boys, come on downstairs,” my mom called up at some point. We remained silently glued to our comic books in protest.

A few minutes later our mom came up and cracked open the door. “Guys, please come downstairs. There’s something you really need to see.” She waited in the crack. I looked over at my brother, who was having difficulty hiding his curiosity.

That kid was a total sucker. I sighed and put down my comic book. “Fine,” I said to my mother, then turned to Wolff, “but don’t get your hopes up.”

We walked downstairs, not even trying to keep up with our mom’s sock feet. We turned the corner into the living room... and a silence—a good silence—fell.

The usual presents were scattered all underneath the Christmas tree. But in the middle, not even wrapped, still in its unopened box, stood the Lego Super Star Destroyer.

Wolff turned to me in shock, and I turned to my parents. “I thought you couldn’t afford it!” I asked. Mom shrugged and turned to Dad. “It wasn’t us,” she said.

I was about to call them out—did they think we were that dumb? To fall for that Santa stuff again after Mom had admitted that she was the one who had done it?—but then I caught sight of Wolffie.

He could hardly take his eyes off of the Destroyer. And when my mom said that, he turned to look at me with eyes big and trusting.

I looked back at my mom and dad. It was too late for me. I couldn’t forget how they’d lied to us for so long. But why ruin it for Wolffie, for my baby brother who had cried when we discovered the truth?

Who trusted me, and me alone, so much that whatever I said, at this very moment, would form his opinion on the entire topic of Santa?

I had already ruined it for him once.

I turned to my brother, putting a hand on his shoulder. “I think we jumped to conclusions, man.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means—” I took a breath. “Santa’s real, Wolff. And that Super Star Destroyer is all ours.”

Wolff ’s face shone hopefully up at me.

“Are you serious?”

I smiled down at my brother. “Yeah, man.”

And with that, we both ran for the Legos. u 26

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FICTION: Three short stories

Edmund

by Patrick Ross

E

very eye in Britain is staring at the same door. It’s not a particularly nice door; it’s really rather drab, with a rusty bronze handle. But everyone’s staring because out of this door, any second now, the new royal baby will say his first hello.

His mother, Princess Alexandra, has been in the public eye for nearly thirty years now. Her face is plastered everywhere: on tea towels, keychains, rubber ducks. Her wedding two years ago was broadcast to 185 countries, and the subsequent demand for tartan hair ribbons singlehandedly pulled Scotland out of an impending recession.

Mrs Isadora Sampson of Number Eight Winston Street has Alexandra’s face in more picture frames than her grandson’s. “My grandson isn’t going to be a queen some day,” she says. A pair of sparkly size twelve stilettos in his closet beg to differ.

But it’s not Alexandra that the country is waiting for: it’s the new prince, born last night at 7:53 p.m. Twitter was ablaze with misspelled “congrautulations,” and a BBC Two anchor got word of the birth during a live broadcast and interrupted a story about serial murders to share the news. The Sun released an evening edition with a cartoon infant clad in blue. Inside was a collage of all the celebrities who had predicted a baby girl, alongside quotations showing how wrong they were.

Today, they’re saying, Alexandra will leave the hospital, baby in her arms. “Only right she goes back home,” says Sheila O’Connor, an indignant Irishwoman with eight children of her own. “The girl needs a rest.” And so the eyes of the isles watch on, staring at the drab door, searching for some sign of the princess.

Kenny Mubawe is standing outside the London hospital juggling an umbrella, a camera and a three-year-old. He thinks he sees her shadow through the window, but it’s just a passing nurse.

In Birmingham, Valerie Ng rings up her beau and cancels their plans for the night. “I can’t, babe, something’s come up,” she says, and turns up the volume on the telly.

The door opens, and together Britain takes a breath. The princess steps out without her husband at her side, and together Britain erupts in a clamor. She scrunches up her lips and shakes her head. She tries to wave at the crowd, a timid little greeting, but her hand ends up covering her quivering lips instead. Together, Britain quiets down.

The cameras zoom in. The baby’s skin is black.

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nside the hospital, the king is in tears, and equerries are scrambling to find him tea. “I don’t want tea,” he spits, but he drinks it when it comes. “Oh, God,” he says, “oh God, God.” He’s been saying it all night. No one goes near him.

The Duke of Albany, eyebrows thick as London fog, broods alone, too. He’s in the corner trying to determine where he went wrong. His cell phone is buzzing because, although he can mute it, he doesn’t know how to turn vibrate off. He wants to throw it, maybe at his wife, maybe at the ground, but he resists the impulse; he’s got some photos on there that he hasn’t yet figured out how to remove. No one goes near him, either.

It’s the women who have banded together, from the moment the baby emerged from the womb. This kind of moment is rare for their family:

a moment that the country will never see. Weddings, funerals, and everything in between is televised, commentated, closed-captioned. But the moment of the little prince’s birth, when his little brown fingers first grasped at English air, and the kerfuffle that ensued... that, at least, was private.

The Duke, who had been gripping the bedpost while Alexandra screamed and pushed, simply left the delivery room. It had been just him and the doctors, and then it was just the doctors, huddled around the spreadeagled princess, her lovechild in their arms. In the ensuing chaos, one of the nurses slipped out to fetch the queen, who entered in a characteristic state of tizzy.

“What’s going on?” she asked, and then she saw. “You can go, thank you,” she told the doctors. Then she sat on the bed, and held her sobbing heap of daughter for the rest of the night.

It was four hours of silent tears, of refusals of meals, before Alexandra finally spoke. “I can’t go out there, mummy,” she said.

But her mummy said, “You must.”

Now Queen Margaret is holding the baby, cooing at him like a cockatiel, as he sloppily sucks on her finger wrinkles. The princesses are on the too-small hospital bed, sister holding sister.

“Well, I’ve got one bit of good news for you, darling,” says the queen. The baby gurgles, and she smiles.

“What is it, mummy?”

“You’ve got a whole life of public service ahead of you,” she says. “Your entire reign. But you’ll never make a mistake as bad as this one.” Then she rings a little bell, and a scrubs-clad peon comes running.

“Tea for the lot of us,” she demands.

“Yes, Your Majesty.”

“Oh, and bring Edward another cup.”

The king. He’s still sitting there saying “Oh, God, God, Oh God,” and although he complains, he’s grateful for the second batch.

Margaret hands over the bundle of baby and for the first time, Alexandra takes him in. Everything on him is little, of course. His little brown eyes sparkle with new life, which makes it difficult to regret his existence. His little tongue searches for milk, his little hand reaches for her face. She takes a breath and thanks God that times have changed.

Not too many years ago, she thinks, she might have had to kill this baby. The backlash would have been incomprehen-

sible. The baby would have been quietly suffocated and disposed of, and the Church of England would have started up a collection for victims of miscarriage in her name.

The tea arrives, and so does the Duke of Albany. He stands awkwardly in the doorway when none of the women invite him to sit. “Alexandra,” he says. She can’t meet his eyes, and she hasn’t since the birth. “Alexandra. Why did you go out there?”

“He’s my baby,” she whispers. She holds Mary’s hand tighter.

“But he’s not mine.” He looks at the child with a scowl. “How could you, how could you—” Queen Margaret stands up and begins to interfere. “Leave,” she says, her blue eyes ablaze.

“We don’t need any nonsense right now. Out!” The Duke is enraged. “Your Majesty, I—” “I don’t care, leave now.” She is a full foot shorter than him, a garden gnome in pearls, but he cowers.

“Alex,” he begs. All the muscles in the princess’s body tense up as she chooses not to answer.

“Alex, please. Whose is it?”

But the queen is thwacking him with the tea tray and shouting. “Out, out!”

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hat, of course, is the question that the whole country is asking: “Whose?” Within minutes of the little prince’s reveal, headlines started popping up on internet tabloids. “WHO IS ROYAL BABY DADDY?” the world wants to know. Tammy Williams, a Lancashire mother, is telling anyone who will listen that it’s the American rapper Prince Zee. “He calls himself prince, I bet he’d love to get under a real princess’s skirt. Them rappers are like that, they are.”

The least polite papers are offering proof of Alexandra’s liaisons with male prostitutes. “An unnamed black man was invited to Kensington Palace nine months ago for an ‘interview’—or so she wants us to think.” The most polite papers are scouring through all of Alexandra’s school friends, clamping onto anyone with remote African heritage. They best they can find is Missy Carleton, the princess’s well-known confidante.

“Yeh, I remember the little bitch,” says Hamish Brown, a factory worker from Leeds. “Alex wanted her to be the maid of honor, but the king said no. She hadta pick her sister instead.” Hamish is actual-

ly right about that. “I bet the black bitch was so mad she got her brother to put a baby inside our girl.” That he’s wrong about. Missy Carleton has no brother.

“Well, her father, then.” He’s dead. “Well, somebody.”

A hotter topic than parentage, though, is whether or not the newborn prince will be permitted to inherit the throne.

Historians are scouring their archival minds to come up with the scholarly solution. Yes, there have been royal bastards before—that’s where the surname Fitzroy derives, son of the king—but not in recent memory, not since bastardy stopped being a serious offense.

The law, as it stands, prohibits the crown from passing to illegitimate children. Also Roman Catholics.

“They should let ‘im have it,” says Holly Kugel, a drug-addled Glaswegian who runs a yarn shop. “He sure as hell came outta her. D’you see ‘is eyes? He’s Alexandra’s son, no doubt about it, so who gives a shit if she was married to ‘is father? I wa’n’t! And my kid came out all right!”

Feminists, who’ve always loved the princess, are agreeing. “I think it’s the right step for the country to take,” says Christine, a student at the London School of Economics. “Look, we’ve got a princess standing alone, holding a baby that she alone is responsible for. She’s married, and the Duke’s a good man, but she doesn’t need him to be Queen.

Look at Victoria, she reigned for forty years without Albert. Look at Elizabeth I! This is the world we live in, and I for one think this is the right direction.”

Buckingham Palace is keeping mum about the whole thing. King Edward hasn’t appeared publicly since the baby’s reveal, and some—mostly Tories and old crones like the Baroness Macleod—are worried about his health. “Oh, if my daughter had put me through that,” says the Baroness. She is too full of herself to actually finish the sentence.

A Yorkshire couple, the Baxters, think Alexandra should be disinherited. “If we were Edward,” they say, “we’d skip right over her and give the crown to Mary.

That girl’s a sweetheart. She’d never do something like this.” Princess Mary, the younger of King Edward’s girls, has actually had three abortions to date.

So-called “family values” groups (such as Build a Better Britain and Mothers for Heterosexual Unions) are agreeing with the Baxters. “This baby is not of royal blood,” says Sussex pastor Fred Jackson. “We cannot let it be our king.” He’s SWARTHMORE REVIEW

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playing the wedlock card in public, but in private, Jackson has referred to the baby as “the royal nigger” no less than forty-four times. Thirty percent of octogenarians also used this phrase, although at least three of them meant it respectfully.

The racism is trickling out of places you wouldn’t expect, as well as the ones you would. At a military performance of “Rule Britannia,” which usually provokes intense, almost colonialist patriotism, a commentator drew attention to the line ‘Britons never will be slaves’. “Looks like we’re headed in that direction, folks,” he said, and was promptly fired by the Director General of the BBC. The people who usually threaten to move out of the country are doing so again. Martin Jones, a retired veteran from Swansea, who most recently said he’d expatriate if Michelle Miller were elected Prime Minister—“she won’t be no Thatcher, the bleeding heart bitch”—is currently claiming he’ll move to Australia if a black baby ever ascends the throne.

Meanwhile, the king has been reading his red boxes and not absorbing any of it. Parliament has passed a law regarding sanctions in the Department of Something. Normally he would care. Really, he would—normally, he would ask the Prime Minister about it in their weekly audience. But this week, he can’t focus on anything but his daughter, and steelyhaired Michelle Miller doesn’t bother to redirect their chat.

“What if she’d married a black fellow?” he keeps asking. “Would there be this outrage?”

“I don’t think so, Your Majesty,” says the Prime Minister.

“Because if so,” says the king. Obsessive monologuing is a tic of his. “If so, then maybe it’s a good thing. This is a Commonwealth of Nations, don’t people understand that? We are Africans as well as Europeans.”

“Your Majesty,” says Michelle, who’s staring at the carpet. “I don’t think it’s the baby’s race, sir. I mean, that will always be part of it. But this is about the princess and her fidelity.” Edward has been silent for too many consecutive seconds and begins to interrupt, but the PM holds her ground. “The British people are concerned. If the princess cannot be faithful to her husband of two years, what’s to say she will be faithful to the crown?”

Edward fidgets in his seat, but decides to uphold the constitutional duty of the monarch and keep his royal mouth shut.

“But don’t fret, Sir. The princess will 28

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thrive. The people love her. Just give it time, and carry on as normal. I guarantee, the press will contort it all into something absurd. ‘Edward X diversifies the throne’, or ‘black is the new purple.’

They’ll eat it up, if you only give it time.

Just keep on keeping on, like nothing’s happened.”

He can’t stay silent for long. “Are you suggesting that everything’s alright?”

“Of course it’s not alright, Your Majesty,” says the PM. “But it will be.”

Elsewhere in Buckingham Palace, Queen Margaret’s private equerry is informing her staff of a slight policy change. Nothing drastic: simply that the Duke of Albany has been banished from all royal premises. She knows this isn’t fair, but as she makes well-known to the reporters, “my daughter comes first.

Always.”

Plenty of mothers understand this. Effie Agyeman, a single London mother of five, gestures at the telly when the story comes on. “You see that, girls?” she says, while she loads up a loaf tin with mac and cheese. “You see that? Alex screwed up and Maggie had her back. I’ll always have your back, you hear me? Mummy’s got your back. On’y don’t screw up like that.”

Most women are less supportive of Margaret’s measures—especially those 65% percent of Daily Mail readers who said in a February poll that they ‘would LOVE to sleep with the Duke’ if they had the chance. Samantha Marshall is one of those women, and she is incensed by the turn of events. “What does Maggie think she’s on about? Ruddy bitch! The poor bloke didn’t do a damn thing wrong. It’s her slut daughter should be banned until she learns to keep her legs shut.” Samantha Marshall has a photo of the Duke as her iPhone backdrop.

“Margaret,” says the king, when they’re in bed later that night. “Why did you do that?” “Do what,” she replies.

“Banish the Duke, Margaret. You’re not William the Conqueror. You can’t just banish people.”

“It was upsetting Alex, having him around. She doesn’t need that right now.”

“Margaret,” he says, and he deeply inhales, the way he usually does before one of his snoring soliloquies. “We can’t react like this, like tabloid fodder. We have to hold our heads high. We’ve got to keep on keeping on.”

The queen scoffs and rolls onto her side. “Oh, fine. Listen to Michelle Miller, why don’t you.” And she goes to sleep.

“L

et’s look at the list again,” says Princess Mary. The two sisters are lying in their childhood bedroom, the one that they shared before Alexandra hit puberty and was granted her own chambers. It is an untainted, holy space, rooted in a time before both princesses had independently had their first kisses with the Greek ambassador’s son. “There’s Edward.”

“It seems wrong to have two Edwards at once,” Alexandra says. “Richard?”

“Too ugly. And too white.”

“All of these names are too white.

They’re royal British names.”

“Yes, well. William?”

“Possibly William.” She kisses the baby on his forehead. Then she says, “Mary.”

“Hmm? No, that won’t do at all—” “No, Mary. Listen.” She meets her sister’s eyes and touches her hand. “I don’t know who the father is, Mary.”

The still-giggling baby starts to cry, his week-old emotions as flexible as his fleshy cheeks.

She presses him against her chest, and together they silently shake.

Mary fetches a piece of paper from her bag, and flings herself belly-down on the bed. “Time to make another list,” she grins.

On the other side of the palace, Margaret is sitting down to tea with the Duke of Albany.

“So,” she says. “You’re back.”

“You invited me—” “I’m aware.” She puts a cube of sugar in her tea. “But now you’re back. Understand?”

He eyes his cup and wonders if it’s poison, and then eyes the queen. “You sent me away.” “That was not productive.”

He rolls his eyes. “And what would be productive here?”

“You going back to Alexandra,” says the queen. He begins to protest, but she silences him with her eyes. “Just go back.

All this drama is reflecting very poorly on us.”

“On you?” he laughs. “Sorry to hear that, Your Majesty, but don’t you think it’s reflecting rather poorly on me?”

“I said us.” She smiles. “And you are one of us.”

“But I don’t want to be.”

She takes a sip of tea. “Well, it’s far too late for that.”

That night, while the baby is asleep in his nursery and Mary is out rendezvousing with the Greek ambassador’s

son’s brother, the Duke pays a visit to a still-distraught Alexandra. Name lists are sprawled across her pink paisley childhood blankets, and she still hasn’t changed out of the dressing gown, which is stained with milk and spit-up.

“Alex,” he says. He’s standing in the doorframe, shoulders sagging, a bouquet in his hands. She jumps up and kisses him. After a moment, he kisses her back.

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he princess has announced a name for the baby. It’s Edmund. Prince Edmund Arthur William. Just “Prince”—not “Prince of.” He should have been Prince Edmund of Albany, but, not being biologically descended from the Duke of Albany, that bit of peerage didn’t pass down.

Scholars all over the country are making King Lear jokes. Katherine Rigby, a professor of English at the University of St. Andrews, can’t believe no one picked up on that.

“Edmund? The bastard in Lear? Come on, it’s got to be the most famous—? No? Have none of you read Shakespeare?”

“Evidently none of the royal family has,” says Joanna Ford, who’s currently playing Desdemona in Stratford-upon-Avon to terrible reviews.

“You know, it’s really an homage to Father,” Alexandra later tells The Guardian.

“He’s Edward, and my son is Edmund.

I didn’t want to have two Edwards, so I made the adjustment.”

“It should have been Edgar,” Katherine Rigby retorts, when she reads the interview. “He’s the good one in the play.”

Of course, he also spends most of the play dressed as a beggar, pretending to be insane.

A man comes forward and claims to be Prince Edmund’s father. He’s a Nigerian medical student called Okoye Okafor, and was at Cambridge around the same time as the princess. He clinches a few daytime TV interviews and explains his relationship with Alexandra. “Well, you know, we didn’t know each other great, but we got along. We ran in the same circles, you know?”

This is good enough for the press. The gates to Buckingham Palace haven’t been this crowded since Edward’s coronation.

“Is it true? Is it him?” they ask the palace guards, who stare, unsmiling, firmly into the distance.

Inside the palace, the queen sets down her teacup as furiously as one can possibly set down a teacup. “You’ve got to say something, Alexandra,” she demands.

Even the Mothers for Heterosexual Unions laugh at this. Michelle Miller, watching from Number Ten Downing Street, accidentally snorts the sugar that she’s putting into her tea.

Susan Williamson, a lifelong republican from Battersea, laughs out loud to her empty fl at and shouts, “Finally!

One of them’s got a sense of humour!”

“This is getting out of hand.”

So the next day, the princess makes a live broadcast, and it becomes the second-most-watched Youtube video of all time—a clip of a puppy biting off a man’s speedo maintains the top spot. The camera zooms in on her, sitting in front of a palace window, wearing the yellow sundress and tiara that will become the go-to Halloween getup for would-be Alexandras. As the orchestral trumpets fade, she smiles at the camera, and begins to speak.

“I would like to apologise, from the bottom of my heart, to the British people for these events. I apologise to the many millions of you who watched my wedding and wished the Duke of Albany and me nothing but happiness in our days ahead. As you have seen, there has been some turbulence, but our marriage remains strong. It will survive my dalliance.

“I must, however, be firm about one thing. I do not apologise for my son,

Prince Edmund. While it is true that his birth is proof of my sins, and while I ask for your forgiveness in that regard, he is still my child. He is a child of this nation.

And I intend for him to succeed me, as the first-born child of a monarch must do.

“The Duke of Albany is a forgiving man, and I thank God for his patience.

He has decided, from the goodness of his heart, that he will treat Edmund as a son, and we will raise him together. The identity of his biological father, however, is a private matter, and it will remain that way. I assure you that Edmund has indeed inherited centuries of royal blood.

Already, at two weeks old, he has shown a strong ability to lead and think for himself. Why, yesterday he found himself hungry, and rather than cry he reached right up and unbuttoned my blouse!”

Even the Mothers for Heterosexual Unions laugh at this. Michelle Miller, watching from Number Ten Downing Street, accidentally snorts the sugar that she’s putting into her tea. Susan Williamson, a lifelong republican from Battersea, laughs out loud to her empty flat and shouts, “Finally! One of them’s got a sense of humour!”

There’s still a minute left in the speech: “Edmund, if I have any say, is second in line to the crown my father wears. It is my belief that Britain, the Commonwealth of Nations and the world will soon learn to love him as their own. I am blessed to be able to share him with you.

By all rights, Edmund’s father is the Duke of Albany. His biological father is, and always will be, England. Thank you, and may God bless you all.”

It is hailed as the beginning of the modern monarchy.

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ot everyone is enchanted by the princess’s speech. Pastor Fred Jackson, for example, has not given up on his attempts to dispossess the bastard prince. He starts a mildly popular movement called “White and Pleasant Land,” which leads to his arrest.

This sparks a Parliamentary debate about hate speech, during which Baroness Macleod and Prime Minister Miller have a showdown which pundits call “the catfight of the century.”

It’s in the aftermath of this that Christine, the student from the London School of Economics, gets involved. She’s interning at Downing Street and manages to clinch a short meeting with the PM to talk about what she’s calling “The SWARTHMORE REVIEW

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Full Circle Movement”—an obscure Lear reference that no one picks up on.

“And how, exactly,” says a careworn Michelle, whose eyes are developing cataracts, “do you think the government can help with this...movement?”

“Well, for the short term,” Christine says, and launches into a litany of clever but infeasible suggestions. Michelle smiles to herself. She remembers when she was this earnest about politics, and knows that it won’t last long.

But Christine takes the smile as encouragement, and goes on. “Then in the long term, and this is what I’m really excited about, I think we need an act of Parliament.” The girl is beaming, and the PM can’t bear to quash her spirits, so she nods. “A change in the law would put us closer to the modern England we all want, don’t you think? Marital legitimacy laws are outdated, there’s no reason to have them in the Britain of today.”

“Yes, it’s a good thought,” says Michelle, as she stands and shakes hands.

“I’ll keep it on the books. Now back to work with you.”

Christine is galvanized by this, and immediately creates a Facebook event to bring together other supporters of the prince. She sends it out to her feminist group at school, and it spreads from there. Sixty-five people say they’re attending.

The Full Circle Movement meets up at the Victoria Memorial across from Buckingham Palace, where Christine is standing with a donation tray, a few blown-up photos from the prince’s christening, and a pizza. Sixty-five people don’t show up, but about thirty do.

Kenny Mubawe is there with his three-year-old, who’s almost four now and knows it. Kenny is eating pizza and chatting up Effie Agyeman, whose girls are on the stairs, playing with a Happy Meal toy.

Mrs Isadora Sampson of Number Eight Winston Street hears about the Full Circle Movement from her drag queen grandson, and takes a thirty-minute taxi ride to London to attend. She tips the driver an extra tenner and climbs the Memorial stairs carrying her seventieth birthday present: a large framed collage with photos of her grandson, printed from Instagram, and of Edmund, printed from Google. It usually sits above her fireplace, but she thought it might be useful, so she brought it with her to the rally. “How nice,” says Christine.

Okoye Okafor, the royal baby daddy 30

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Christine is galvanized by this, and immediately creates a Facebook event to bring together other supporters of the prince. She sends it out to her feminist group at school, and it spreads from there. Sixty-five people say they’re attending. pioneer, is busy with Celebrity Big Brother and doesn’t bother to turn up. Samantha Marshall does, though. Her Duke of Albany iPhone backdrop has been replaced with a shirtless pic of Okafor, and she came to London today in the hopes of meeting him. She hangs around in case he’s just fashionably late.

“Excuse me, everyone,” shouts Christine. She’s trying to sound professional, but it’s hard when you have to holler.

“Could I have your attention?” Most people turn to look at her, but some (read: Samantha Marshall) continue to talk amongst themselves. “I’m going to come around with a tray for donations.

I’m hoping to start a fund that will get us some publicity.”

Effie Agyeman is thrilled, and puts five pounds into the tray. “You see this, girls?

You see this? We’re gonna change the goddamn law for this kid. I’d do that for you. Mummy’d do that for you.”

Mrs. Isadora Sampson puts in twenty pounds, and Samantha Marshall drops in two. “Thank you, everyone,” says Christine, as the money piles up. “I’m thinking we can maybe get a bus.”

Unbeknownst to everyone, Edmund’s father is at the rally, too. He stands in the back eating a bag of Walkers crisps

(Chocolatey Onion and Cheese), and throws one hundred pounds into the donation tray on his way out.

Just across the street, inside Buckingham Palace, Alexandra is sitting down with the Duke of Albany to tell him the news: “I’m pregnant again.”

The Duke is thrilled. In the past few months, he’s been praised by the tabloids for treating Edmund like a son. The paparazzi have snapped shots of royal male bonding everywhere from the West End to Regent’s Park, where Guardian photographers caught him trying to teach the infant how to pronounce “sovereignty.” He’s put up a convincing façade, smiling for the cameras and relishing in faux fatherhood, but this new pregnancy makes him happier than Edmund ever could. This baby might fix their broken marriage. This baby will be his own.

Alexandra peeks through a palace window and sees the rally across the street.

The people are tiny, but she recognises the photos that they’ve blown up. “Look, darling,” she says, “it’s Edmund.” She wipes a tear from her eye. “They do love him, you know.”

“I know,” says the Duke. He joins her at the window, and watches the group mill about the Victoria Memorial. He touches her stomach gently and smiles. “They’ll love this one, too.”

The unborn child that’s growing inside Alexandra will, in the end, supersede its brother as heir to the throne. Despite the best efforts of Christine and company, no law will be introduced. Michelle Miller will resign over the controversy, but the princess will never give up hope, not even when she becomes Queen. Then, one day, old, wrinkled and alone, she will pass away, and the crown will pass Prince Edmund by.

But no one knows that yet. For now, Alexandra is kissing the Duke, who’s suggesting they call the baby ‘Charlotte.’

Effie Agyeman is giving Kenny her mobile number, and Samantha Marshall is showing Mrs Sampson how to send a text. The queen is having tea, the king is greeting guests, and Princess Mary is fetching baby formula.

Edmund the prince is crying in his cradle, unaware that there’s a rally in his name happening just across the street, unaware that an entire kingdom has been watching him from the moment he first breathed, rooting for him, hating him, and everything in between, from the moment he first emerged from that drab hospital door. u

TELEVISION A finale in violation of a show

REVIEW

Can we consider the ending of ‘How I Met Your Mother’ happy?

Ted and The Mother at the Farhampton train station in season eight of “How I Met Your Mother,” following the reception of Barney and Robin’s wedding.

by Mike Lumetta

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emember when an entire episode of “How I Met Your Mother” centered on a quest to piece together the events of Ted’s blackout, and to figure out how a pineapple ended up on his nightstand? Or when Barney set Ted up on a blind date with a paralegal, strongly implying that “paralegal” was a euphemism for “prostitute,” and the date went well until Ted asked if she was a prostitute? Or when Ted and Barney licked the Liberty Bell?

“How I Met Your Mother” has come a long way from Season 1, when Ted was still so enthusiastic and the show had a strong “everyone here was in college in the last decade” vibe. As it went on, everyone, especially Ted, experienced failures and setbacks. The show got more plot-driven as Barney and Robin got together and Ted learned to cope with that fact. Ted fell into the background toward the end there,

too—at one point, he was content to sit in his apartment naked. The characters’ aging (and the show’s) coincided with a dip in quality, and consequently the viewers’ waiting for the mother. By the finale, the show had gone a lot of places. Unfortunately, the finale was true to none of them.

“How I Met Your Mother” was, as far as sitcoms go, a serious one. Unlike shows like “It’s Always Sunny,” “The League,” or “Seinfeld,” “HIMYM” was invested in its characters’ outcomes. In this sense, it was very much a network TV heir to “Friends.” Even more than “Friends,” though, “HIMYM” sold itself as a show with an ending that mattered—it was in the title, after all— which is why its fans stuck around through the less-than-funny parts and, ultimately, why the finale was so offensive.

A lot of what “HIMYM” had going for it had to do with its realism. As many people suggested in support of the series finale, it depicted a series of failures that led to moments of happiness. So much of what

happened throughout the show—losing jobs, breakups, and other bumps in the road—reappeared in the finale. Robin and Barney get divorced. Barney returns to womanizing. Robin wishes she had said yes to Ted, one of those many, many times in the previous several seasons. Barney has a child out of wedlock. Marshall returns to a corporate job before becoming a Justice of the state of New York. And so on. It’s not new for the show. All of the characters struggled with various personal and professional challenges of varying degrees, and not all of them turned out pretty. As the argument for the finale goes, the material in the finale was just more condensed.

For me, it’s less a question of whether the ending should be happy and more one of whether we can consider the one that happened happy. Of the five major characters, three of their story arcs ended in twists that were presented as positive—namely, Ted and Robin end up together, and Barney has a child. I don’t buy them as happy events SWARTHMORE REVIEW

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even a little bit. First of all, the lead-up to these endings destroyed about four years’ worth of character development. We’ve been slowly acclimating for years to the Barney-Robin marriage; it’s been pieced out in season premieres and finales since season six. Barney learned how not to be a pickup artist, a funny but also disturbingly underexamined theme in the show. Robin became less of a commitment-phobe too.

Meanwhile, Ted didn’t end up with Robin, but that was okay because his love for her was getting, well, a little pathetic. That was six years ago, Ted. Get over it, buddy.

For some reason—presumably the Master Plan—the writers shot the whole thing to shit 14 minutes into the finale. Literally one episode after they got married, Barney and Robin got divorced, for no apparent reason besides Barney’s inability to post the Boner Joke of the Day. Okay, okay, there was a little more than that. Barney loves Robin, but she works a lot, and he told her he’d never lie to her in their wedding vows.

So, due to some not-clearly-explained lie, they should get divorced. That’s what love is, I guess. Then Barney goes for the perfect month—31 girls in 31 days. The perfect month is just who adult Barney is: a middle-aged man who needs to lie to women in order to seek physical intimacy. In Lily’s words, “You’re in your forties and you have a playbook. That is the sad part.” He’s frighteningly close to Charlie Sheen from “Two and a Half Men” and/or the old-man version of himself from earlier in the show.

Luckily or unluckily for Barney, he blows it by impregnating “No. 31,” the last woman in his perfect month. Up until the moment he sees his daughter, he still holds out hope he’s not the father, even tossing faux-celebratory “Not a Father’s Day” cigars in the waiting room. His change of heart is supposed to be comic, the realization of a commitment that he could never achieve with a sexual partner. But let’s be real—Barney did achieve that level of commitment with Robin. It took four years to happen, but it did, and then he threw it away. Given the shortness of time in which Barney came to love his daughter—not to mention the lack of storytelling effort that went into it—how can we believe that it’ll last? That’s not even mentioning the fact that Barney’s child’s mother has neither a name nor a face. The conclusion of Barney’s story is pretty implausible, and it doesn’t have anything to do with the last four or so years of the show.

Ted and Robin’s getting together, though, is even worse. In large part, the brilliance of Cristin Milioti as Tracy contributed to this feeling. When the show elected to go for a 32

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ninth season and introduce the mother in more detail, lots of people worried that she wouldn’t measure up to the role. What if we preferred Ted with Zoe, or Victoria, or Stella? (Just kidding, no one would prefer Stella.) But she measured up, and Ted’s and her relationship was great, for the few scenes it was on-screen. Which is what made killing her off so messed up.

Just as the show made it clear—up until the end—that Barney and Robin went together, it made it clear that Ted and Robin didn’t. Ted pathetically tried several times over the last few seasons to make it work, and she said no every time. After her divorce, though, and Barney’s childish, manipulative behavior returns, Robin wonders whether she married the wrong person. As a storytelling device, it opens up the ending, but in reality, it felt more like the wrong kind of regret. Robin didn’t make a mistake in saying no, but she did regret not succeeding with the choice she did make.

If this ending is ironic for Robin, then it’s certainly ironic for Ted. For one thing, Bob Saget has been telling a nine-year story to his children whose actual point centered around Robin, not the purported point of Tracy, their mother. In light of this news, his story becomes, rather than an endearing narrative about how he became the man who could marry their mother, a story about what he wants in the present. His kids’, ah, enthusiasm for his getting with Robin is also a little beyond my comfort zone. There may have been some ways for Ted and Robin to reconnect that were somewhat tasteful, but this was not one of them. Beyond the story itself, Ted goes back to the woman who rejected him over and over again. In the beginning of the finale, he jokes, “She only shot me down three times, she’s still very much in play.” When does she go out of play, Ted? The answer, apparently, was never. That’s not love; I’m not sure what that is. Obsession, maybe? In any case, once the woman he loves died, Ted has no pride or agency to try again, or to be steadfast in his solitude. He regresses back to the version of himself that stole the Blue French Horn and walked up to Robin’s apartment, only with dozens more rejections. I know this show loves to incorporate failure, but the ending hit a level I’m not comfortable with. When I was 16 watching this show, I never imagined it would end that way. Ted ends up with Robin, love does not exist, and there is no God. The “HIMYM” writers fell prey to a truth that they’ve interspersed throughout the show: you can’t have it both ways. Ted experiences this lesson often enough, par-

ticularly with the women he dates seriously.

He can’t have Zoe and his building. He can’t have Stella and his friendship with Robin.

Most painfully (in my opinion, anyway), he can’t have Robin and Victoria. The writers tried to pull the trick they planned from the beginning of him and Robin together with a different mother, but it just played out like a bad joke. Tracy’s ex-fiance’s death is supposed to justify this plot choice, I think, but there’s a key difference. Tracy begins new with Ted, but Ted doesn’t begin new with Robin. He still has all that baggage.

I don’t want to say that everything about the finale was bad, though. In particular, the parts involving Tracy were fantastic. The actual meeting of the mother­—the event we’ve been waiting for the entire show— was brilliant. I appreciated Ted’s reluctance to talk to her, and the exuberance (reminiscent of a younger Ted) of the old woman next to him at the train stop. Season nine Ted doesn’t really believe in destiny, nor is he willing to jump out and get hurt like he was nine years ago. He tells the old woman, “Just be cool, lady, damn.” But there Tracy is, with the yellow umbrella that belonged to both of them at various points—and destiny comes together. Beyond that, life just happens for the couple. Ted has a kid out of wedlock, which preempts his big wedding—okay because “big weddings are a young man’s game.” Their actual wedding is small and spontaneous, and almost happens in McLaren’s. I liked all of these details, if only because Ted’s big plans from the pilot got derailed and shit on and life took over.

And life, for a bit, was good to him.

I’m still not sure what the legacy of this show is for me, particularly given where it fell in my life. My sister and I grew up watching this show—it’s been something we’ve bonded over for a long time. It was one of the first TV shows I loved. In high school, it became a vehicle at times through which I imagined what life—particularly in terms of friends, relationships, and place— might be like after college. When I went to college and had a better view of what those things might be like, and when the show dipped in quality, it became less significant in that sense. I began to see the limitations and the truths of what the show portrayed.

I wonder if any of these experiences are true for anyone else of my generation with respect to “HIMYM”. In retrospect, one thing’s for sure: no finale has so violated the terms of the rest of the show. Whether that ruins the rest of the show or not, I don’t know. In any case, we’ll always have those memories of the gang in McLaren’s. Cheers to that. u

MUSIC Where does Pharrell belong?

What ‘G I R L’ can tell us about one of the most celebrated veterans of the music industry

by Kenny Ning

P

eople need to understand a few things about Pharrell before they can even begin to judge him as a musician. First off, he’s been in the music game for a long time (he’s 41 years old).

He rose to fame as half of the production team The Neptunes, arguably one of the best hip hop production teams of all time.

He’s collaborated with just about every big

G I R L Pharrell Williams i Am Other, Columbia Records 10 tracks | $10 (iTunes)

star from Jay-Z to Britney Spears. He put Justin Timberlake on the map by producing most of the tracks from his debut, “Justified.” He made “Drop It Like It’s Hot.” He is the man behind “Get Lucky” and “Blurred Lines,” the two biggest pop hits of last year. It’s hard to deny that he is an insanely talented man who knows how to make great music.

On the heels of a successful 2013, he released his solo album, “G I R L,” at the beginning of this year. Most of us will remember this album as the one that has “Happy” on it. And honestly, that’s a pretty fair summary of it. But here’s a trackby-track walkthrough of what was going through my mind throughout the album.

1. “Marilyn Monroe” What’s with this new trend of starting albums with some sappy string arrangement (see “Pusher Love Girl”)? Anyways, apparently this track is going to be Pharrell’s next single. I don’t think it’s going to stick. It’s not quite danceable enough, even though it seems like it is desperately trying to be, so I’m not sure where it would fit in the pop sphere these days.

REVIEW

2. “Brand New” (ft. Justin Timberlake) This sounds like a bonus track off “The 20/20 Experience.” Even the intro on this song has those trademark Timbaland beatbox sounds that are immediately recognizable from other Justin songs like “Cry Me a River” and “Mirrors.” It’s almost like Justin Timberlake was like “nahhhh this song is kind of mediocre, but hey Pharrell you can have it. I already recorded my vocals on some of it though, is that cool?” and Pharrell was like “yeee, I desperately need another track thanks man I’ll hit you up with a new fedora next time I see you.”

But despite all the hate I’m giving Pharrell, this track is actually kind of decent. I found myself bobbing along when JT hits that high note on “good-byyeee.” But then again, when has Justin’s head voice ever NOT improved a song?

3. “Hunter” This song is pretty bad. There’s a very noticeable drop in the production quality when we get to “Hunter.” The guitar lines sound like they were made in Garageband, and they’re like the only part of the beat.

Definitely skipping this one.

4.“Gush” What do you expect from a song that starts off with Pharrell saying “make the p—ssy just gush” a bunch of times? It also reminds me a lot of that other Pharrell song “Hypnotize U” and its bizarre music video.

Highly recommended viewing.

5. “Happy” Everyone knows “Happy” is an amazing song. You’ve got backup vocals singing non-conventional chords in the chorus, but it’s still catchy in the way you want pop hooks to be. The drum beat alone is enough to get anybody dancing. It general-

ly just makes you feel good. This song isn’t going anywhere for a while, and I’m cool with that.

6. “Come and Get It Bae” Apparently Miley is on this song, but I think all I hear of her is her shouting “hey” in the background. I think she sings in the bridge too, but I didn’t make it that far in the song.

7. “Gust of Wind” This song is pretty cool. It’s very reminiscent of “Get Lucky” (and even includes some Daft Punk vocals), so if you’re a fan of that, definitely give this one a chance.

Compared to some of the other tracks on the album, it grooves pretty hard and is definitely a standout. There’s also a bunch of different melodic sections to this song.

In other words, there’s more than just a verse and a chorus repeated a bunch of times; Pharrell has like four separate melodic ideas that form the song, which I think continues to keep the song interesting. Others could equally argue that all of these different ideas is what makes the song harder to follow, and therefore less likely to stick as a single. Depends on your taste in songwriting.

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8.“Lost Queen”/“Freq” Okay, I see you, Pharrell, trying to channel some African music feel with the drums and the melodic style (very simple, reminiscent of a spiritual or children’s song). But that kind of feel definitely feels weird juxtaposed with you talking about how “you know I’ma smash it.” But don’t worry everyone, he makes sure to add afterwards “only if you want it, want it”! It appears Pharrell does care about consent after all, whew! But yeah anyway, this song comes off mad cheesy, and the sounds of waves crashing between “Lost Queen” and the hidden track “Freq” definitely do not help that image.

9. “Know Who You Are” (ft. Alicia Keys) Kind of a random song, not sure what to make of it. I have no idea why Alicia Keys is on this, but she sounds good per usual.

10. “It Girl” Never thought I’d find myself saying this, but if I had to choose my favorite song that was titled “It Girl,” I’d have to pick Jason Derulo’s, sorry Pharrell.

If I had to summarize my entire listening experience it’s this: everything else on the album is fine, but nothing comes close to the infectiousness that is “Happy.”

A possible explanation as to why some of Pharrell’s solo endeavors failed to land (e.g. his solo debut “In My Mind,” his time in the rock band N.E.R.D.) is that he’s not a very convincing performer.

When placed center stage, Pharrell the singer or Pharrell the rapper just don’t captivate at nearly the same level as an Usher or a Jay-Z. What people take away from Pharrell’s best songs are his beats, and his vocals are always forgotten in the background. You like the quirky cowbell sounds in “Blurred Lines,” not Pharrell going “Woo!” You like Justin Timberlake’s “Senorita” because of the funky piano and drums, not because of Pharrell’s weird intro. And you like “Happy” as a song, but it’s probably not even hard for you to imagine swapping out Pharrell’s vocals with those of someone else like Bruno Mars. Hopefully it’s clear that Pharrell is, hands down, one of the most talented music-makers of our generation. But “G I R L” is more evidence that Pharrell can sometimes fall flat as a solo artist, and instead shines best when he is in the production sphere of things. u 34

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BOOKS Literary one-liners In Lydia Davis’s new collection, brevity is the soul of wit

by Cecilia Paasche The cover of Lydia Davis’s new collection of (very) short stories is printed simply with an excerpt from the four-line titular story “Can’t and Won’t.” In this story, an author is denied a prize and accused of laziness for using too many contractions. The cover, like the story excerpted on it, pokes fun at convention in a playful yet wry style that is characteristic of Davis’s writing in this collection Can’t and Won’t: Stories

by Lydia Davis FARRAR, STRAUS, AND GIROUX 304 pages | $19

of stories that range from one sentence to twenty pages, from whimsical to deeply melancholic.

Davis is known for writing very short stories that pack a punch, and this collection includes many that are no exception.

Remarkably, it is often the stories that take up the least space on the pages of “Can’t and Won’t” that deliver the most emotion and are the most stylistically interesting. Davis’s stories are quite varied in form. Some appear like poems due to stanza-like formatting, altered spacing, fragmented sentences, and repetition.

The majority of the stories follow a more classic format, but the mix keeps the eye engaged and surprised. Across all of her stories, Davis uses words sparingly, resulting in prose that is never flowery and narration that keeps its distance from the reader. We are watching these characters and listening to them rather than being intimately invited into their lives.

Davis writes grief subtly and beautifully in this collection. One paragraph-long story called “The Dog Hair,” perfectly captures the experience of losing a beloved pet through a narrator who still

REVIEW

finds the hairs of a diseased dog. The story ends with a wistful, tender longing: “We have a wild hope—if only we collect enough of them, we will be able to put the dog back together again.” In a 21-page story called “The Seals,” Davis again describes perfectly and heartbreakingly the pain of loss, this time the grief after losing a sister and a father: “The first New Year after they died felt like another betrayal—we were leaving behind the last year in which they had lived, a year they had known, and starting on a year that they would never experience.”

The humor Davis is known for is largely absent here, which isn’t necessarily a critique. What humor there is comes in punchy, irreverently clever stories that are more brain-laugh than belly-laugh inducing, but funny nonetheless. In one such story called “Idea for a Sign,” the narrator describes what people should post when they board trains: “It might help if we each wore a little sign saying in what ways we will and will not be likely to disturb other passengers, such as: Will not talk on cell phone; Will not eat smelly food.”

Egregious train behavior becomes an inside joke between Davis and the reader as she weaves references in and out of multiple stories. In a later, irreverent story that lists minor annoyances titled, “I’m Pretty Comfortable, But I Could Be a Little More Comfortable,” one complaint on the list reads, “I didn’t get two seats to myself on the train.” A second complaint says, “The person behind me on the train is eating something very smelly.”

Categorized stories are also interspersed throughout the book, prefaced with the italicized words “story from Flaubert,” or followed by the word “dream.” The dream stories are taken from actual dreams and “dreamlike waking experiences” experienced by Davis and some of her friends and family, which she explains in her notes and

acknowledgments at the end of the book.

The Flaubert stories are interpretations of actual letters written and sent by Flaubert that Davis, an accomplished French translator, translated and adapted. The style of these letter-stories is direct and spare, describing events with little detail or emotion, reminiscent of the author’s

Short stories are wonderful for many reasons, but for a reader with limited time, they are particularly effective. narrative voice in his fiction. The Flaubert stories are often quaint description of daily life in France, a far cry from the wandering, outlandish dream stories.

One Flaubert story begins, “Louis has been in the church in Mantes looking at the chairs. He has been looking at them very closely.”

Short stories are wonderful for many reasons, but for a reader with limited pleasure-reading time, they are particularly effective. Each story offers an image, an interpretation, of a different kind of life. In this collection, a story often offers a brief journey into imaginations, into ponderings, into obsessions. Without dwelling too long on any one theme or character, short-stories leave ideas percolating and building off of each other, culminating in further introspection and reflection as one progresses through the stories. I recommend leaving this book on your bedside table and reading a few stories a day, allowing Lydia Davis’s prose to please, emote, and enter the psyche.

To echo the sentiment of the last line of one “story from Flaubert” in the collection: “Oh, we writers may think we invent too much—but reality is worse every time!” Can’t and Won’t is never more sad, more mundane, or more tragic than reality, and yet it is still striking that Davis creates such visceral depictions in her stories. The collection is a strong example of Davis’s work and a worthwhile read, with content, form, and style that provoke thought and capture reality— usually in less than one page. u

A tale of two time periods Donna Tartt’s third novel makes unreflective use of a Dickensian structure

by Philip Harris At first glance, Donna Tartt seems to be the anti-Bret Easton Ellis. The two were friends, and dated briefly, as undergraduates at Bennington College. At school, Ellis and Tartt shared the manuscripts of their debuts-in-progress, manuscripts that would become “Less Than Zero” and “The Secret History.” “Less Than Zero”’s Clay returns from college in New Hampshire to Los Angeles for winter break; “The Secret History”’s Richard leaves California for college in Vermont. “Less Than Zero” is full of affectless, nihilistic college students engaging in drug abuse and sexual depravity; “The Secret History” is full of seriously affected Classics majors who become obsessed with enacting a bacchanal, resulting in the death of a groundskeeper.

“The Secret History” is a work informed by the Greek tragic tradition, full of classical allusions, incest, and suicide. There is an inevitability to the novel’s events, as if the Fates are weaving just behind the curtain. “Less Than Zero” revels in the absence of any such divine logic: Clay’s drug dealer Rip, a man with a penthouse and a bottomless trust fund, keeps a 12-year-old sex slave chained up because he has “nothing to lose.” Ellis went on to mine the nihilism of the eighties’ nouveau riche to exhaustion (and then some) in his most notorious work, “American Psycho.”

Nowadays he’s known for his ridiculous tweets, including his posthumous bashing of David Foster Wallace, and his ill-conceived (to put it lightly) film collaboration with Paul Schrader starring Lindsay Lohan and James Deen; Ellis is more of a media presence than a novelist. Donna Tartt, in contrast, is known for her reserve. She writes alone on her Virginia farm, and her novels are steeped in the literary tradition.

She’s not on Twitter, and she rarely interviews. At age 49 she has just released her third novel, “The Goldfinch.”

After a quick establishing frame of the protagonist, Theo Decker, holed up in a hotel in Amsterdam, leaving his room only to snag a Dutch newspaper and scan

REVIEW

it for reports of a crime, we return to the day of his mother’s death. On the way to a school meeting about 13-year-old Theo’s recent expulsion, he and his mother stop at a museum to see an Old Masters show.

A bomb goes off, killing Theo’s mother and others and setting the stage for a dream-like set piece when Theo comes to amidst the rubble. He encounters an old man who, before he expires, entrusts Theo with a ring and an address: “Hobert and The Goldfinch

by Donna Tartt LITTLE, BROWN AND COMPANY 775 pages | $17

Blackwell [...] Ring the green bell.” He also has Theo, in his disoriented state, snag the titular painting, Carel Fabritius’s “The Goldfinch,” knocked free from the wall.

Thus Theo acquires the book’s enchanting, and frustrating, MacGuffin. But at this point in the novel, we are immersed. Theo’s world has been upended, and the stage has been set for whatever is to come.

And then the exposition continues for another 300 pages. To avoid child services, Theo stays with the Barbours, a family of New York gentry crowbarred into the novel, before being whisked off by his newly sober dad and his cocaine-dealing girlfriend to Las Vegas. What follows can only be described as a drug-fueled YA novella that co-opts the narrative for over 100 pages. Theo meets another displaced youth, the Ukrainian Boris, and, free from any adult supervision, they lounge around their Vegas tract mansions and drink a lot of vodka (this rampant drug and alcohol use allows for some narrative sleight-ofhand that explains certain events later in the novel). Theo’s dad gets in deep with the wrong people, and stress drives him back to drinking, and, unfortunately, to drive.

Theo sustains his second loss in nearly 200 pages. He must say goodbye to his new friend and return to New York. Boris exits the narrative here, though he will spring up with Victorian serendipity later in the novel. And with that we are nearly back SWARTHMORE REVIEW

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Donna Tartt, the author of “The Goldfinch” where we started, halfway through the 800-page tome, ringing the green bell at Hobert and Blackwell.

Things happen—Boris returns, complications arise regarding the painting, Theo gets engaged—all culminating in an action set piece in Amsterdam, closing the frame narrative. Critics have already pointed out the novel’s strengths and weaknesses in numerous publications, mostly with doe-eyed fawning. The novel does run long and some narrative devices are very obviously contrived to keep the plot going, but Tartt is an admirable storyteller, so you rarely pause to gripe. Reviewers have also already picked out the novel’s fairly obvious parallels with “Great Expectations”: an orphaned protagonist narrating in the first-person, his apprenticeship to a craftsman, his love for a fellow orphan 36

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girl, and the befriending of a criminal who returns to play a narrative role. What critics have neglected to consider is the novel’s structure within its own historical period—that is, what are the implications of using a Dickensian structure in the 21st century?

For the Russian formalists, a school of literary critics who espoused a “scientific” method of investigating poetic forms and language, basic plot structures are ahistorical. However, when they manifest in novels, they must do so in a guise suitable to their times. Viktor Shklovsky in “Energy of Delusion: A Book On Plot” observes that one way for this to occur is parody.

He takes the figure of Don Quixote as his example, a parody of the knight-errantry hero down to his equipment: “His pasteboard helmet is the death of the old epic

weapons.” In one sense, parody is an act of scavenging, taking those bits which are of use and discarding or whittling those that aren’t to fit the demands of modernity. The humor arises when some of the old devices aren’t modified, and are instead shown for what they are in the light of the new.

Don Quixote sees the present day through the tinted filter of the medieval epic, and windmills become giants. For the project of keeping literature relevant, parody is a necessary act of subversion.

Even in Tartt’s model, Dickens, parody is present. As Shklovsky notes, the initial characterization of Mr. Pickwick, from Dickens’s “The Pickwick Papers,” is rife with it. When Dickens describes Pickwick’s tracing of the mighty ponds of Hampstead to their source and his revolutionary theory of the Tittlebats, Shklovsky observes: “The hero is presented as a parody. The ponds mentioned in this passage are in the city. The tittlebat, I’d say, is the worst of all the fish. The hero himself, his frock and his gestures—everything is parody.” A modern reader would expect something of a similar treatment by Tartt when Hobie steps out of his antique shop like some Victorian artisan, clad in a paisley robe with satin lapels, while, presumably, commuters walk by engrossed in their cell phones, and I.E.D.s are being detonated in the Middle East, and, far away from Hobie’s basement workshop, regular non-artisan pieces of furniture are being fabricated in thirdworld sweatshops. But no, Hobie is a man with a twinkle in his eye. He is the kind of character who, presumably having failed to watch any of the myriad films of our time chock-full of emotional cliches, can look at a piece from his collection and say, with no self-awareness, “this piece, not of the first quality, doesn’t fit with anything else I own, and yet isn’t it always the innappropriate thing, the thing that doesn’t quite work, that’s oddly the dearest?” not even so much as wincing at the treacle content of that sentence. Tartt’s propensity to use genre-fiction-y cliffhangers as if her work were, like Dickens’s, published serially (“I understood the instant I saw them, that my life, as I knew it, was over”; “It was a fantastic night—one of the great nights of my life, actually, despite what happened later.”) and the tired cliches that litter the entirety of the novel, and which Francine Prose enumerates in her review in the New York Review of Books (“Theo’s high school friend Tom’s cigarette is ‘only the tip of the iceberg.’ A dying man ‘grappled and thrashed—a fish out of water.’ After the explosion, the bomb site is ‘a madhouse.’ The

shock of seeing the girl Theo loves is ‘like a dash of cold water.’ Mrs. Barbour assigns Theo to share Andy’s room ‘without beating around the bush.’”), confirm that Tartt apes Dickens’s structure without matching his linguistic precision - that which allows us to forgive Dickens his occasional narrative inconsistency and what makes his prose such a joy to read. And while there is an initial hope that some wave of reality will come crashing down to sweep away the “Dickensian” trappings, it never does.

Serendipity gets Theo out of all his jams, and the police and gangsters operate on the periphery until the novel’s climax, and even then everything works out alright.

The result is a holographic novel: tip it one way and it is Dickensian, the other and it’s modern. Unfortunately it never puts the two in dialogue, and is thus never completely convincing in either mode.

I framed this piece the way I did in order to, in a clever rhetorical twist, collapse

the distinction I drew between Ellis and Tartt, and suggest that “The Goldfinch”’s flimsy idealistic conclusion belies Tartt’s fundamental nihilism. But in the end, I don’t know if that’s a legitimate claim to make; or rather, the book is simply not ostentatious enough to deserve that kind of savaging. I discuss the need for parody, but perhaps that is just faulting the novel for not willing to be progressive. At no point is it really disastrously anachronistic. Neither is Theo terribly nihilistic. Rather, he pouts just enough for us to not really care for him as he meanders through the baggy novel. Ultimately, the twist is not that the book is not what you think it is, but that it is exactly what its publicity suggests it is: last year’s Big Novel, a late-2013’s “The Art of Fielding.” The novel may sputter along at times and contain, as James Wood points out, passages of just plain sloppy writing, but with its pasted-on concluding essay-cum-monologue by Theo checking

all the right boxes, critics can, with genuine wonder, praise Tartt for her celebration of the “enduring power of art.” Unfortunately, neither side of Tartt’s juxtaposition of Theo’s enduring personal gloom (“Because, here’s the truth: life is catastrophe...and I’ll keep repeating it till I die, till I fall over on my ungrateful nihilistic face...better never born, than born into this cesspool.”) with his universal rhapsodizing about the “point where the mind strikes reality [...] the space where all art exists, and all magic” registers as any less contrived than the novel’s unreflective use of Dickensian structure. I slighted Ellis for his recent collaboration with director Paul Schrader, and yet it generated the massive “New York Times” piece “Here Is What Happens When You Cast Lindsay Lohan in Your Movie,” which may contain more genuine pathos than the entirety of Tartt’s novel.

Maybe I’ll go watch “The Canyons” now after all. u

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POETRY: THREE WORKS

Henna

by Rose Wunrow

After Tea and Cakes, Mr. Prufrock

by Ben Xie

All he talks about is how he’s getting old.

He rubs his head like it’s the Holy Dome and he’s a pilgrim and he can’t quite figure how to keep the tiles from cracking.

He always complains about his pants and what the hell can we do?

What can we do for someone who won’t listen to reason?

Wear the goddamn gown, you geezer. Or stop complaining; roll your trousers up and stop talking about it.

Jeez, he doesn’t listen.

And what does he want to say? What is he trying to say?

He sounds like he’s choking on something. His own words I guess. “What is it?” I ask him, and he shuts up.

I ask him again and again until he sputters, “I am Lazarus, come from the dead, come back to tell you all!”

What? Tell us what?

Sometimes I feel like he’s saying something smart, but he always stops.

He always stops and gives this look like he’s a little kid and his mom just told him he’s good for nothing.

Like I’m his mom or something.

“That is not what I meant at all,” he goes.

“That’s alright, Al. You can save it for later,” I say, but I want to grab his skinny arms and shake it out of him.

The ladies have mostly stopped caring.

They feed the others and clean off their dribble and leave him alone. Very routine.

They come and go and come and go and when they go I watch him.

Sometimes he looks out of the window like he’s trying really hard to remember something, or maybe he’s just thinking whether to eat the damn peach on his tray.

What do I know what goes on in his head. Why can’t he be like the others-quiet, smiling, free of trouble?

What’s so special he’s got? What’s he know that we don’t?

He acts like he’s got some big problem no one else got.

Like he was faced with slaying Goliath and he ain’t even David.

He’s like Abel or something. Yeah, he thinks he’s Abel and he’s fighting Goliath and God likes the baby lamb but that won’t save him from the giant’s fists.

He’s getting beat. Not even just by Goliath but by everyone.

And when he croaks, maybe it’s for the best.

Maybe his blood can cry out from the earth whatever he keeps trying to say.

And so it happens that the henna on your hand fades to lemon, slithering through the soft summer hairs of your freckling skin. When you braid your fingers together, your veins look blue, then yellow, then wrinkled, as if you have bruised and aged in one season. Tree­ringed with henna, already turned a color older than the cool morning­frothed sun shade that dawned over your first best friendship, that which unraveled with the same pulled­apart breath that sucked splinters from the wooden horizons of places old as Troy. Not quite the same sun, because your henna is a color cooler than flame, cool like teeth but not the shade of your great­grandmother’s passing smile; a color paler than the flower he drew on your ankle with a marker that lost its grip on permanence within an hour of its blooming. Fingers braided, think how close you are to shaking hands with aged shades ­remember the colors you are almost, but not. You are not quite a battle worth deceiving for, your bones sleep with locked doors; death will not evict them from those enamelled rooms where she nursed memories of home.

You are not a love story. You are shaded more like a second­best friendship.

A week ago, maybe you could have believed in the rust streaks spilling from your knuckles to your nails.

Now you press your fading skin to your nose. Breathe the tang of dried red fleeing, think you will become lemon too along with the stripes, the whorls, the flowers and the suns, your wholeness, a crooked design drawn on the earth’s ankle, will untattoo itself in time. All you hope is that you can shift through the yellowings of hours. On and on and on, until you reach some swatch colored like sunset sand and tornado­sky where you can leave your memory like permanence.

Seas

by Josh Gregory

Never mind the red blooms, a profusion of carrior cruor runs its fingers through the water; moves like a scent.

And through the encrustations clot these waters

we will have our new seas upon which to build

There, the rigid waves are called mountains.

EDITORS’ PICKS

Brief recommendations of books, music, movies, and more from our editors bus! Antitaxi!” I don’t know. But for those of you who don’t speak French or don’t care about the lyrics, there’s absolutely nothing to complain about here, except that, no matter how good it is, it can’t be the same as seeing them live.

-Z.L. Zhou, Poetry Editor Poetry: ‘She Had Some Horses’ by Jo Harjo

a strong female lead without being superwoman, which is much more realistic and relatable. “In a World” is a light, feel-good movie that’s still worth watching.

-Marina Martinez, Reporting Editor

Joy Harjo’s “She Had Some Horses” is enthralling in its intimate depictions of desolate communities, dispossessed women, frantic, and scattered long-distance relationships, and self-imprisoned characters. Harjo slices open and exposes the rough, raw realities of a fallen people, of a woman hanging on to the edge of a windowsill. Ancestral histories are made present through bloodlines, and the individual dilemma is made universal, at times political. Dark undertones linger in most poems, but there is relief in Harjo’s vibrant works. For each emotion that cuts, there are tender, yet striking, images that soothe; there are always the horses.

-Victoria Stitt, Poetry Editor

Album: ‘Psycho Tropical Berlin’ by La Femme

Television: ‘Friday Night Lights,’ developed by Peter Berg

By this point, La Femme has long since left Swarthmore, not that that’s a good reason to not talk about them. In what was probably one of the most popular concerts this year, La Femme played to a nearly-packed Olde Club and one of the most ill-advised mosh pits I have ever been in.

Simply put, La Femme is incredible, and I am ashamed that it took until this year for me to discover their dark, majestic, beach rock aesthetic. “Psycho Tropical Berlin,” their first LP, is an incredible accomplishment. At times more overtly relaxed and at times more obviously frantic, the female singer, Clémence Quélennec, never goes entirely to one extreme or the other, giving the album a hard, tightly-controlled tone, even when everything else seems like it should be the perfect beach song (she also was the best on-stage dancer I’ve ever seen, hands down). The bass guitar is gorgeously intense. There’s a question that I asked while listening to the album: what’s with the lyrics? The opening song, “Antitaxi,” goes (in French) “Take the bus, take the

I was living in a devil town Didn’t know it was a devil town Oh Lord it really brings me down About the devil town -Tony Lucca, “Devil Town”

Zach Gilford (7) and Taylor Kitsch (33) star in “Friday Night Lights.”

Movie: ‘In a World,’ dir. Lake Bell Lately when I sit down to watch a ‘funny’ movie, I end up turning it off within ten minutes due to my inability to tolerate blatant sexist and racist jokes and stereotypes and propagations of rape culture. But “In a World” is a rom-com even a jaded Swattie can enjoy. Lake Bell directs and stars in this comedy following the daughter of a famous voice-over actor (Fred Melamed) in her dream of becoming a female voice-over actress. The depiction of the ‘man’s world’ of voice-over and Bell’s quest to break into it isn’t as oversimplified as one might expect, and the subplots following Bell’s sister and father are happily-ever-after while still poignant. The movie pokes fun at overdramatized film franchises like “Avatar” and “The Hunger Games,” though it also makes use of some annoying stereotypes about girls (Bell ends up being a voice coach for whiny sounding women to have more “professional” speech patterns in order to get ahead in their jobs.) Demitri Martin plays Bell’s awkward studio manager and ultimate romantic interest, and Ken Marino plays her douchey and misogynistic voice-over rival. Maybe I liked this movie because I identified so much with Bell’s character—seduced by the macho guy before realizing that she wants someone she can actually talk to, ambitious but still humanly insecure. She’s

“Friday Night Lights” is a TV show based on a book and a movie about a town, a team, and a dream. On top of the book’s critique of high school football culture in West Texas and the movie’s capturing of the glory of the struggle, the show adds a third thing: a love for the people of fictional Dillon, Texas. A brilliant cast of teenagers backs the pairing of Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton as Eric and Tami Taylor, the coach and guidance counselor at Dillon High. A big theme in the show is growing up, especially in a messed up place—or a devil town, as the song says. If there is a better portrayal of adolescence and community on television, ever, I haven’t seen it. Texas forever. Oh, and one more thing: clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose.

-Mike Lumetta, Poetry Editor SWARTHMORE REVIEW

MAY 2014

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