Issue 22

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W A

R T

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M O R

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NOVEMBER 2018

e c a p s The Photos

n e e w in bet oshino

na H

by Aria

AND...

In Ceausescu’s Romania...

Finding un-forgiveness for Junot Diaz Foucault on pass/fail

CONTRIBUTORS

Eva Baron (she/her) is a first-year who likes her clown costume and thinks that the Sharples french toast sticks can be, at times, and only after a few, a little bit spicy.

Kenny Bransdorf (he/him) is a senior who likes to write fiction, a passion he is certain will lead to a successful, lucrative career as the next great American novelist.

Rebecca Castillo (she/her) is a junior majoring in Education, Race, & Media. Her favorite things about Swat are the people and Kohlberg’s Indian food (in no particular order).

Lee Cohen (he/him) is a sophomore from North Carolina studying philosophy and interpretation theory. Yeah no, he’s not sure what his plan is either.

Louisa Grenham (they/them) is a Death Star inthe-flesh to all those who oppose them, beginning with the genre of third person autobiography.

Neel Gupta (he/him) is a freshman. You can find him procrastinating his homework by watching (and re-watching) every tennis video available on YouTube.

Nora Hikari Shao (she/her) is a member of the Class of 2019. When not writing poetry, she spends her time loudly contemplating the great questions, such as “is there biblical evidence of a divine preference for bottoms?” and “exactly how gay was King David?”

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 swatreview@ gmail.com

How to contribute Submissions of longform reporting, personal, argumentative and photo essays, book and media reviews, short stories, poems, and anything else that seems suitable can be e-mailed to Leo Elliot, editor-in chief. Submissions will be considered from Swarthmore students, alumni, faculty, and staff, and will be considered anonymously, though will will not, except in rare cases, publish anonymously. Submissions should generally not go longer than 10,000 words.

Contact: lelliot1@swarthmore.edu, jkay2@swarthmore.edu

Ariana Hoshino (she/her) is a swashbuckling junior from the better Carolina. She spends most of her time in the CS lab coding with her hacker fingers or devising cinema gold as a film production major and founder of the Cinema Club.

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF LEO ELLIOT MANAGING JONATHAN KAY

Jonathan Kay (he/him) has aesthetic premonitions.

And recently discovered that he’s a Leo.

FEATURES JONATHAN KAY

Ari Liloia (he/him) has no biography.

Inna Kimbrough (she/her) is a sophomore and an art/cognitive science major. She prefers to project her musical elitism to the world by writing Slint lyrics on the sides of her shoes (in tender homage to her teenage years).

PERSONAL ESSAYS HOPE DARRIS

Daria Mateescu (she/her) likes dubstep, hates therapy.

FICTION & POETRY KENNY BRANSDORF

Gabriel Meyer-Lee (he/him) is a senior currently working on a scheme to allow him to avoid the real post-graduation world and allow him to live out the rest of his life in the Swarthmore Costume Shop.

BOOKS ANNA WEBER

Elisabeth Miller (she/her) is a sophomore English and History major who has no idea what she’s going to do with those degrees, thanks for asking.

Anna Weber (she/her) is a senior, majoring in English Literature and minoring in Gender/ Sexuality Studies as well as Peace and Conflict Studies. She has a dream of opening her own bookstore.

PHOTO ESSAYS REBECCA CASTILLO

Design © 2017 the Swarthmore Phoenix. All content © 2018 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.

MOVIES & TV KAT CAPOSELLA

Published by the Swarthmore Phoenix swarthmorephoenix.com

WEB EDITOR BELLARA HUANG

MUSIC GABRIEL MEYER-LEE SENIOR EDITOR JOE MARIANI

ILLUSTRATIONS EDITOR SAGE RHYS

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LAYOUT EDITOR EVA BARON

“And we both know hearts can change And it’s hard to hold a candle In the cold November rain” --Axl Rose

ARTS BOOKS

November 2018

FEATURES Worker and his Product, Woman 4 and her Womb Reproductive dystopias in Communism’s past and Capitalism’s present

by Daria Mateescu

Producing Docile Swatties Foucault on the pass/fail semester

by Lee Cohen

by Eva Baron

Junot Diaz thinks we should discuss consent

by Elisabeth Miller

The space in between

by Ariana Hoshino

Richard Powers on hope and despair in contemporary environmentalism

by Jonathan Kay

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Plus,

Sunsets

by Rebecca Castillo

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FICTION & POETRY The two observer twin paradox

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by Neel Gupta

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Flicker

by Kenny Bransdorf

Four poems

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Class-y Cooking

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A review of Jack Monroe’s “Cooking on a Bootstrap”

by Anna Weber

MUSIC “Just Mustard”

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PERSONAL ESSAYS The way my mother loves

“the Overstory” 27

PHOTO ESSAYS

by Nora Hikari Shao

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Sound paintings on the road

by Inna Kimbrough

Ambient Music

2018’s peaks and pits in the genre

by Ari Liloia

MOVIES “Corporate”

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Comedy Central shows the dark side of workplace comedy

by Gabriel Meyer-Lee

“Tila Tequila” retrospective 37 “Tila Tequila’s Shot at Love” and the grim reality (TV) it fostered

by Louisa Grenham

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FEATURE

WORKER AND HIS PRODUCT, WOMAN AND HER WOMB

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n 1951, in the Socialist Republic of Romania, a young woman was twenty one years old and pregnant with her fourth child. The daughter of a priest, though not religious herself, she was married to a factory worker. Fearing that another child would be a financial burden far beyond the family’s means, she went to an unlicensed doctor and received an abortion. She suffered an infection from the operation and died soon after, leaving my grandmother and her two brothers without a mother and great-grandfather without a wife until five years later, when he remarried.

When I was eleven, or maybe twelve, my second cousin was raped while working the crops during summertime. She has severe autism and had been adopted at the age of three from an orphanage by my grandmother’s brother. I discovered this news by accident, an indirect result of my crippling fear of lonely beds and the dark, which had compelled my grandmother to let me sleep with her. Terrified equally of death as I was of my other two amorphous enemies, I would stay awake all night listening to her breathing for fear that if I fell asleep her lungs would give way. In such a state, it was I who heard the phone ring first and I who woke my grandmother up to respond to her sister-in-law’s tears. I cracked the bathroom door and perched on the toilet cover, hoping to listen in.

Much to my chagrin, my grandmother began to sob. I followed quickly with my own round of tears, for my part due to the realization that yet another family member was human being and not superhero (I then desperately wished that human complexity could collapse into itself and leave adults as perennially composed and all knowing). She continued to do so well after I returned to the bed away from the phone, and even upon her return. She sat and told me what had happened. Then, af4

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by Daria Mateescu with illustrations by Inna Kimbrough

ter a pause: “I’ll pay for the abortion. May god save our souls.”

Though to a Western ear it might appear that the latter sentence follows from the former, this is a fallacy. Contrary to what evangelical pro-lifers might lead one to believe, the topic of abortion does not exist solely in a symbiotic relationship with religious ideologies. In contrast to the religious moralizing of American anti-choice legislation, Romanian limitations on reproductives rights have historically centered on a pronatalist discourse about the need for demographic growth. Pronatalism was not about the life of the fetus, but the birth of a worker.

The demographic need for a pronatalist stance emerged out of societal changes that early communism brought about.

Early communist gender policy centered itself around the elimination of illiteracy and the setting of universal educational standards, as well as the full integration of woman into the workforce. Traditional family norms, and whatever feudal psychologies remained culturally imprinted upon them, had to be destroyed for the newly imposed domestic climate to take hold. As unemployment was illegal, women worked as much as men outside the

home, and tasks such as raising children and completing housework were not relegated to men so women became doubly burdened. This, coupled with a generally more educated population, triggered a rapid decline in birth rates and an increase in divorce rates. The demographic shift could not satiate the needs of the socialist economy, and so childbirth-maximizing pronatalist policy began its Orwellian takeover with Decree 770.

Passed in 1967, the Decree made abortion and contraception illegal except for women older than 45, women with four or more children, women pregnant by rape (rape by spouse did not count), or women whose life was threatened by carrying to term. This led to a relative cultural revolution of women’s role in labor and in home.

Rapidly, a woman’s social success shifted away from the workplace and into motherhood. The Decree instituted a system of meager rewards, such as small allowance for children, and tremendous penalties, namely imprisonment or death. Young women had routine gynecological exams intended to determine pregnancy, after which they would be monitored. If the monitoring showed that the pregnancy had come to a sudden end, it was deemed a suspicious abortion and warranted investigation and likely imprisonment.

Women who had more children were not only praised societally, but each child after the first was allowed a greater allowance, sometimes as high as a fifth of the parent’s salary. These measures were intended to promote the rise of the new socialist population that could bear the burdens of an economy increasingly focused on a single goal: the elimination of national debt, which brought about a series of programs that created an even greater need for workers and drastically lowered the quality of life. Rapidly, the discrepancy had increased between the message of utopia

that the propaganda machine produced and the lived experiences of women and their families.

Beginning in 1966, propaganda focused on the elevation of the matriarchal figure; a woman was seen as having a special and commendable role as producer of a next generation. By 1973, as women took more symbolic roles in the political structure, propagandist iconography heralded Ceausescu’s wife Elena as the socialist archetype of motherhood. The duplicitous elements of this did not escape the population; she bore two children and did not raise them on her own. Nonetheless, the population was supposed to comply and replicate her maternal image. As this too failed and the debt-reduction plan took hold, more drastic measures became necessary. Rather than only elevating the woman-creator, it was necessary to create moral obligations and incur shame in those who met them. The nation needed workers, and to not produce them would be to betray family, fellow comrade, and nation. What these imperatives failed to take into account was the material reality of existence. Moral obligation did not produce the funds sufficient to raise a child.

As sixty percent of pregnant women deliberately aborted and there were up to four times more abortions than live births, the propaganda machine’s inefficacy was all too apparent.

The oral history of the period gathered in Gail Kligman’s “The Politics of Duplicity” documents immense suffering endured by women as well as doctors, who were forced into an ethical catch-22 between their obligations to the socialist nation and to the hippocratic oath. As one doctor says, “what shocked me was the hypocrisy and disregard for basic deontological principles by certain doctors who had highly touted reputations.” As doctors were legally forced to allow women to die preventable deaths, the deontology established by the hippocratic oath of medical practice was crumbling. At worst, doctors

would demand sex in exchange for abortive procedures, and even the monetary prices were difficult for many women to meet.

Testimonies of trauma occupy the majority of women’s oral narratives. One woman is recorded as saying, “Those were tough times; it pains me to think that it even happened. It was torture for women.”

Women had taken on the role of third-party spectator to their own oppression, one against which they could not fight without risking the loss of all material and emotional possession. In these histories, the women do not make any effort to conceal the trauma they underwent, nor do they portray the government’s enforcement as anything short of brutal terror.

What these imperatives failed to take into account was the material reality of existence. Moral obligation did not produce the funds sufficient to raise a child.

Thankfully, the worst of the terror did reach its end; with communism’s collapse, Elena and Nicolae Ceausescu’s assassination, and the ascent of capitalism came the decriminalization of abortion. The state receded from the intimate lives of its citizens, comparatively liberating women. Yet this did not vanish the era’s brutal repercussions. The rates of infant AIDS were high, and as the conditions of children abandoned to orphanages were exposed, both nation and globe were forced into an unwelcome awareness of the real consequences of demographic policy enforced via the eradication of reproductive rights.

It should concern us that if such policies were to be reinstated, our mere value judgment that they violate reproductive rights is not upheld internationally. Reproductive rights, as an internationally upheld aspect of human rights, are so ill-defined that states are able to completely deprive women of access to contraception or

abortion without actually trampling on these international orders. The definition originated at the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo in 1994. The conference hosted 179 countries with eleven thousand attendees that included activists and representatives from NGOs, governments, and international agencies. They adopted a twenty-year Program of Action which stands as the primary document framing contemporary discourse on population and reproduction. It marked, as Lara Knudsen argues in Reproductive Rights in a Global Context, a “new consensus shift … that governments have a responsibility to meet individuals’ reproductive needs, rather than demographic targets.” Importantly, it determined the new consensus on what reproductive rights actually entailed: “... the recognition of the basic right of all couples and individuals to decide freely and responsibly the number, spacing and timing of their children and to have the information and means to do so, and the right to attain the highest standard of sexual and reproductive health.

It also includes their right to make decisions concerning reproduction free of discrimination, coercion and violence, as expressed in human rights documents.”

However, this definition of these rights does not guarantee their possession, nor does it necessitate that those states who offer them will enforce a system of justice in protecting them. Within the more verbose language of that definition, the right to “decide freely and responsibly the number” stands in for what in practice may be considered access to services which terminate pregnancy. The “information and means to do so” represents comprehensive sexual education, and “the highest standard of sexual and reproductive health” represents the availability of resources which provide the medical standard necessary for safety and good health. The document capitalizes on the ambiguity of its language precisely because these material goods could not be guaranteed: at the conSWARTHMORE REVIEW

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ference itself the delegates could not agree on a consensus about abortion specifically, and therefore the word was entirely neglected. No specificity is offered for what material goods must be made available in order to have reproductive freedom, and so the formal abstractions of cautious diplomats evades descent into the preexisting material necessities to obtain an abortion.

In much of America, Roe v. Wade has been similarly abstracted to near-meaninglessness. What does it mean to have the right to abort if you have neither the resources to pay for it, ability to drive to it,

or circumstances to jump over the many hurdles set up to convince you otherwise?

Brett Kavanaugh, a man accused of sexual assault by three women, is a Supreme Court Justice. Though many consider it unlikely for Roe v. Wade to be overturned, it is near certain that the hurdles women face in accessing that formal right will only increase while he serves. Unlike Romania, much of the American pro-life agenda is derived from moral theories about fetus consciousness and Christian doctrine.

The religious component has become a politicized one, as the Republican party that once enacted some of the most generous abortion policies shifted its agenda rapidly in order to win the Catholic vote.

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American politicians perverted, in a way that was at least internally consistent if not remotely justified, morality into an engine of political gains. The gains of Republican officials does not, however, compare to the loss felt by American women as they watch their access to abortion disappear before their very eyes.

Americans have good company for this predicament. Most recently, in August of 2018, a bill that many hoped to legalize abortion in Argentina flopped, and within a week another woman had died from an illegal abortion. The following twenty-six countries ban abortion altogether: Andorra, Malta, San Marino, Angola, Congo-Brazzaville, Congo-Kinshasa, Egypt, Gabon, Guinea-Bissau, Madagascar, Mauritania, São Tomé & Príncipe, Senegal, Iraq, Laos, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Palau, Philippines, Tonga, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Suriname. Worldwide, 63% of women of reproductive age do not live in countries where abortion is permitted without restriction. Some of these policies are religiously motivated, others by concerns about declining population caused by emigration or a lack of desire to bring children into environments of extreme economic duress. The poorest women suffer the most from restrictive policies, and unwanted female children are more likely to be killed or given away to orphanages.

Though no country has achieved the same success in reproductive oppression as the Socialist Republic of Romania, many are not too far off.

Comparisons abound between communist Romania and two of the most popular dystopian novels, George Orwell’s “1984” and Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale.” Indeed, 1984 was the Republic’s peak of food rationing and censorship, a time where the only information publicly available was propaganda. Securitate, the Romanian secret service, had created a near-perfect panopticon. The state and its loyal informants installed in every Khrushchyovka quite literally watched and listened as its citizens walked to work, talked on benches, and raised their children. As for the “Handmaid’s Tale,” Margaret Atwood’s dystopia had already manifested in full strength a couple thousand miles away from her home in Ontario. In Romania, women had long before been rendered mere reproductive machines, effective craftsmen of the most valuable product: a communist worker. By the time Ceausescu and his wife were shot down by a firing squad, the year 1984 had passed

Woman as reproductive organ is already prioritized over woman as human being. We all have good reason to fear the future, but even more reason to feel disturbed by the present. and so had the worst reproductive rights abuses of modern, and perhaps ancient, history. The world that Orwell imagined as he wrote in 1949 was, in the Iron Curtain, far less than thirty five years off. As for the Margaret Atwood of 1985, the year she wrote the Handmaid’s Tale, she was twenty years past the passing of Decree 770, and she had only the whole history of civilization between her and the beginning of patriarchy.

Dystopian timestamps approach and pass; dystopian scenarios approach and sometimes remain in place. And though Merriam-Webster defines dystopia as “an imaginary place where people lead dehumanized and often fearful lives,” dystopias don’t require much of an imagination.

Woman as reproductive organ is already prioritized over woman as human being, and to say that women live fearful lives in the face of patriarchy seems laughably obvious. We all have good reason to fear the future, but even more reason to feel disturbed by the present. u

FEATURE

PRODUCING DOCILE SWATTIES

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ransitioning to college is difficult.

First-years simultaneously clammer to make friends, adjust to living away from home, and wrestle with a substantial new workload. We assume academic missteps are bound to happen. It is through this line of thinking that schools like MIT, Johns Hopkins, CalTech, and Swarthmore afford their students a supposed gift: a low-stakes, pass/ fail semester for all incoming first year students. As one student writing for the Swarthmore admissions blog, SwatStories, puts it: “without the enormous burden of grades looming over my head, I allowed myself the free time to explore the countless extracurriculars offered to try to fill up the hole that marching band had left in me… Pass/fail is about finding a sense of who you want to be at Swarthmore.” At the same time, however, students say that they worked too hard during their pass/fail semester. So, is pass/fail really best understood as a gift to freshmen to discover themselves, free from the power exacted on them by normal academic life? Why did we work so much harder than we had to?

We usually think of power in a certain, determinate, and even concrete way. Foucault complicates things a bit. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault sought to study “the metamorphosis of punitive methods on the basis of a political technology of the body”—in other words, to trace the evolution of how power was used in the penal process to physically (and psychologically) control people. In this effort, Foucault distinguishes two modes of power, sovereign and disciplinary. Sovereign power operates as we tend to think of power: a top-down, direct, and violent spectacle. It is wielded unilaterally, striking an individual when they have broken the rules or deviated from the wishes of the wielder. It is analogous to our normal expectations of power, where an entity that possesses power has the prerogative to inflict harm on others when that entity’s will is challenged. It’s important for Foucault (and maybe a little less important for us) that the powerful entity inscribes its will on the body of the transgressor, and as a result, there is no question of who holds the power in this act of punishment. But this does not explain all instances of power. For example, Foucault argues that power also operates in scenarios like regulating the days of prisoners. The aim under this type of power, the

by Lee Cohen

disciplinary model, is not to broadcast and reify where power is vested, indulging in brutal punishment of transgressors; rather, it is to produce so-called docile bodies. It is perhaps easiest to understand docility in this context in terms of utility. “Docile” in Foucault’s sense of the word implies two conditions of usefulness for the interests of the powerful: first, a sufficient level of regulated physical aptitude or control over one’s own body to carry out a designated task, a utility of capability, and second, an obedience to complete the task at hand, a utility of compliance. So what kind of power operates at Swarthmore?

photo by Jonathan Kay

We tend to think that, as students, we work for the grade. Of course, course material can be interesting, but each reading, problem set, or response paper becomes grating over the course of a given semester. Surely there is something more coercive at play. Many students think that they work hard because they are driven by a fear of a bad grade point average, sort of the sovereign power of a school.

In this analogy, the student’s GPA is like the executioner’s tool, used to punish those who do not uphold the sovereign’s aim that they do their schoolwork. The academic institution uses the GPA to inscribe and realize its own power onto the transgressing student by destroying their future prospects, leaving them branded with the power of the sovereign and crippled when they enter the job market. But perhaps disciplinary power goes

further than sovereign power to explain why students work hard, particularly seeing that they do so during their pass/fail semester when the executioner’s weapon, GPA, is not in play. I will show how the pass/fail semester trains docile Swarthmore students by applying Foucault’s three central instruments of disciplinary power as outlined in “The Means of Correct Training.” I will begin with hierarchical observation.

One of the most striking things about coming to college is the lack of time completely alone. All first-year students have at least one roommate, and it is not uncommon to have more. The dorm itself is populated by interested observers. Upperclassmen who work as Residential Assistants, Diversity Peer Advisors, Sexual Health Associates, and Student Academic Mentors serve both as friendly peers and as authority figures. They posses an elevated institutional, social, and moral status in each hall in comparison to the frantic first year students. Furthermore, the vast majority of social spaces on campus are well-populated open-plan study spaces as well, guaranteeing visibility throughout most points of the day. Studying is social, and what is social is thoroughly observed. All of this might seem pretty normal to us, but to Foucault, it would exemplify the hierarchical observation. The constant visibility of students is crucial to how disciplinary power works at Swarthmore, particularly during the pass/ fail semester. Foucault states, “the exercise of discipline presupposes a mechanism that coerces by means of observation; an apparatus in which the techniques that make it possible to see induce effects of power and in which, conversely, the means of coercion make those on whom they are applied clearly visible.” This sentiment is somewhat reminiscent of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. Observation is not simply the process of receiving information about a subject; the subject is changed by the very act of observation. This observation is inconspicuous as it is completely normal to a given student. However, there is little doubt that one acts differently when one is observed, even if that observation is not abnormal. Every student becomes an observer and an observee. The “calculated gaze” of a classmate, an RA, or a even roommate serves to keep each student entangled in the web of surveillance wherein one feels SWARTHMORE REVIEW

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that they ought to be stressed and working diligently at virtually all times. There is no need for a professor to wield the power to devastate a student’s transcript to encourage obedience. It is accomplished simply through the reproachful gaze of other working students.

There seems to be an implicit rule we all learn or a particular pressure we feel when we first arrive at campus: proper Swatties ought to marry their academic and social identities. I remember the way in which first year students introduced themselves to one another for the first two months or so of

of normalizing judgment. First, undesirable behaviors are punished or checked in subtle ways that we may not normally consider punishment, like “a certain coldness, a certain indifference, a question, a humiliation…” Second, what is determined undesirable does not cleanly fall into “the binary opposition of the permitted and the forbidden.”

Rather, there is a spectrum of normalcy, and, within it, an infinite number of ways to deviate from a given norm. Any given student entered the college occupying a unique situation in relation to the norm of the socially academic, hard-working Swarthmore stu-

photo by Jonathan Kay

my pass/fail semester. There was an expected format that we all knew and eventually grew tired of: name, where you are from, and your prospective major (and generally preferred pronouns). Deviating from this model of introduction would result in an ever-so-slightly surprised or hesitant response from one’s fellow interlocutor, slowly teasing each individual student towards the academic/social norm. In this way of acting, firstyear students were conditioned to link their academic interests to their social lives, as is expected of them as Swarthmore students.

As groups developed around these academic interests, even though you could get away without doing much work, freshmen would study together as a social event. This trained each student to a distinctly Swarthmorean way of doing schoolwork, or at least finding themselves in work-spaces. They became what is useful to Swarthmore as an academic institution: useful, docile students, working hard not from fear of bad grades, but because it was an integral part of their social success.

Foucault’s second instrument of disciplinary power, normalizing judgement, may be useful to unpack this phenomenon. Two factors are essential to Foucault’s definition 8

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dent, and each underwent an individualized habituation towards this new, universal norm due to normalizing judgement. The college does not need to brandish anything at new students to urge productive normalization.

The students do such work inconspicuously on themselves.

It would be misleading to say that there is no evaluation during Swarthmore’s pass/fail semester at all. While typical, GPA-impacting grades may be suspended during pass/ fail, something else takes their place. Students during pass/fail receive two sorts of evaluation: quantitative “shadow grades” (which are only kept internally at Swarthmore and can be a factor in declaring a major, perhaps retaining some elements of sovereign power), and qualitative, written comments particular to the student’s performance in each of their classes. These qualitative comments are intended to give the student individualized feedback on their performance in their courses and to suggest how they may improve to be a successful college student in the future. This kind of evaluation seems pretty benign, but Foucault argues in “The Means of Correct Training” that the final instrument through which disciplinary power

operates is examination. We can think of it as a combination of hierarchical observation and normalizing judgement. Examination “is a normalizing gaze… It establishes over individuals a visibility through which one differentiates and judges them.” In essence, once the subjects are placed under hierarchical observation and are atomized and distributed in relation to a given norm through normalizing judgement, they are formalized as “cases” in the system of disciplinary power at hand—they are under examination. In other words, people are made determinate parts of the institution through which disciplinary power operates.

But, what exactly is a “case” in this context?

Foucault defines it as “the individual as he may be described, judged, measured, compared with others, in his very individuality; and it is also the individual who has to be trained or corrected, classified, normalized, excluded, etc.” which is achieved through written documentation. Formalizing people in this way (and the threat of doing so) has significant implications for how people view themselves. Returning to examination during pass/fail, the student’s identity is similarly formalized and documented by the school. The qualitative comments are deeply personal, and they cannot be written off as just something that impacts GPA. This is you—the you who is first and foremost a successful or unsuccessful producer of academic work. This case is what the school “thinks” of the student in relation to its expected, academic norms. It is no surprise that students would feel compelled to live up to these norms for their own sake, not out of fear of long lasting implications of grades on their future prospects, but of a long-lasting reputation. Students end up wanting to be docile.

Let me be clear—this essay is not a plea to Swarthmore’s administration to abolish pass/fail. Even if Foucault complicates our normal understanding of the first semester at Swarthmore, bringing to light a more coercive side of some of the generally unexamined parts of the Swarthmore experience, does disciplinary power not effectively transform highschool acceptees into what Swarthmore needs to function? In this way, pass/fail molds students to the goal of being able to function well at Swarthmore. But, as we have seen, maybe the disciplinary power to which students are subject at Swarthmore does more than help achieve their goals; maybe it does something to shape these goals in the first place. More than any concrete aim, Foucault warns us that there is a risk of forgetting about power. We may let our critical guard down when GPA is suspended, but nevertheless, power is everywhere, whether we realize it or not. u

PERSONAL ESSAYS the way my mother loves

by Eva Baron

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he’s crouching over, back arched, skinny limbs hanging off the chair like an acrobat, or perhaps a deer.

There is nothing beautiful in the way she mourns, in the way she cries. It feels like sorrow, contoured by deep shadows, and it’s her sorrow, wailing and pulsing (even I can feel it from my room, underneath my heavy covers). And it’s November, but her spine hangs like a bow, curved and bent.

The sky’s probably gotten darker by now, lights coming from the other apartments outside the window, and she knows he’s not coming back (I know he isn’t, too).

He left last month, when I had an orange bag of Halloween candy on the kitchen table, and my mother had her black scarf on, tethered at the end, because it was getting cold, reminiscent of fall. He lives on Lafayette Street now, just a few blocks away, but I’ve only ever seen him in his own room, big windows, and sun spilling down like the yolk of an egg. Sometimes, he tells me, he goes back to Mercer Street, to the apartment that I live in with only my mother now. Perhaps he picks up a piece of clothing or a precious sculpture sitting on a thin table, small and compact. But it’s April now, and he got rid of his keys, I think.

She probably knew he came to the apartment sometimes, but only slightly, and only when she allowed herself to glide, freely, in thoughts and in memory. It must’ve tasted like bile, and she would chew it hard, swallow, and lament, an enormous and retching feeling. Tucking me into bed, lights dim and curtains neatly pulled down, she might’ve pretended to smile, and I might’ve too, but I knew this was what losing felt like. It’s fear and it’s anguish and it’s a sun that spills. In her room, she might’ve felt it too, deep and fat underneath the yellowing light. And it’s September now, ten years later, and I haven’t seen my mother grieve since my father left in 2008. Sometimes she even tells me, when we mock, lightheartedly, what was once so utterly painful and immediate, “Good riddance! I’m glad that

it’s just us.” Her voice isn’t full of guilt, or sorrow, but rather relief, a careful one: “It was hard for us, wasn’t it?” And in our new apartment, the one she bought herself last year, with the soft bed sheets, white walls with apparitions of trees, it’s easy to laugh and to forget.

But she knew grief, intimately, and she taught me how to know it, too. She taught me with shared tears, with a dread for what was to come, with quiet sighs, breathless, that would only sometimes float through the kitchen and into my own room. But my mother also knew love, fully and completely. And she had those beautiful hands, angular fingers with crescent nails embedded in flesh (she used to play piano when she was young). And they were hands that loved, that caressed, that delicately washed vegetables for dinner, that only a mother has. I think she taught me love more than grief, a love that was so incredibly laced with motherhood.

She came home one night, her eyes exhausted, black jacket hanging off of her shoulders sloppily, and told me that she had decided to stop working with my father. It

PERSONAL ESSAY

didn’t feel like vengeance, but she had decided to leave and she excused her choice with yearning, something she said that I couldn’t understand yet. It was yearning to be a leaf, perhaps, instead of an intimate part of the bark, of the tree itself.

“And how’ll you get money, without dad?”

My question had the texture of crumpling, like the delicate crumpling of paper, but mostly of expression. And my mother’s face crumpled, too, bitter at what I thought was a mundane observation.

“It’s completely possible.” She was probably trying to comfort herself, rigid voice, but bristling with insecurity. “And it’ll be fine.”

But during that March night, just a few months after he left, I couldn’t believe her.

And instead I chose to listen to her grief and not her confidence, one that was only budding, shyly and quietly. Of course, it was selfish of me to do so, childish and foolish. But, at the same time, how could I have understood? How could I have understood her love, her capability? I had only heard people praise my father. Hardly

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did I hear, not even in a whisper, someone praise my mother, who stood bleakly, almost shadowed, next to him. And in the bare, fluorescent shine of the kitchen lights,

It didn’t feel like vengeance, but she had decided to leave and she excused her choice with yearning, something she said that I couldn’t understand yet. she looked small. No sun spilled lavishly over her, making her fat with its glare, and I felt her grief that night. It was pulsing and afraid.

Her grief kept pulsing for a while. I felt it, sometimes, when she would come home from her new job, frustrated probably, feeling as though she had made a crucial, almost vital, mistake. And I sometimes felt it when she would forget to cook dinner, empty the microwave for some leftovers.

And I felt it sometimes when her eyes were brimmed with a gentle sorrow, but never becoming liquid. And it was lonely. A cer-

tain emptiness had ruled the white walls, stainless and pristine, since my father left Mercer Street, forcing my mother to raise me with her hands that were tired, worn out, from rubbing her knotted back, her exhausted eyes, her pounding temples. But her hands, regardless of her own turmoil and her own solitude, seeped into my own, spilling in a way that a sun couldn’t, holding in a way a father couldn’t. It was love, and it was deep, a little fragile, and I felt it, pealing like bells. It was almost beautiful, and, in a whisper, I praised her, over and over and over again.

Molded like an arrow, spindly and linear, my mother’s back doesn’t hang like it used to. It doesn’t curve as a bow would, isn’t rigidly hugging her spine, flesh covering bone.

But it took her years to perfect, to master a straight back, one which braved emptiness and an emasculated, castrated home. And I was raised in that fluidity, that hesitant exploration of womanhood, unhinged from father and from man. She’s sitting there now, ten years later, with her shoulders arched back, a quiet concentration wrinkling her forehead, artificial glow from the computer softening her cheeks, and she asks as I walk into her room, “want to see my new project I’m doing for work? Look at this design here. I think it’s kind of nice.”

There’s hesitation in her voice, reminiscent of that insecurity from when my father left, from when she had to root a home into herself, be a mother, discover how to work by herself without a man. “Don’t you?”

And it is. It’s gorgeous, a design of a per-

fume bottle, penciled out with her own hands, exuding a humble womanhood.

And I love her. I love her with the love she taught me, the love she raised me with.

My mother’s back doesn’t hang like it used to. It doesn’t curve as a bow would, isn’t rigidly hugging her spine, flesh covering bone.

“It’s great.”

Because I can’t tell her in words, mere sentences, how much praise I have for her, how much I admire her. And her hands glide over her keyboard, the hands that love and caress, gently, and it’s overwhelming to love so much. She had done it all herself, done everything she once thought she couldn’t, that she once heard she wasn’t capable of doing.

“Thank you for showing me.”

Because that’s all I can really say to her (it’s only a fragment of gratitude), and it’s overwhelming to love so much, and the trees dance across the white walls of her room. u

PERSONAL ESSAY

Junot Diaz thinks we should discuss consent CW: Sexual violence

by Elisabeth Miller

W

hen I found out that Junot Diaz was coming to Swarthmore last spring, I was ecstatic.

“The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” was one of my favorite books, and Swarthmore was his first public appearance after his article in the New Yorker about the sexual abuse he endured as a child came out. I read it just as I was beginning to piece together what had happened to me in a dimly lit dorm room only a month before.

During his talk, Diaz was charming and funny, and he made a point to take 10

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He signed my book and actually spelled my name correctly, almost emphasizing the often forgotten “S” with a flourish. questions from women. He made me believe that he cared about what silenced voices had to say.

Afterwards, I waited in line for an hour

to meet him. When I finally reached the front of the line, he smiled, shook my hand, and said: “Hi, I’m Junot.” I thought this was nice, humble. He said my name was beautiful and traditional. I told him that he had inspired me as a writer and that it was surreal to meet him. He smiled and told me to keep writing.

A few weeks later, the other articles came out. The ones about the grad student from Columbia he cornered and forcibly kissed at a lecture, the woman he berated for questioning whether his satirical misogyny was thinly veiled, actual misogyny, and the literary peers he embarrassed and belittled for sharing their female experiences. I wondered what

other stories remained in the dark.

Diaz responded. He didn’t apologize; instead, he said, “We must continue to teach all men about consent and boundaries.” When I read these words from one of my favorite authors, I was doing my best to get out of bed, to convince everyone that I was okay. Because if I told someone that I wasn’t, I would have had to label what happened.

When Organizing For Survivors began their movement last Spring, I didn’t think that I had the right to accept their voice as an extension of my own because what happened to me wasn’t bad enough.

I didn’t scream or fight, and my life never felt like an episode of SVU. The conversation around sexual assault was loud and all-consuming, but I convinced myself that I had nothing to contribute. Despite that, Diaz’s response disgusted me. As I studied for finals, my mind oscillated between vivid memories of my assault and Diaz’s words, and I struggled to make sense of it all. I didn’t understand how

Junot Diaz is different. I don’t think I can look past this, separate the art from the artist and continue to support him. someone who had smiled at me and made me feel important could say something so unsatisfying, so heartbreaking. When I packed up my room for the summer, I threw my copy of “Oscar Wao” into my bag. I tried to read it on the plane, but it felt heavy in my hands, and Diaz’s signature on the inside cover had lost its flair.

Diaz isn’t the only man in the MeToo era to disappoint me. Kevin Spacey, Aziz Ansari, Louis C.K., the list goes on and on. I’m not perfect though. I will undoubtedly watch the next season of “Master of None,” and “American Beauty” is still one of my favorite movies. I don’t know what this says about me. Maybe I’m a bad survivor. Maybe I’m tired.

But Junot Diaz is different. I don’t think I can look past this, separate the art from the artist and continue to sup-

I was doing my best to get out of bed, to convince everyone that I was okay. Because if I told someone that I wasn’t, I would have had to label what happened. port him. I feel betrayed by his response, by his insinuation that women must keep working to teach men to respect them.

That women have to teach men to not assault them or disregard their boundaries.

That I was assaulted because I didn’t do a good enough job of teaching men about consent and boundaries. Because I was naive enough to think that I was entitled to respect.

Being back on campus is hard. After a summer of lying in bed, binge-watching The Wire until my eyes burned, and adopting silence as my coping mechanism, I don’t know how to be at Swarthmore, how to function when I see my assaulter around every corner. I look around campus and at the world, and I’m angry. I think about Junot Diaz, and I’m angry. I’m filled with an anger so deep and hateful that I wonder if my whole

body will crack and break apart. Anger is a new emotion for me. I have always been a nice girl.

If anyone wants a signed copy of “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” addressed to Elisabeth with a flourish to emphasize the often-forgotten s, you can have it. I think I’m done making excuses.

I think it’s time to be honest about what happened to me, to stop trying to deconstruct and deny the narrative that I know is true. One step at a time, I will become honest.

I have only just started calling it assault. It still feels wrong, like a bitter word belonging to someone else’s mouth, but it’s a start.

Maybe I’m a hypocrite. If I were truly done making excuses then I would report my assaulter. I would stop hiding in my room to avoid seeing him and feeling that wave of self-hatred come rushing over me again. I would admit to myself and everyone around me that I feel small, that I fear my body will never be my own again, that I wonder if I will ever really get over it. I would put his name here, in tiny print, as a subscript to the story that he has played the main role in for far too long.

But I won’t. I can’t.

Maybe one day, hopefully in the not so distant future, I will start speaking truthfully. Maybe one day I will stop working so hard for respect and instead start to expect it.

But first, I’ll just throw out the book.

We all have to start somewhere. u

I threw my copy of “Oscar Wao” into my bag. I tried to read it on the plane, but it felt heavy in my hands, and Diaz’s signature on the inside cover had lost its flair.

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The Space in Between

by Ariana Hoshino

M

y summer can be described in an elevator pitch: I was living in LA and interning at a small production company in West Hollywood doing coverage for development.

But on the weekends, my roommate Ilana and I hopped in my rental car and adventured up and down the west coast. The truly unforgettable moments are inexpressible through words—the feeling of a sunset over the mountains driving north on the 5, the fear of maneuvering a narrow road above the clouds and a thousand feet above the ocean, the vibrant life and sweltering heat of Venice Beach, the chilliness of the day Ilana and I walked over the Golden Gate bridge and looked out at the expanse between us and San Francisco. These are photos I took with my Minolta SRT-101 (a 35mm film camera) in Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, and all the spaces in between. u

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Sunsets

by Rebecca Castillo

S

unsets in Los Angeles are something else. The sky turns orange, purple, yellow, pink. A good sunset will be on everyone’s Snapstory—some might even make it to Instagram. When I’m homesick, I scroll through my photos of sunsets that have blown me away: sunsets on the beach, on the mountains on the frozen yogurt shop I frequented in high school. I like to take the colors of these sunsets and splash them onto my photos. It makes me feel a little more at home. u

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FICTION&POETRY Two observer twin paradox

FICTION

by Neel Gupta

I

returned to my high school, ostensibly to teach math. I thought my old stomping grounds would prove the impetus for my graceful exit from academia after a failed career. Over the past eight years, I had hit the wall in physics, and switched to math out of fear. With math, I felt secure in the blanket of rigor; empiricism dressed up in calculus scared me off like a blind date. Regardless, I came back to high school because it remained my only association with unencumbered intellectualism. I left high school idealistic and sure of myself; I came back hoping to replicate the experience. Regardless of my intended goals, I met Evelyn Rosewind, the new high school physics teacher, herself barely out of college.

At the start, she was to my left. Or perhaps I was to her right. Those days, I saw her bygone middle school, adolescent shyness, unsure and eager and I found it exhilarating and new. I saw someone moldable, a soul uncorrupted by the higher levels of education, in sharp contrast to myself. Perhaps she saw me as a source of wisdom, a dying nucleus of washed up intellectual energy waiting to be harnessed. In those days, we measured different times; I brought her out of her shell, and she gave me a reason to think.

Simultaneity was not agreed upon. I was still and she was hurtling towards me. Or perhaps she was the still one, and I was hurtling towards her. She spent her days exploring and creating; every interaction we had was a movie with me as the viewer. She moved from surrealism to dada, from romance to the novel at a breakneck speed. She dilated time and contracted length. We were unsure of each other, but excited, what we misjudged we Lorentz transformed away. What I initially thought was merely to be a transitory career, a time to rediscover myself through a vicarious reimagining of my young adult

years, turned into a meandering and tentative courting, entirely unlike anything I

At the start, she was to my left. Or perhaps I was to her right. experienced in high school. I found myself loving to teach, and I think she found herself loving to learn.

It was late, and we were on the phone, just like the day before and the day before and the one before that. t = 0, x = 0. t’ = 0, x’ = 0. Our clocks synched. That night, we discussed the twin paradox and what it meant. We understood the physics. One twin leaves the other on earth, travelling near the speed of light, consequently measuring a proper time less than that of the stationary twin. Once hitting mars, the twin reverses direction, coming back to Earth at the same constant velocity. Both twins see each other as moving

relative to themselves. Thus, the paradox: when the twin returns to earth after flipping the direction of their velocity halfway through the trip, who was older and who was younger? Who moved, and who didn’t? I argued the canonical, mathematical explanation; the doppler effect and the speed of light indicated that the traveler was younger, by both twins’ admission. It was trivial once one understood the physics. I also mentioned the explanations that depend on the sudden moment of acceleration undergone by the moving twin. She postulated that with each explanation, the others grew less credible.

We were both in our third year of teaching, and I’d never been happier. We stayed up developing curriculum plans, and we guest-starred in each other’s classes. I’d go and derive the position equation for constant acceleration, and she’d come in and teach cross products. I remembered why I used to love physics; conserved quantities governed the world elegantly. We sat by ourselves at lunch, earning the enmity of our colleagues. Our English lit colleagues

from scienceabc.com

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analyzed our every action through various lenses of critical theory. Even our kids said stuff. I didn’t care, I never would.

Improbably, it seemed she didn’t either. I felt my world conflating and converging; teaching, math, my high school years were all in our absolute pasts, causally leading me to her. I made her happy, and no thrill in life equates that of making someone

from infinityplusonemath.wordpress

you love smile. We made plans, ten-year plans and twenty-year plans, we saw ourselves at universities in France and labs in Russia. We agreed on the order of events; for the first and last time, we were on the same page.

With time, and motion, came change.

Her breakneck pace towards me never slowed down. Just as we had converged, so we diverged; she left me on Earth and never returned to see the resulting age gap.

We switched places. She became outgoing and I, reserved. With every step she grew more self-certain and confident, while I meandered, devoid of purpose. We drifted, as quickly as we had come together. I saw her racing past me, inertially, and I realized my delusion was that she’d slow down and stop where I was. Somehow, I thought her momentum would disappear as she approached me. She was a physicist: to have slowed down would have been to sacrifice her own inertia. Perhaps, though, she would say that I was the one who didn’t slow down for her, that I raced past expecting her to accelerate to my velocity instantaneously. I couldn’t make Eve happy anymore. I was too tense, too aware of myself, too aware of our relative motions to slow it down. We interacted as two relics from our bygone identities,

Flicker

by Kenny Bransdorf

“D

o you ever think about how little space we occupy in the minds of others? Mostly we just exist in our own. Otherwise, our existence is fleeting, made up of moments where others see you. Think of you. But even then, it’s not you that’s existing. It’s their idea of you, a pale reflection of our true selves.”

“If there is such a thing as a true self.”

“Fine then, our self-concept. No one sees you as you do. No one knows you like you do, and they don’t care to. They’re too focused on themselves. We all build our worlds around and within ourselves, we’re constantly thinking about the self.”

“Well, that’s not always a bad thing.

Sometimes that can take the form of constructive introspection, which can further lead to moments of piercing insight and revelation.”

“Sometimes. But too often we waste our

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incompatible with our and each other’s present selves. I saw our intersection, the moment where our clocks synched, as the end of time, not just a node on a path.

She started to sit with the English depart-

With time, and motion, came change.

Her breakneck pace towards me never slowed down. Just as we had converged, so we diverged... ment, and the history department, and even the foreign languages. I sat out in the field by myself, recalling our high school barbeques. Eve got research job offers, I chaired the department. I became a teenager, obsessive and over-analytical, and she diversified, matured, grew ephemeral. I contemplated the twin paradox. She raced away from Earth. u

FICTION CW: Addiction time and energy obsessing over inconsequential, petty details. And even if we do end up understanding ourselves better, what difference does that make? When you die, all that understanding, all that knowledge of the self goes with you. The history of you and your inner life… it all flickers out. And your memory soon follows, displaced by the void, and then it’s like you were never here.”

“All right, can we talk about something else? This conversation is a huge bummer.”

“So you must realize I’m right then.”

“No. I think about other people.”

“But mostly just when they’re relevant to your agenda, right?”

“What? That’s not true.”

“If you say so.”

“Seriously, enough of this.”

“Okay. I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine.”

“I just… I just can’t stop thinking how lonely it is to lead a life. Or be led.”

“I’m not lonely.”

“You don’t ever wake up and feel like there’s no one you can talk to? That even when you’re with your friends, there’s something between you, subtle but insurmountable? A barrier that communication breaks against, that keeps you from really connecting. From really seeing them, and vice versa.”

“I feel it right now with you.” “… Me too.”

“God, you’re such a chore. You know why you’re still unhappy? Because you never try to actually change. Oh sure, you love talking about how shitty you feel and how shitty life is. But when it comes time to act… you don’t. And hey, if you want to resign yourself to living sad and lonely for the rest of your life, then don’t let me stop

you. But don’t come to me with your whining. I don’t have time for that shit.” “…” “…”

“You’re right. I know you’re right. I’m the only one who can change my circumstances.”

“Uh-huh.”

“But.” “But?” “I don’t think I… it’s not really possible for me anymore.”

“See, this is what I hate. You haven’t even tried, and you’ve already given up.”

“Just trying is hard.”

“I can’t suffer those who don’t have enough in them to try.”

“Where’s your compassion?”

“The well’s empty. You’ve drawn it all up, dried it all up.”

“Wow, well I’m sure grateful. I didn’t realize what for anyone else would be the bare minimum was actually all you could muster.”

“And I hate that passive aggressive bullshit you throw when people don’t coddle you. Every time someone tries to give you a hard truth, you lash out like a child.”

“I’m the child? This coming from a man with the emotional intelligence of your average ten year old?”

“Oh, it’s not a matter of emotional intelligence. I understand your feelings very well, and I’ve tried so many times to empathize with you. The problem is you don’t give anything back. You just talk and talk and talk about yourself and how horrible

“You don’t ever wake up and feel like there’s no one you can talk to? That even when you’re with your friends, there’s something between you, subtle but insurmountable? your life is.”

“I ask you how you’re doing, but you don’t give me anything. What am I supposed to do with that?”

“I don’t give you anything because there’s no point. I tried before, and you didn’t listen. You never listen. I see it in your barely concealed boredom, I hear it in your ‘mmhmms’ and other non-responses.

You don’t actually give a shit about me, or anyone else. It’s all about you. And what’s even more infuriating is that you go off on these long-winded speeches about what’s wrong with all of us, how we’re all selfish and terrible, yet somehow you fail to see how you’re guilty of the same things.”

“I see. I see it in all of us.”

“Oh really? So change then. Be better.”

“I can’t suffer those who don’t have enough in them to try.”

“Where’s your compassion?”

“The well’s empty.

You’ve drawn it all up, dried it all up.”

“You don’t care about hurting your friends. You don’t care about letting them down. It doesn’t affect you. There’s no guilt.”

“What do I have to be guilty for? I’m not doing anything that bad.”

“Maybe not, but you’re not doing good either.”

“Oh please.”

“Look at how you treat people. What impact do you have? Do you do more good, or bad?”

“Stop talking down to me.”

“I’m not.”

“You think I’m stupid.”

“No, I think you’re thoughtless. I’m amazed that you can go through life like that. Ignoring your problems, keeping people at an arm’s length just by not thinking of them. Going weeks without talking to your supposed friends. And when we come to you for understanding, you always fall short.”

“Whatever.”

“See, you’re doing it right now! Shutting off your feelings, and shutting out mine.”

“Sorry. I’m awful, I’m a cold-hearted, selfish, numbed-out piece of shit. That’s what you want to hear, right?”

“It’s sad that you don’t see how accurate that is. If you had an ounce of self-awareness…”

“I’ve had enough of this. You don’t know me. You act like you’ve got me figured out,

“It’s not that easy. I barely have enough energy to get out of bed. How do you expect me to change myself?”

“Anyone can change.”

“Know anyone who has? Have you ever changed yourself for the better?”

“I don’t need to change. I’m fine.”

“Interesting. So there’s nothing wrong with you?”

“I’ve got some minor flaws, I guess.”

“Minor flaws? You constantly flake on people. You never follow through. You make and break promises like it’s nothing.

Fucking people over at every turn, what a life. It would eat me alive.”

“As if you’re the most reliable person.

How many times have you told me ‘I can’t go out today,’ or ‘I can’t be around people?’”

“Our reasons are completely different.”

“Right, right, because you’re sad. That makes it all okay.”

“As if it’s so simple. I’m not saying I’m justified.”

“But you’re still better than me. That’s what you’re insinuating, right?”

“We’re just very different people.”

“Oh, fuck off.”

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but you don’t.”

“Seems like you’re scared I do. It scares you when I hold up the mirror, and this is all you see. This is all there is to you.”

“Fucking armchair pseudo-psychologist. How about I show you your reflection? Huh? You’d like that?”

“I’ve seen it enough times that it’s burned into my vision. I can’t stop seeing, I can’t put it out of my mind.”

“How tragic. I’d weep for you, but I’m cut off from my emotions.”

“Again with the lack of self-awareness… you’re unbearable.”

“Can’t you just accept that not everyone’s like you? Not everyone wants to pour out their heart every time they feel down.

You’re an exposed nerve, raw and throbbing, all the time. And that’s fine for you, it’s just not for me. I don’t want to show the ugly inside me.”

“I thought you were okay with yourself.”

“Well, I’m not. All right? You got me.”

“I wasn’t trying to get you.”

“Yes, you were. You love doing that.” “...”

“You know… I’m gonna regret this, but fuck it. Let’s talk. I’ll try one more time, what’ve I got to lose? When I think back…

I don’t remember ever feeling motivated. I didn’t know where other people got it from. My mom was always pushing me to do stuff. She was the one who made me join all those clubs, saying, ‘You need to get involved. Otherwise you won’t get into any good schools.’ So I did. It’s not like I hated it, but I mean, it wasn’t my choice.

I just thought that’s what I was supposed to do. At the time, it didn’t really bother me. I thought I was okay with being guided through life, letting stuff fall in my lap.

But after getting here, I realized… I don’t know what I like to do. I don’t know what I want. I’m not connected to anyone or anything, because all I’ve been doing is going through the motions, checked out. And when I looked at everyone else, all of you had these big plans for the future. You had these rich, full lives, and I didn’t. That terrified me. I was scrambling for a reason to… to be. I was desperate for purpose, something that could drive me, but I couldn’t find it. Then I started smoking, and suddenly all that shit that was stressing me out dissolved like it was nothing. I couldn’t remember why I was so worried. Escaping the pain… for a while that was enough for me. But now I look back and realize that I spent two years holed up in my room high.

I barely remember any of it, and what I do recall feels like it happened to someone else. Some stranger whose thoughts and 22

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feelings I can’t access or understand, who did things I wish he hadn’t. Or maybe it’s more the things he didn’t do. He never pushed himself. He was scared of people, of the world, of trying. After all, why take

Rationally, sure, I know I should quit.

It’s keeping me like this, as this hollow half-person that doesn’t feel or think or try. But I can’t, because I’m so afraid that it’s too late for me. risks, why expose yourself to harm when you can just smoke alone and feel good?

Zero effort, no need to rise to a challenge.

No need to deal with my problems. So I do it every day, when I wake up and when I need to sleep. Before and after class, because why not. Can’t catch up at this point, so fuck it. Fuck all of it. Do you see what I’m saying? It’s the only thing that matters to me, it’s the only thing I have, because I let the rest slip through my fingers. People left. Opportunities passed me by. My life passed me by, and I doubt it’s coming back.

So now, this is all I’m left with. This is the only constant, my only joy, if you can call it that. And rationally, sure, I know I should quit. It’s keeping me like this, as this hollow half-person that doesn’t feel or think or try. But I can’t, because I’m so afraid that it’s too late for me. It’s too late to fill up this emptied-out life, to fix me. I’m too far gone.” “…”

“What do you have to say? I’ll wait.” “…”

“You wanted to talk. So here we are.

Can’t un-ring that bell.”

“I didn’t realize it was making you unhappy. I thought you had it under control.”

“I’ve hinted at this several times with you.”

“I’m sorry, I must have missed them.”

“No shit.”

“Don’t blame me for not picking up

on your hints. You should’ve just been straightforward with me.”

“It’s not as easy for the rest of us. And if you had been paying attention, you would’ve gotten them.”

“Okay, fine. I’m sorry. I’m here now. So… why don’t you just throw out your weed?”

“Just like that.”

“Yeah. Simple.”

“You’re right. So simple. Wish I’d thought of that earlier.”

“Why are you getting mad? Just giving you some friendly advice.”

“Thanks so much. Really appreciate it.”

“Do you have a better solution? Do you have any plan at all? Or are you just complaining?”

“Look, forget I said anything.”

“If all you want is a shoulder to cry on, I’ll gladly give you mine. But didn’t you say you can’t stand those who don’t try?”

“I have tried. So many times. But I always get pulled back in.”

“All right. And why is that?”

“Because… it’s too hard to be sober.

I’ve tried, and sometimes I’ll go for a few days and it’s fine. Not great, but fine. Then something happens, a little thing, and it’s devastating. I feel so low, so small, over nothing. So when that happens, I’m forced to confront the fact that… like, if at any given moment I’m just a step away from overwhelming despair… do I have a good life? Am I happy? And I know the answer to both those questions, I’ve known for a long time. It just sucks to acknowledge. Because, let’s face it, I’m probably not going to change. It’s too hard, too late. Easier for me to just keep on doing what I’m doing until it’s over.”

“Don’t say that.”

“That’s where I’m at right now. Anything else would be a lie. And you wanted me to be honest with you, right?”

“Yes.” “…” “…”

“So. What now?”

“I don’t know.”

“Figures. Who does?”

They laugh in spite of themselves. It’s not particularly funny. But it feels right to laugh, because what else can they do? Soon the tears arrive and begin their descent, rolling down their cheeks as they lean into their chortling. Though they have no more of an answer than before, somehow this releases them, if only for a few precious moments. They see each other now for the first time in years. Of course they wanted more. Perhaps this is enough. u

Four Poems

POETRY

by Nora Hikari Shao

death does not ask

you died. how do you make someone know the light fading from behind your eyes and leaving your body? how can someone who still belongs to the world of the living know what it is to walk in the world of the death? they cannot know the sickening emptying when the carrion feeders scoop mouthfuls of your life out from your unresisting flesh. they cannot know what it is to be bound and led to the water and forced to drink until you have gorged yourself on the waters and you rot with the drowning. after dying, you are a crooked thing. a splintered thing. a killing thing to behold. you have no place here. no mirror will bear your gaze. no land will hold you above the waters. you just fall – fall into it again. into the cold and the crushing and the unwelcome holding. you do not turn when the living mock the dead. you do not look when they break light-hearted about the dying. you know that they cannot know. they who have never borne a murder against their hips, held its head as it drank of your breast. you died. you do not belong here. but there is somewhere next. there is something more after the grip. you think. you are still looking. you will keep looking through death. perhaps the looking is what’s next. perhaps there is something else. you don’t know, but you hope – which is not quite believing, but it is enough. u

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Ephesians 6:13

i. God is a girl with a sling against a giant of the nation.

Did David feel this way when he faced an armed soldier of injustice?

Of an opposing people who would seek to tear him down? Did he don God as a garb around his shoulders, did he wear You as an unseen shield and sword? ii. God is who I paint black on my face; God is the razor on my scalp, my skin; when I face the armies of the nations on these trains and sidewalks, God is bare on my shoulders. In the step of my combat boots. Dripping from the spikes on my collar. God is the cherry eucharist painting my grimace that the soldiers tell me to betray into a smile. iii. My heart is a place of broken glass, smashed bottles held up like lanterns in the darkness. I am not a kind woman. I am not a gentle woman. I have never borne a child against my breast and I never will.

My Mother does not begrudge me my bleeding edges. She is a hard place against whom I sharpen my teeth and shatter.

She is a ring of keys borne for my knuckles. She finds the men that jeer at me and silences their tongues, topples them from their high places and brings them low. iv. Worship is this war. My hymns are the sound of breaking chains.

God lives in these hands that have innocently held so many of Her sinless daughters and She is here for the ending.

She is here ready to level. She is ready for the finishing.

I have God on my side. May my enemies tremble at Her coming. u

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eucharist

When I say your name it drips down my open offered mouth.

Lord is a prayer only you can hear, a shuttered gospel for this lonely hour.

When I say amen it is an undressing.

Heat for you lances me spread-eagled as a waiting tomb and a cross on a skull.

You told me take and eat and it was a consenting.

You told me this is my body and it was, and I gorged myself on the fat and the fruit of you.

Felt you trickle down my waiting throat, felt your fire settle in my deep places.

There was no apostle before me.

I cried out your name in the morning as the jars trembled from my fingers in the sight of you. I bore your body as you breathed out your gospel and took it into my flesh. I spoke it out first, proclaimed the shivering life you bled from your open flesh. Felt the tenderness in your wanting wounds.

You told me do this in remembrance of me, and I do. I eat. This is an unveiling and it is a hunger and it is a bread that feeds without end and without satisfaction – without needing to satisfy.

The hunger and the thirst is the life of it.

The starving is the strength of it.

And I will stay, hands outstretched, kneeling before you as I have done so many times before, wanting and begging, give me this day my daily bread, and I will eat of you. u

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a name is a chain

i. Isaac a name is a chain. it weighs and binds.

I did not choose this name. it means “sacrifice” and it chose me. it means “patriarch” and it chose me. this name means what it is cast upon me to mean. this name means being led by someone with a knife in hand to see the Absolute. this name means bare. this name means burden. this name means abomination. this name means “he will laugh” and at my expense. this name means burning and eating. ii. Nora I am taking this blade. I am cutting these ropes unclean through. I am unmaking this altar stone upon stone upon stone. my mother calls for me and I do not answer. a name is a chain. it is a binding promise, a covenant. this one I have built for myself. I have given it into the hands of my love. she whispers it to me like a scalpel down my back and it peels away these calloused layers. it cuts through my old face and reveals my shining. this name is a cloak of wondrous colors and it is a gift to myself. I am new life now.

I have cast off bondage and I face the wild. iii. Jacob a name is a blessing, it is a prayer of love. it is a promise and it is a charge.

I have earned this name through combat and my hips are monument to it. I have earned this name through force of will and the Most High has chosen me for it. a name is a chain. it is links stretching into the future. every clasping iron is cast in my image. this name will be echoed graves in a field.

I will unfurl myself from the emptiness as flames in the desert, countless and unquenchable, scatter these flames into the darkness. these vast burning stars are my immortality. this name is my forever. u

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BOOKS “the Overstory”

Richard Powers on hope and despair in contemporary environmentalism

REVIEW

by Jonathan Kay

O

n a highway in Oregon, Douglas Pavelcik pulls off the road to relieve himself. Something strikes him as odd about the rows of spruce and fir that line the road, and he investigates. A few steps into the undergrowth, he discovers a nightmare.

You can’t even call it a clearing.

Call it the moon. A stumpy desolation spreads in front of him.

The ground bleeds reddish slag mixed with sawdust and slash.

Every direction for as far as he can see resembles a gigantic plucked fowl. It’s like the alien death rays have hit, and the world is asking permission to end.

They’re called “vista corridors”: thin curtains of trees meant to hide the miles of clear-cut forest beyond from passing drivers. It’s the 1980s, and timber companies have been granted license to level most of the Pacific Northwest’s national forests.

Doug decides to do something about it.

He finds a job replanting the wastelands with Douglas fir saplings, Johnny Appleseed-style. It’s less an environmentalist sentiment than a desperate need to rid himself of the vision of the clear-cuts.

The Overstory

by Richard owers W.W. Norton & Co., 2018 502 pages | $19.00 (Hardcover)

Four years and fifty thousand saplings later, he’s celebrating his work at a bar in Portland—a lot of greenhouse gases out of the air, he tells anyone who will listen, a lot of new oxygen. One of his pool partners, however, cuts Doug’s exuberance short: by planting the new trees, the man tells Doug with a laugh, he’s only allowed the timber companies to raise their annual logging

Cover of “The Overstory,” from the Washington Post

limits. “You’re putting in babies so they can kill grandfathers. And when your seedlings grow out, they’ll be monocrop blights, man. Drive-through diners for happy insect pests.”

In the beginning of “Overstory,” Richard Powers’ latest novel, trees feature as nothing

more than background characters. They lurk in the backyards of Ma Sih Hsuin, renamed Winston Ma upon his arrival in California, and Nicholas Hoel, whose family has spent five generations photographing the growth of one of the sole survivors of the plague that wiped out the great Eastern chestnuts. In Vietnam, a banyan tree saves SWARTHMORE REVIEW

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an air force pilot after he parachutes from a burning plane, while in Palo Alto, a computer programmer’s son’s fall from a Spanish Oak paralyzes him from the waist down.

Oaks in a staging of Macbeth, a going-away present carved into the stump of an elm—it feels like nothing more than a thematically-linked collection of short stories.

Only near the end of this first section, when we meet Patricia Westerford, do trees begin to seem like something more. As a plant-obsessed graduate student, Patricia makes a startling discovery: when attacked by a swarm of insects, a maple will not only pump out insecticides to defend itself but will also signal the danger to other trees in the grove, who will do the same. These “mindless” trees communicate and even, in their own way, think. After her paper demonstrating this phenomenon comes under attack, however, she retreats to a cabin in the woods for a self-imposed exile.

Many years later, she writes a book, “The Secret Forest” (likely based on the real-life “The Hidden Life of Trees”). It begins:

You and the tree in your backyard come from a common ancestor. A billion and a half years ago, the two of you parted ways.

But even now, after an immense journey in separate directions, that tree and you still share a quarter of your genes…

The book becomes a point of connection between the various storylines, which gradually begin to intertwine. Along with several of the other characters, Doug finds himself drawn into the Pacific Northwest’s burgeoning environmental protests, where increasingly violent clashes with the police and loggers prompt the activists to radicalize with grave consequences. The marriage of characters Ray and Dorothy Brinkman begins to crumble, Patricia becomes the reluctant spokeswoman for a growing political movement, and Neelay Gupta creates a series of games that enthrall players with ever more faithful approximations of the world they seem to be turning away from.

Each of their lives are touched by encounters with the seemingly banal subject of “Overstory:” trees.

Part of the power of Powers’ book comes from his ability to capture reverence, devotion, wonder, and obsession. Like Olivia Vandergriff and Nicholas Hoel, who have ascended a redwood (nicknamed Mimas) to hold a standoff with loggers, waking up their first morning to see the world around them: 28

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They look together: high-wire surveyors of a newfound land.

The view cracks open his chest.

Cloud, mountain, World Tree, and mist—all the tangled, rich stability of creation that gave rise to words to begin with— leave him stupid and speechless. Reiterated trunks grow out of Mimas’s main line, shooting up parallel like the fingers of a Buddha’s upraised hand, recouping the mother tree on smaller scales, repeating the inborn shape again and again, their branches running into each other, too mazy and fused to trace.

Or Patricia, speaking at a conference:

Tagore said, Trees are the earth’s endless effort to speak to the listening heaven. But people—oh, my word—people! People could be the heaven that the Earth is trying to speak to. If we could see green, we’d see a thing that keeps getting more interesting the closer we get. If we could see what green was doing, we’d never be lonely or bored. If we could understand green, we’d learn how to grow all the food we need in layers three deep, on

a third of the ground we need right now, with plants that protected one another from pests and stress. If we knew what green wanted, we wouldn’t have to choose between the Earth’s interests and ours. They’d be the same! [...] To see green is to grasp the Earth’s intentions.

As such episodes reveal, “Overstory” has an undeniable activist impulse. Powers, however, seems uncomfortable with the prospect of advocacy. None of his characters are the activist “type”—they complain about agitators and “people with conviction,” and their individual dedication to nature is defined as much by self-doubt as anything else. As Adam Appich, a psychology student who falls in with the protestors, tells his thesis advisor: “Anyone who gets righteous doesn’t understand. How hopelessly fragile and wrong we all are. About everything.”

In many ways, today’s environmental movement feels far removed from that of the tree-hugging seventies: more selfaware, more pessimistic. Five decades of failure have laid bare some of the movement’s contradictions, and with the prospect of disaster so immediate, a love for nature is inextricably linked to a degree of despair.

Humans are, as Doug notes, “the only animals that know they’re hosed.” Certainly, any candid look at climate change should engender complete terror. On the one hand, a degree of fear is necessary to dispel complacency, and we need a broad, unflinching perspective on climate change

to find durable, effective solutions. On the other hand, fear usually paralyzes us.

Chronic denial becomes a survival mechanism. It becomes easy to rationalize: for most of us privileged Americans, it will be decades before the worst of climate change really hits. It’s still possible to hope that we will avoid the worst of it or that we’ll be saved, either by technology or the slowly-turning gears of politics, simply because we’ve always been saved.

At the same time, we convince ourselves that we don’t need to act by believing that action is pointless, that it’s already too late, or that we can’t make a difference ourselves.

Powers makes no secret of the futility of his characters’ actions: protest encampments and homemade barricades torn down in a matter of minutes, toothless court orders, backpackers that hike to each protest camp to avoid burning gas, “all trying to bail out the ocean of capitalism with an acorn cap.” The tree that Olivia and Nick spent a year protecting has been felled by the time they’ve reached their holding cells. With each failure, the protestors seem shocked by how quickly their efforts are swept away, and when they turn to violence, they do so knowing that they can at best only slow things down.

One antidote to despair is love. By putting looming disaster out of our mind and instead focusing on what we can control, directly treating nature with care and compassion in our own lives, activism becomes an end in itself, not contingent on the larger success (and struggles) of the environmental movement. Indeed, the urgency that moves the characters of “Overstory” to action come not from an intellectual reckoning with the big picture but from the very particular personal appeal that trees presented to them—an ethics of care.

Love, however, can be myopic, frivolous, and selfish. As Doug discovers, work that is personally satisfying is not always effective, particularly since not every sustainability problem will have an icon as immediate and evocative as a tree. Environmental advocacy also requires working with the invisible or unapproachable, like watershed management, industrial agriculture, or ocean acidification.

Moreover, focusing on your own backyard has little use when climate change is a global problem—after all, as one logger points out, the scale of the clear-cuts in the Pacific Northwest pales in comparison to those in Brazil or China. Over the course of their stay atop their redwood, Nick and Olivia watch the trees around them fall, one by one. By the time they’re forced down, the desert where their tree stands alone can

hardly be called a forest anymore.

Today’s environmental movement needs to inhabit the space in between the two: fear and love, the distant and the immediate.

“Overstory” offers a way to do that.

I cannot empathize with nature through charts or figures. All I have is what I can see, touch, and smell: the vast, swaying oaks that loom over my home in California, the contorted Monterey Cypresses that line the beach near my grandparents’ house, the aging magnolias in the Science Center courtyard that grow abruptly extravagant each spring with heavy, purple blossoms.

This only blinds me, however, if all I see is the tree before me and not the web of connections and interdependence that led to its growth. As Patricia discovers, every forest is connected. The same is true of the entire natural world. To love one tree, Powers reminds us, is to love all of them.

Part of what can bridge this divide between the particular and the universal is storytelling. As Adam tells the protestors, “The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.” Powers takes his own advice. We empathize with the characters in their own right, and we can connect with their moments of awakening and increasing radicalization because they are not simply props for a jeremiad. Moreover, this book isn’t just for environmentalists.

It would be an enjoyable, beautiful read— Powers manages to make a page-turner out of a 500-page, nine-character epic—even if you viewed the environmentalism as purely incidental.

Yet it’s impossible not to feel that Powers ultimately doubts his own project. He’s given himself an impossible task—to make his audience feel more than our typical short-sighted empathy and feel a connection to something so large as the earth it-

self. As he writes, “To be human is to confuse a satisfying story with a meaningful one. No: life is mobilized on a vastly larger scale, and the world is failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people.”

And yet Powers tries. This tension—between the environmentalist’s colossal, desperate love of the natural world and the writer’s fatalistic awareness of humans’ inability to feel that love in all its insistent depth—lies at the heart of “Overstory.”

Ultimately, what sustains Powers’ characters (and perhaps the man himself) is not just love but resiliency. Resiliency means remaining aware of the big picture while throwing ourselves into what’s directly in front of us, having no alternative. It’s doing everything to avert failure while, when failure comes, persisting.

Up north, long after he’s parted ways with the others, Nicholas Hoel arranges fallen branches and logs in massive lines on the tundra. Even here, surrounded by white spruce, miles from the nearest city, he can’t shake the feeling of searching for something. “I wouldn’t need to be so very different,” he thinks,

for sun to seem to be about sun, for green to be about green, for joy and boredom and anguish and terror and death to all be themselves, beyond the need for any killing clarity, and then this—this, the growing rings of light and water and stone— would take up all of me, and be all the words I need.

When he’s done, the branches spell out one word: STILL.

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Class-y cuisine in “Cooking on a Bootstrap” A review of Jack Monroe’s new “simple budget” cookbook

REVIEW

by Anna Weber

C

ookbooks are unique. They feel different than a novel or nonfiction story, usually in hard cover with larger dimensions and thicker pages.

We as readers connect with cookbooks differently than we do with other types of books. We may focus more on the aesthetics of the pages while reading and can more easily isolate and cherry-pick specific sections or recipes. In many ways, cookbooks feel like archives, a way to search through the stacks of foodbased knowledge and discover that famously delicious pecan pie recipe. This archival comparison also reveals cookbooks’ relationship to history and preservation—the idea that recipes are passed down from generation to generation and cookbooks are a modern, print-industry method of documenting the past.

Cooking on a Bootstrap

by Jack Monroe Pan MacMillan, 2018 256 pages | $9.95 (Paperback)

Jack Monroe’s new cookbook partakes in this historical documentation, as it specifically connects dishes to class-based histories with its mission to provide “simple budget recipes” for the working class. Flipping through “Cooking on a Bootstrap” will not only provide readers with delectable recipes, but it will also show them what it means to live, eat, and grow as a working class individual in the U.K. This includes grocery store tips for buying cheap and long-lasting ingredients. Protein, for example, does not have to be chicken and beef; rather, it can be bought in the cheaper-form of frozen fish fillets or tins of beans. For people with smaller kitchens and fewer tools, Monroe gives a list of the most necessary tools: a saucepan, frying pan, roasting tin, wooden spoon, scales, and mixing bowl. Other advice includes time management tips for people working double shifts and a list of common mistakes for people who have a low margin for error and cannot afford to throw away a cooking disaster. The cookbook itself is also more affordable than most, costing only $9.95.

Beyond this cookbook, Monroe works as a British food and politics writer as well as an anti-poverty food campaigner.

Her work comes out of personal expe30

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rience, as Monroe previously depended on food banks for both her and her child’s sustenance. Her recipes were first shared with the world when she began donating them to food banks. Then, she started a blog, which turned into her first published book, both titled “A Girl Called Jack: 100 Delicious Budget Recipes.” Monroe’s personal experience and consistent advocacy make it clear that the positive and capable representations of the working-class in this book come from empathy rather than patronage.

and beans became signifiers of a working-class meal. Connected to the overarching capitalist economy, working-class individuals more often performed cheap manual labor, so the heavier foods would allow people to stay energized with their longer, calorie-burning work.

“‘Cooking on a Bootstrap’ will not only provide readers with delectable recipes, but it will also show them what it means to live, eat, and grow as a working class individual in the U.K.” Before delving into the cookbook itself, it may be beneficial to provide a brief— and by no means complete—summary of the way societal opinions on food and class have changed over time. The initial image of high-class eating may be one of abundance, cabinets and refrigerators full of every type of food imaginable; however, in “Distinction and Taste,” anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu writes that throughout time the opposite process occurred. Plates became smaller to signify high-class meals, while larger amounts of heavier, fattier foods like pasta, potatoes,

Portrait of Jack Monroe, courtesy of Pan MacMillan

However, Bourdieu importantly states that the overall trend of smaller meals with leaner foods being high-class is not definitive, and there is always room for change. Working-class people often maintain recipes for special occasions that include small and delectable dishes.

In contemporary times, Bourdieu’s arguments remain relevant, especially in the case of class- and raced-based food

Photo courtesy of Pan MacMillan

deserts. The U.S. Department of Agriculture defines food deserts as “parts of the country that are vapid of fresh fruit, vegetables, and other healthful whole foods, usually in impoverished areas.” Philadelphia, for example, contains food deserts that affect 307,000 people who live in neighborhoods with high poverty and low-to-no walkable

ital to know these terms—and running into them can easily turn readers away. Monroe takes a full 180-degree turn away from this terminology and instead combines accessible language with a love for food. For example, one of her bread recipes is titled, “Unfuckupable Pizza Dough.”

This title not only makes readers laugh, but

access to healthy food retailers (see statistics from Philadelphia Department of Public Health). Importantly, although “Cooking on a Bootstrap” does not mention it, these food access issues are linked to racism and white supremacy in that many of the food desert areas are located in urban areas with higher populations of African Americans.

Within Monroe’s cookbook, the first

Photo courtesy of Pan MacMillan

Photo courtesy of Pan MacMillan

helpful aspect for readers of all classes is the book’s overall accessible tone and word choice. Cookbooks have a terminology of their own, including phrases like “al dente” and “julienne” (which describe firmer and less chewy pasta and the technique of cutting things into matchstick-sized strips, respectively). However, many people do not have the social, educational, or cultural cap-

it also puts Monroe as author on the same level as the reader. The cookbook’s sections, namely bread, soup, potatoes, and beans/ lentils, also connect to the same working-class labor/energy needs that Bourdieu highlighted in his anthropological account.

However, what makes Monroe’s usage of these cheap, filling foods different than the unhealthy meals that food deserts dictate is that Monroe consistently invents new flavors and herbs to go with these meals.

In this way, the bases that people still need to stay full for longer and preserve for easy leftovers become something special. The many types of bread that Monroe provides, for example, are all as unique and interesting as caviar-topped dishes.

The most powerful aspect of “Cooking on a Bootstrap,” however, is not the physical nourishment readers receive but rather the mental nourishment. Monroe reminds her audience throughout the book to enjoy their food and congratulates them on crafting their meals: “You did this. You made this for yourself out of love.” The idea that food can only be for physical nourishment is rooted in the stereotypes that working-class people solely worry and think about work or money. In reality, it is often working-class communities that host large community dinners and food-based gatherings. Cooking and eating is just as much about coming together and enjoying a meal as it is about filling a stomach.

Monroe shows this fact with recipes that play around with food shapes, such as her “Turkey Batman, Planes, and More” recipe

for turkey nuggets. Monroe’s centering of self-love and self-importance in the cooking and eating process is perhaps the best aspect of her cookbook.

Admittedly, there are a few gaps and problems in “Cooking on a Bootstrap,” namely that it focuses very narrowly on a single working-class framework. Even within this framework, it is important to question what it means for a book about class inequality to then participate in the economy that propagates such inequality in the first place. Furthermore, the book is not even published by a small, independent press; MacMillan, a mainstream, internationally based publisher, sells it. Secondly, Monroe’s definition of the working-class seems nationally limited.

In the book’s introduction, Monroe makes a comment about lentils seeming “Other” to her, which points to her limited understanding of global working-class communities. Monroe fails to recognize that working-class communities exist across the globe and, especially, that non-Western experiences of poverty are not the same as Western experiences of poverty. There is

specifically colonial work at play in the history of non-Western poverty. As Monroe continues anti-poverty food campaigning and writing, it would behoove her to establish on-the-ground partnerships with global working-class communities in order to truly see and combat the larger economic exploitation beyond the U.K. itself.

Keeping these critiques in mind, “Cooking on a Bootstrap” is an important book for both its recipes and its historical documentation of what it means to live and eat as a working-class individual in the U.K. It provides readers with thrifty advice as well as motivational and stereotype-debunking lessons. With this book, nourishing oneself becomes an act of self-love.

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MUSIC A journey through “Wednesday” Irish outfit “Just Mustard” debut with a vivid and refreshing album

by Inna Kimbrough with two illustrations by Sage Rhys

I

n May, in the midst of post-Swarthmore laziness, I was both relishing and despising my newfound free time by staying up late listening to new music on Bandcamp. My searches usually consisted of finding album covers that looked gripping in a genre that fit my mood, avoiding bands with pretentious names. Quite the rigorous criteria, I know. It was on one of these humid, stagnant nights when I stumbled upon an album that saved me from the musical monotony that I had been stuck in for the past month.

A mysterious Irish band emerged from the depths of Dundalk in May with an LP that makes your guts twist in both bliss and fear. Just Mustard’s coverslip for “Wednesday” features a picture of the disorientingly blurred faces of its members, setting the mood for the dissonant trip you are soon to take. Just Mustard dabbles in various genres: noise rock, trip hop, lofi shoegaze, alternative, post-punk, and any number of tags that a music junkie would be happy to conjure up. Regardless of which of these tags entices you the most, Just Mustard presents a gloriously noisy debut album that sets the mood for eerie nighttime driving in rural America. Rather than thinking about this album conventionally however, try this. Think of each song as a tool of evocation, and immerse yourself in these experiences.

“Wednesday” cover art courtesy of Bandcamp

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I listened to this album incessantly after that very lucky night. My boyfriend and I took turns driving 16000 miles, from the swampy heat in southern Georgia across the South to the scorch of Texas deserts, west to the balmy beaches of SoCal, north to the dense forests of the Pacific Northwest. This album followed and tainted each of the landscapes...

“BOO” Imagine driving up a mountain at night, hairpin turns and vertigo-inducing cliffs abound. There are 3 cars behind you and each ones looks like it would be eager to shove you off the side. They’re locals and could effortlessly drift around these crazy fucking curves given the opportunity and the sudden teenage-like impulsivity. A sign in the dark forest says “Watch for elk.”

You scoff and look over at your co-driver,

Image by Sage Rhys

REVIEW but not a minute later you slam the brakes as three elk (the first you’ve ever seen) emerge from the darkness on the shoulder of the road, lifting their enormous heads to scrutinize your unwanted presence.

Pine trees pierce the inky sky. Tense, distorted guitars open this first track, later accompanied by haunting, wordless vocals that sound like what you would expect to hear if you put your ear to a keyhole in your creepy aunt’s old house. This track sets the scene for the lofi, semi-shoegazeish journey that Just Mustard is about to take you on.

“Curtain” You’re scraping by in a night of West Texas dust. The GPS told you 3 hours ago that your next right would be in 204 miles.

You haven’t seen a single car since. The sun set a little while back, and the black

this very tall cliff and the whitecaps washing over the rocks at the bottom like a silk veil. Gritty guitars rake the eardrum like the wind through the trees.

Image by Sage Rhys

of night encroaches over the tops of bare mountains. You’re driving towards the mysterious Marfa lights, rumored to appear blinking over the isolated plane of the horizon. Your high beams watch the dust kicked up by something ahead of you but you know there are no people around for many miles. The lights watch you as you watch them, your small being perched on a stony wall looking out over the desert.

This track scrapes across the eardrum like the best-sounding nails on the god of lofi’s divine chalkboard. The screams of the vocals echo out over the horizon and warn you that those distant lights are not benign.

“Feeded” Gentle raindrops of guitar accompany the rich blue green of the ocean on your left like it was smeared on by a palette knife. Your childhood on the murky, suspect gray-green brown of the East coast couldn’t have prepared you for the pure cobalts and bottle greens of the Pacific.

The glowing-ember orange of cliffs in the sunlight and the gun-barrel gray of monolithic stand-alone islands 30 feet from the cold shore fill your eyes like a Cezanne. A lullaby-like voice accompanies these colors like a peach smear of paint on your brain, warming the landscape up.

Seascape, Cezanne, 1864

All images courtesy of the respective artists’ Bandcamp pages

“Pigs” The night bites into you both as the dissonant sounds of bass creep into your brains. You lean back in your seat as your co-pilot eases off the gas for fear of the elk again. Arizona canyons rise and dip into and blend into the Scream-red sunset. This energetic piece grabs you by the back of your collar and dangles you over those edges, then whips you back to safety.

“Pigs” rhythmic spirit matches the sky and gives you a mini shot of 6-minute energy to sustain your drive into the dusk.

“Tainted” House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski leers at you from your own hands, that hideous book, a nightmare-inducing masterpiece. Your fear is magnified by the pitch-black trees outside, pressing in on both sides and looming in the distance like the creature from “It Follows”, always there, the roads cavelike and infinite and there is no escape from this sound. This intoxicating track pulls you into its whirlpool of sound and spins you dizzy with its fuzzy bridge. “Tainted” is the song that would play if you were underwater and watching moonlight play in the waves above you.

“Deaf ” Sweet harmonies pervade this track, playing as you drive in the faint morning light around the cliffs of Big Sur, the Cezanne wedges of color again permeating the landscape. After a night of pitch black terror in the dense woods, the light of this song tinkles out of a tinny radio in a tiny tourist shack surrounded by labyrinthine gardens. Baby pink peonies blossom to the chorus. The Pacific coast is deeper blue and more beautiful than you could even have imagined and there is no cell signal to distract your from everything that is, from all of the little tide pools at the bottom of

“Tennis” This song walks down a very long corridor towards a dark, dark door. You’re driving home now, reading scary stories to each other as you twist down the corridors that are county roads in the coastal plains of Georgia. The pickup that has been following you for the last half hour since the lonely two-pump gas station finally turns onto a dirt road and leaves the trees to press in tighter around you. This song is a ticking clock at midnight, knowing that something is coming but not knowing from what direction. Its heavy distortions bend like shadows in the dark, while hypnotic and echoing vocals call out like a siren trapped in a well.

“Pictures” This song opens with the sound that your brain makes when you open the door to a 21 year old’s apartment: the buzzing of flies, decay, heaviness, hopelessness. Grungy, dirty sound accompanies your worn tires as you drive through the tunnels in the middle of the Rockies and wait for the sunlight to come back. One minute elapses into five, into ten, and suddenly you don’t remember if it was daylight when you entered this mountain. This song lights a cigarette while watching the world burn and blinking through soot. It slashes your tires and leaves you desperately wishing the album were longer than eight songs.

I first discovered this gem of an album by myself at 3 in the morning when I couldn’t sleep and was horrifically bored and anxious and unhappy and agitated and it was the breath of fresh air that I had not tasted in the music world for a terribly long time. Special thanks to you, Just Mustard, please keep it coming.

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The best ambient music of 2018

This years best in monstrous ASMR, restrospective guilt, gentle percussion, and flutey synths

by Ari Liloia

CUCINA POVERA

BY HILJA (Night School)

The general mood throughout “Hilja” is one of gloom and doom. Although it’s not uncommon for ambient music to try to give off this kind of vibe, Cucina Povera evokes it in a way I’ve never heard before. “Hilja” is unmistakably organic but barely human; the rhythms anchoring these songs have more in common with the sound of buzzing cicadas or waves crashing on a shore than with a drummer. As disparate elements ebb and flow around the central pulse, they might fade in or out, but they’re not processed or run through any kind of identifiable “effects.” She uses very little reverb, eschewing formless haze for crystal clarity.

While the sounds she uses aren’t necessarily ugly, they’re so closely miked and amplified that listening to the album can become uncomfortably intimate, even suffocating.

It’s disorienting to hear sounds I’ve always thought of as “quiet,” like a gust of wind or dripping, played back so loudly. If the monster under your bed started making ASMR videos, they would sound like this. u

ENVELOPE

BY MILAN W. (Ekster)

I’ll be honest—this album is guilty of a few of my personal pet peeves when it comes to ambient music. Generally, I feel like it’s more style than substance, and there are a few songs that start out pleasant but that are so repetitive they quickly wear out their welcome. But guess what?

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ELECTRONIC MUSIC FROM THE EIGHTIES AND NINETIES

BY CARL STONE (Unseen Worlds)

Yes, this album has a boring title. Yes, it has an even more boring cover. And yes, if I had a nickel for every album of pretentious nonsense Unseen Worlds has called a “brilliant lost classic” and enthusiastically re-issued, I could buy an official Unseen Worlds tote bag from their website. Many experimental musicians seem to want to challenge listeners by identifying things we generally enjoy, like melody, rhythm or any kind of structure, and writing them off completely. Carl’s music, on the other hand, is all about utilizing these elements in totally unfamiliar ways. Samples of classical or pop music are stretched out and scrambled; a melody might suddenly jump out of nowhere, or it might congeal slowly out of the chaos. Phrases that first seem to repeat themselves endlessly will morph into something unrecognizable over the course of a song. I wish all experimental music was as exciting and interesting as this album. This is, as you might have guessed from the title, a re-issue, so putting it on this list might be cheating, but I’ll do anything I can to spread the gospel of Carl Stone. u

TIMELESS

BY NICO NIQUO (Daisart)

In the ambient music lowdown I wrote for the Review last year, my biggest mistake was not including Nico Niquo’s incredible album “In A Silent Way.” I couldn’t look past the ugly cover (I like it now!) or the annoying title (still annoying!) and after listening to the first minute of each song, I wrote it off completely—that is, until earlier this year when I gave it another listen, and then another, and now, to absolve myself of my guilt, I am begging you to check it out.

“Timeless,” the follow-up, is much more expansive and freeform. I was worried that songs less obviously built around central motifs would sound aimless and self-indulgent, but my fears were quickly proven unfounded. This may be floaty, instrumental music, but it never sounds sedated or directionless—Nico Niquo proves himself to be a master of tension and release, using long chunks of near-silence and dramatic dynamic shifts to create music that, despite featuring barely any percussion, is still extremely propulsive. It’s refreshing to hear music this clearly painstakingly constructed and deliberately composed that’s still immediately recognizable as “ambient.” u I don’t care, because this album could literally double as a guided tour of all my favorite sounds. It’s full of just the right kind of fast, gentle percussion and detuned flutey synths that I’ll never not go crazy for. Think “Old MacDonald,” but replace the barn animals with fairies and dust mites, making lots of pleasant little sounds in between simple, catchy melodies. “Envelope” might not be for you, but more so than any other album on this list, it’s for me.u

MOVIES & TV A retrospective on Tila Tequila

REVIEW

Looking back on reality T.V.’s worst and first steps.

by Louisa Grenham

S

omewhere deep in my brain is every piece of media I’ve ever consumed. I don’t know where it goes, what little capsule it gets locked away into or why it opens when it does. Somewhere in the folds of my brain ““A Shot At Love” with Tila Tequila” bubbled up to the surface. My memory of it was hazy, so when I indulged my interest and started to watch it again I didn’t know what to expect. The show begins as a battle of the sexes structure that MTV likely recycled from their earlier show, “The Challenge,” where they split teams by gender to compete in challenges. “A Shot at Love” also alluded to shows such as “a Flavor of Love” and “Rock of Love,” where normal people competed for the affections of a B-list celebrity. “A Shot At Love” rolled all of these shows into one, but the advertised twist was Tila Tequila’s bisexuality. The contestants are 16 lesbians and 16 straight men, all competing for a chance to date Tila Tequila. In a classic form of homophobia, the goal is for Tequila, ultimately, to choose whether she wants to be with men or women.

The show’s premise is only the beginning of the objectification and fetishization of everyone involved. I could make an list of the ways “A Shot At Love” is offensive, insulting, and hard to watch, but it would present nothing new. This list would be exhausting to write and even more exhausting to read. So I tried instead to think about what the show represents—an outdated way of thinking, and a period of time where there were hardly any standards for reality TV. It seemed to be a time of hyperproduction, where reality show after reality show was created on the off chance it might catch a viewership. Budgets were low and there was hardly a bar for which ideas were good ones. Bisexuality must have entered the minds of producers as a trend they could capitalize on, a catch to the normal dating show structure. “A Shot At Love” was never meant to represent the sexualities of those they cast. So rather, what does “A Shot At Love” represent? A transitional period in our understanding

CW: Suicidality of sexuality? Some sort of how-to guide for exploitation?

Sociologist Todd Gitlin describes contemporary media’s capacity to raise some kind of emotional response despite its many faults: “with all their lies, skews, and shallow pleasures, they saturate our way of life with a promise of feeling, even if we may not know exactly how we feel about one or another batch of images except that they are there.” This quote rang true for me when thinking about “A Shot At Love”, because there’s something more sinister underneath the shallow outer layer, there’s a reason why it has stuck in my head for so long. Whenever I try to analyze media I get caught up in which groups or narratives the show represents, why it’s good or bad, or how shallow it is. I want to look back on the show for what it is, even though I know I could throw it out on the basis of its flaws. I want to examine what feelings it does bring up, even just to get it off my mind. My short answer to “how does ‘A Shot At Love’ with Tila Tequila make you feel?” is, “pretty fucking horrible.”

It was my first introduction to bisexuality, the first time I heard the word ‘lesbian’ out loud.

But, when I think deeper, I’m also nostalgic. I remember watching MTV and seeing ads for the show. It was my first introduction to bisexuality, the first time I heard the word “lesbian” out loud, the first time I’d seen lesbians on TV. I also felt excited and devious—like I was learning something I wasn’t supposed to. Revisiting the show, it’s a stock photo for the mid-2000s: all low rise jeans and tube tops. It sends me back to that nostalgic feeling, but just as quickly I’m pulled out of it. One of the male con-

testants says “dyke.” Another one makes a joke about Tila being Asian. People call each other “retarded.” This is the mid 2000s that I don’t feel nostalgia for. Rewatching the show, anger floods over me. I’m angry that something so undeserving will be forever ingrained in my mind. I’m angry at what Tila Tequila has become since then— her affinity for Trump, her twitter thread wishing Adolf Hitler a happy birthday. All these feelings can exist simultaneously, and they can exist without affirming what “A Shot At Love” and Tila Tequila both aim to do: keep your attention and waste your time.

The Golden Era for Trash TV “A Shot At Love” existed at a time in reality TV when standards for who was cast were few to none. The group is a motley consortium of straight men with spiked hair and graphic tees, and lesbian women with bleach blonde hair and sharp, dramatic layers, all vying for Tila’s heart. Tila herself wears a long sleeve tube top and SWARTHMORE REVIEW

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low rise jeans, showing off her belly-button ring. The contestants are not informed beforehand that the show has this battle of the sexes approach to Tila’s search for love. The show kicks off by Tila telling the contestants that she is bisexual. Another kicker: all 32 contestants sleep in the same bed. Yes—literally the same one. If you were wondering what the budget was for this show, we can assume that it didn’t push $500.

The producers’ ability to structure the twists and turns of the show means they can subject the contestants to pretty much anything. Because they’re not official actors, they have no access to unions, which would limit the number of hours that they film on a given day and, in many cases, guarantee overtime pay if filming goes over that number of hours per day; limit the types of stunts actors have to do; and ensure that the actors are fed—all things that make sure actors are treated well while on set. Because reality TV contestants receive none of these protections, the producers can essentially do whatever they want as

The show is pure chaos, and the storylines completely invade the privacy of the contestants. long as they promise a summer in a cool mansion with an endless supply of alcohol.

For most contestants, this is enough.

Today, reality stars are able to make a decent amount of money depending on TV appearances and name recognition. But in the early days, before people had really gained fame from reality TV, most people were paid next to nothing. MTV was notorious for underpaying contestants—during the first season of “the Real World Road Rules” in 1994 contestants would make around $1500 for a summer of filming.

In 2009, contestants for “The Challenge” (a Real World Road Rules spin off ) would make around $300 a week. During the first season of “Jersey Shore,” the six guidos received only a weekly $200 gift card for the Shore Store—the very same Shore Store they worked at while they filmed the show.

So, these contestants make hardly any money to give up their privacy for at least a summer, they have no access to phones, television, newspapers, or any kind of contact to the outside world and have their 36

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The only available photographs of “the Bed” are grainy stills from Youtube uploads of old episodes

every move documented. So why do it?

That question is somehow the easiest to answer—a sliver of fame, housing in an LA mansion, and endless amounts of alcohol.

In one of the first episodes during a pool party, two male contestants start fighting, stumbling around with red solo cups while attempting to hit each other. Minutes later the entire ordeal is forgotten. One contestant during a confessional can’t stop laughing. One tries to pole dance and falls on her face.

The contestants in “A Shot At Love” have little to lose. The show moves between a classic trashy MTV reality show and a serious attempt at love. They play spin the bottle and squeal as two reluctant straight men kiss. The women compete in a lingerie runway. Tila invites two men and one woman into a room, and begins making out with the girl; the scene cuts to a confessional interview with one of the men talking about how hot it was. Other times, the show attempts to be more serious. An interview with one contestant, still visibly drunk, admits that he feels like he’s beginning to fall in love with Tila. Tila in one scene confides in one of the women that she gets frustrated when people take this process as a joke, that she’s truly looking for love. She wipes away tears before getting up for another drink.

The show is pure chaos, and the story-lines completely invade the privacy of the contestants. One contestant, Eddie, is sent home by Tila for being a virgin (her words, not mine). Another time one of the lesbian contestants, Rebecca, is accused of sexual contact in the giant bed with one of the male contestants. As you can guess, anything but discretion is used to get to the bottom of the issue, people screaming at each other whatever acts they assumed went on under the covers. Tila takes each of these absurd moments seriously. She says that the person she’s looking for needs to be experienced (not a virgin) and sure of

herself. As she asks Rebecca, “so are you a lesbian or not?”

The first season of the show continues pretty much like this. Spurts of the blatant homophobia that were still tolerated in 2007, and consistent fetishization of Tila only scratch the surface of offensive things said by the contestants on “A Shot At Love”.

Who the f--- is Tila Tequila?

Tila Tequila’s life and fame are riddled with sadness and controversy. Born Thien Thanh Thi Nguyen, her family moved first from Vietnam to Singapore, where Nguyen was born, then shortly after to Houston, Texas. She states that the name Tila Tequila came from her early affinity for alcohol. She gained the nickname when she was only 13. Nguyen’s teenage years were nothing short of tragic. She ran away to New York City at age 16, returned shortly after only to witness a drive-by shooting, became pregnant, and miscarried all before reaching 17. At 19, she was “discovered” in a mall by a modeling agent, and moved to California to pursue entertainment in 2001. By 2006, she was the queen of the early internet. She gained millions of friends on MySpace; she began to sell merchandise and racked up magazine covers. This all seems very normal to us now, where everyone knows someone with a few thousand followers on Instagram. But in 2006, Tila Tequila was the first of her kind. She was covered in The New York Times and Time Magazine.

Time wrote, “it’s hard to know how to read the rise of Tila Tequila. Does she represent the triumph of a new democratic starmaking medium or its crass exploitation for maximum personal gain?” Tila was offered “A Shot At Love” at the height of her career.

The early 2000s represented a new era of fame and celebrity status. Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie coined the idea of “famous for being famous,” and the Kardashians fol-

lowed shortly after. But Tila Tequila could never cover up her trashy quality with wealth. A semi- playboy bunny, cam-girl attraction coated the Tila Tequila brand, something she could never shake and that aged very quickly. Although she was the namesake of the show, after two short seasons of “A Shot At Love”, Tila was replaced.

MTV coined the new series, “A Double Shot at Love with the Ikki Twins.” The spin off kept the same structure and bisexual premise but with contestants vying for affection of identical twins Rikki and Vikki Mongeon. Yes, MTV even did the weird bisexual twin thing.

After her bout of fame from “A Shot At Love” ended in 2008, Nguyen was briefly engaged to Casey Johnson, daughter of billionaire Woody Johnson of the Johnson & Johnson company. Johnson and Nguyen became engaged in December of 2009 and were both known for excessive partying and drug use. Johnson died shortly after in January, after consistent partying caused her to neglect her diabetes. Johnson’s family publicly distanced themselves from Nguyen, calling her an attention seeker who capitalized on Johnson’s death.

During a break from the spotlight in 2012, Nguyen suffered from a severe brain aneurysm. During this time, her inner circle implied that she consistently talked of suicide and made an attempt to take her own

life.

After 2012, Nguyen spent most of her time recovering. She re-appeared again in 2015 for a brief appearance on “Celebrity Big Brother,” but was removed from the show during filming for her pro-Hitler

A semi- playboy bunny, cam-girl attraction coated the Tila Tequila brand... comments on Twitter and Facebook. In 2016, she came out in support of Trump’s presidential campaign and posted a photo of herself doing the Nazi salute at the National Policy Institute, a conference for white nationalists where she was a featured guest alongside Richard Spencer.

This sharp turn to Nazi ideology baffled many. She was banned from Twitter and Facebook, and later deleted her Instagram.

Why would this chaotic, pre-internet internet star suddenly take such terrifying views public?

Nguyen’s only current activity is on YouTube under the name Tornado Thien. She makes videos stating her love for God, that Satan had control over her for too long,

that she was never bisexual or lesbian and only pretended to be “gay for pay”. She insists that everyone in Hollywood is going to burn in hell.

The lives of Tila Nguyen and Tila Tequila leave me with questions about the place that “A Shot At Love” can hold in our minds now. Exploring the life of Tila Tequila brings few positive things to the surface, and hardly offers us any chance to feel 2000s nostalgia without understanding the present day consequences. So what do I feel when watching “A Shot At Love” now?

I feel my nostalgia dissipating. The parts about it that I found amusing fall flat. The aspects that peaked my interest in 2007 don’t interest me anymore. It does not connect in my mind to some larger narrative of self discovery. The parts that are terrible outweigh the fact that it was the first reality show that centered bisexuality in the U.S. I can accept this failure of representation as a placeholder for true representation. I can grapple with the fact that figuring out sexuality means wading through countless instances of misinformation before you can find real truth in representation, before you can understand and represent yourself. Not all memories are good memories and not all forms of representation are representative.

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‘Corporate’ shows the darkside of office comedy A comparative analysis of TV’s latest workplace dystopia.

by Gabriel Meyer-Lee

I

f I’m trying to get someone interested in Comedy Central’s “Corporate,” I’ll usually describe it as the embittered child of “The Office” and “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.” This description is really only true in the sense that children frequently end up quite unlike either of their parents instead of a simple summation of parental traits, as this familiar metaphor may often be taken to suggest. In this case, “Corporate” is distinguished from these two predecessors most clearly by its all-consuming nihilism, which at times threatens to subsume the entirety of the show itself.

“Corporate,” whose first season aired at the beginning of 2018, stars Matt Ingebretson and Jake Weisman as Matt and Jake, a pair of “junior executives in training.”

The characters all work at international megacorporation Hampton-Deville, whose slogan is “We Make Everything.” Ingebret-

son and Weisman, along with director Pat Bishop, share credits as the show’s creators

It’s the embittered child of “The Office” and “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.”

This description is really only true in the sense that children frequently end up quite unlike either of their parents... and writers. In this sense, the series takes after “Always Sunny,” which also represented a group of previously unknown comics

Review

writing, producing, and starring in their own show. This team’s ten-episode debut attracted enough attention to get renewed for a second season two thirds of the way through its airing, with a release date to be announced.

“Corporate”’s most obvious inheritance from “The Office” is its setting. Both shows are comedies primarily taking place within a genericized office. These workplaces are portrayed as dysfunctional in various ways, allowing the shows to poke fun at bureaucracy. Adam Lustick, who plays conniving executive John on “Corporate,” actually acted in four episodes of the Office’s ninth season. His largest contribution to the first season, in the episode “The Weekend,” revolves around a Michael Scott-like intrusion into his employees’ personal lives. However, “Corporate” is set in Hampton-Deville’s headquarters where most characters are executives, not a small branch office populated by salespeople. Additionally, this fictionSWARTHMORE REVIEW

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al company is more globally dominant and overtly sinister than anything “The Office” has to offer and “Corporate” lacks the elements of mockumentary so integral to the style of “The Office.” Honestly, I choose to make the comparison to “The Office” because it is so well known, so widely beloved, and so vastly different in tone from “Corporate.” The cheerful acceptance of “The Office” poses such a striking contrast with the bitter cynicism of “Corporate,” and so having “The Office” in mind makes the fact that the pilot’s opening gambit about emails ends in Jake proclaiming that “life is meaningless and nothing we do matters” hit that much harder.

“Corporate” definitely takes more after the “Always Sunny” side of the family. Both shows have a distinctly dark sense of humor and feature a set of main characters who are plainly awful people, but at times relatable. Both shows consistently feature dark, satirical, and provocative brand comedy, but in “Corporate” it is typically the result of deadpan nihilism and norm-following than the chaotic collisons of norm-break-

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ing. The characters of “Corporate” are awful in a very mundane way, in contrast to the wildly antisocial characters of “Always Sunny.” The self-centered and uncaring nature of these characters is normalized by the environment they exist within. There is, however, some variation within the cast.

Lance Reddick’s portrayal of CEO Christian Deville is straight up villainous, symbolic

The show frequently carries on a comical bit past the point where it’s really made its punch. of the corporation he runs, while Aparna Nancherla’s take on HR rep Grace is well meaning to the point where she could pass as a character on “The Office.” In “Corporate” it’s clear the source of the psychopathy is the corporation itself and its living embodiment-as-CEO Christian and that this

psychopathy is gradually diluted as it moves down the corporate hierarchy. The characters, particularly Matt, Jake, and Grace, are aware of this evil but don’t believe they can change it and don’t care.

In its first season, what distinguishes “Corporate” most from its predecessors is not its humor or its portrayal of office dynamics but its target of the contemporary ever-intrusive megacorporation and the determination to satirize the corporate, consumer, and popular cultures that proceed from these entities from every angle possible and to extremes. The show frequently carries on a comical bit past the point where it’s really made its punch, which may be intentional or the result of a miscalculation on the part of the show’s writers and often results in a heightened sense of parody. While jokes are delivered in a tone of matter-offact resignation, the humor is certainly not subtle. Each episode features a central satirical bit, which is the primary driver of the plot throughout the first season; the characters are developed quite gradually and the series only really begins to develop an over-

arching plot connecting these characters near its end. What may be missed in some areas, however, is made up for by novelty in the framing and development of the central bit of each episode. For instance, the core conceit of “The Weekend” is to lampoon the increasingly large portion of our time and personal lives work absorbs. Its aim here is broad, satirizing bosses who demand their employees’ personal time, employees whose identity is centered on their work, consumers who want to contract out portions of their personal life, and corporations whose use of technology serves to entrap their employees. The entire plot of the episode is really just the evolution of this satirical bit, but the result is funny, engaging, and manages to develop some of the characters a little on the way.

The content of the satire in “Corporate” is intensely political, although largely absent of the partisanship that is nearly synonymous with politics currently in the U.S. While the treatment of episode-centered satirical targets like social media faux pas, war, protest art, and memorial holidays certainly suggest specific political views, they do not align with a particular partisan platform and are expressed with a nihilistic resignation that dampens the political impact of the critique. With the exception of the occasional one-off joke, it is clear that “Corporate” has steered clear of the workplace issues most subject to a present partisan divide: those surrounding the prevalence of discrimination and harassment based on race and gender. Given the prevalence of these issues in the news media, a TV show made by a bunch of white men avoiding them may seem like egregious erasure. It is clear, though, that these white, male creators either care about these issues or at least pretend to, as they have hired a cadre of women writers (Kate Thulin, Heather Anne Campbell, Amelie Gillette) who hold the primary credits for half of the season’s episodes. They’ve also cast a diverse set of actors, relative to their parent shows.

However, representing a diverse set of identities within a show without exploring the implications of the varied positions of these characters, as “Corporate” does in its first season, doesn’t really constitute more than lip service. Regardless, it does seem clear that this avoidance of these frequently discussed workplace issues doesn’t represent malicious discrimination but rather a component of a larger avoidance of any sort of partisan political debate. Perhaps this was done out of an attempt to render the political messaging of the show more covert or a desire to address different topics from those

covered by the majority of current TV. It would be an oversight to analyze “Corporate” without a discussion of the show’s eighth episode, “Society Tomorrow.” This particular episode presents a unique challenge to analysis of the show: an indirect rebuttal of the utility of its own show. This episode is based around a fictional hit SciFi drama which the Hampton-Deville employees are obsessed with. Called “Society Tomorrow,” this show is a pop culture phenomenon similar to “Black Mirror” or “Westworld” dramatizing the evils of a wearable device strikingly similar to one manufactured by Hampton-Deville. Here,

While ‘Corporate’ is not necessarily a dystopian TV show, the exaggerated depiction of life in a megacorporation and dark nature of the show serve as a similar cautionary tale. the satire of this television show questions the ability of dystopias to serve as cautionary tales and, more broadly, the ability of people to meaningfully engage with a popular TV show as social critique.

True to the show’s nihilistic bent, this episode of “Corporate” depicts a world in which people appreciate a show for its surface-level qualities and ignore the contradiction between its political messaging and their own politics. The episode does seem somewhat appreciative of some aspects of the community-building of TV consumption, but remains highly suspicious of any constructive political function of TV shows.

Even when a character is able to connect the cautionary tale to his reality, the dramatic exaggerations of the dystopia continue to mislead him, preventing him from ever discovering the reality of the situation.

While “Corporate” is not necessarily a dystopian TV show, the exaggerated depiction of life in a megacorporation and dark nature of the show serve as a similar cautionary tale. In fact, this episode, in its portrayal of Hampton-Deville employees reception of “Society Tomorrow,” speaks to a sobering truth about the show: the audience who can relate the most to the humor of “Corporate,” and are therefore most likely

to appreciate the show, are the employees of mega-corporations themselves. The show’s exaggerations afford this audience a buffer of comfort, allowing them to enjoy the show without feeling compelled to do anything in response to the show’s sharp critiques of their position in life. The show’s creators framed this sentiment well in their season two renewal announcement, writing “We’re absolutely thrilled to continue selling our souls making some more anti-corporate comedy for one of the biggest corporations in the world.”

The nihilism of the show is, however, likely a key factor to growing the viewership of this show given the younger generations’ predilection for nihilist humor. There’s significant overlap in the humor of “Corporate” and recent popular nihilist cartoons “Rick and Morty” and “Bojack Horseman.”

These shows, though, are both centered around a single tragic character who is awful and sometimes attempts to better themselves but never succeeds. “Corporate” lacks such a character because it is not any one figure but the corporation who is always ruining everyone’s lives. This is somewhat less personally engaging, but still plenty entertaining for a generation increasingly embittered towards huge corporations but unable to avoid them.

“Society Tomorrow” may be interpreted as reducing any public analysis or criticism of a cautionary TV show to simple promotion of the show, but this isn’t necessarily a relevant distinction in this case. I do not expect my critiques expressed above to have a tangible effect on the world and ultimately do encourage the reader to watch “Corporate.” The above analysis for the most part constitutes a disclaimer about what “Corporate” is not. This is not a show that engages directly with contemporary political partisan debates. This is not a show of lovable characters or a show that prioritizes the development of its handful of characters over an elaborate bit. This is not any of the several recent TV shows or films providing landmark new opportunities and representation for members of marginalized race and gender-identity groups. This show is probably not going to start the revolution. Maybe, in its upcoming second season, this show will become some of these things it is not, but for now, this show will feed your Millenial/Gen Z appetite for nihilist humor, present you with a series of cleverly conceived sketches about the contemporary corporate workplace, and, if the world is not as bad as “Society Tomorrow” projects, maybe even make you think about your future place in the corporate world.

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