The College Hill Independent Vol. 36 Issue 5

THE COLLEGE HILL A BROWN / RISD WEEKLY INDEPENDENT

36 • 05 09 MAR 2018

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INDY COVER

A BROWN / RISD WEEKLY VOLUME 36 / ISSUE 05 MAR 09 2018

Untitled Shaina Tabak

NEWS 02

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FEATURES 11

Week in Review: Strange Competition Eve Zelickson, Sarah Van Horn, Sydney Anderson

TECH

Customs and Immigration Wen Zhuang

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Selling the State Lucas Smolcic Larson

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Novel Adventure Liam Greenwell

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Riverrun Maria Camila Arbelaez Solano

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this past weekend three different men, on three separate occasions, called to me across a room full of people. i swear their voices all sounded the same with my name on their lips. eye contact. i turned every time—the ever eager subject responding to my hail. YOU. HEY. GIRL. HEY. LADY. YOU. WOMAN. HEY. YOU. each time i was stunned, and somewhat affronted. i know them all, but not well. ballsy bold, i thought. you're making a scene. not self-conscious? unimaginable. after it happened for the last time on sunday afternoon, i decided this sort of social bravado had but one explanation: a figure from my past (or future) was inhabiting the body of these men, calling out to me, desperately trying to warn me. of what? another storm to rip open my kitchen window? tiny hands? pregnancy? (mom, is that you?) or, could it be, could it really be, the last gasping breath of white-cis-hetero-patriarchy, making itself known to me one final goddamn time? me too, fuckers.

NEWS Isabel DeBre Chris Packs METRO Harry August Erin West ARTS Nora Gosselin Cate Turner Isabelle Rea METABOLICS Dominique Pariso Eve Zelickson

SCIENCE Liz Cory Tara Sharma TECH Paige Parsons Olivia Kan-Sperling OCCULT Zack Kligler Gabriela Naigeborin EPHEMERA Maya Bjornson

The Independent is printed by TCI Press in Seekonk, MA.

Yamless Julianna Johnston

X Derby Zak Ziebell

MISSION STATEMENT

FROM THE EDITORS:

FEATURES Ruby Aiyo Gerber Neidin Hernandez Paula Pacheco Soto

i as dying lay Fadwa Ahmed

EPHEMERA

Mirror, Mirror Cate Turner

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WEEK IN REVIEW Julia Rock

Body Language Anna Hundert

LITERARY

ARTS 09

Do or DIY Julia Rock

METABOLICS

METRO

Hiya!

Babette Thomas

LITERARY Isabelle Doyle Fadwa Ahmed LIST Jane Argodale Alexis Gordon Fadwa Ahmed STAFF WRITERS Galadriel Brady Mica Chau Ella Comberg Mara Dolan Soraya Ferdman Liby Hays Anna Hundert Lillian Kirby Lucas Smolcic Larson Mariela Pichardo Ivy Scott

The College Hill Independent is a Providence-based publication written, illustrated, designed, and edited by students from Brown and RISD. We are committed to publishing politically engaged and accessible work. While the Indy is financed by Brown University, we hold ourselves accountable to our readers across the Providence community.

The Indy rejects content that explicitly or implicitly perpetuates racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, ableism and/or classism.

Though this list is not exhaustive, the Indy strives to address these systems of oppression by centering the voices, opinions, and efforts of marginalized people in Providence and beyond.

The Indy is constantly evolving: we are always working to make our staff and content more inclusive. Though our editing process provides an internal structure for accountability, we always welcome letters to the editor.

-EW

Marly Toledano Sara Van Horn Kayli Wren Kion You Wen Zhuang COPY EDITORS Shuchi Agrawal Grace Berg Benjamin Bienstock Seamus Flynn Sasha Raman Caiya Sanchez-Strauss ILLUSTRATION EDITORS Eve O’Shea Claire Schlaikjer

SPRING 2018

STAFF ILLUSTRATORS Julie Benbassat Alexandra Hanesworth Kela Johnson Halle Krieger Sophia Meng Pia Mileaf-Patel Ivan Rios-Fetchko Ella Rosenblatt Kelly Wang Dorothy Windham Katya Labowe-Stoll Rémy Poisson

Ella Rosenblatt

DESIGNERS Bethany Hung Amos Jackson Laura Kenney Katherine Sang Mariel Solomon

BUSINESS MANAGER Maria Gonzalez

DESIGN EDITOR Eliza Chen X Zak Ziebell SENIOR EDITORS Jane Argodale Kelton Ellis Robin Manley Gabriel Matesanz Will Weatherly

WEB MANAGER Alyssa McGillvery SOCIAL MEDIA Fadwa Ahmed Pia Mileaf-Patel ALUMNI RELATIONS Julia Tompkins MANAGING EDITORS Jonah Max Katrina Northrop Signe Swanson MVP Julia Rock

THEINDY.ORG — @THEINDY_TWEETS

WEEK IN STRANGE COMPETITION

BY Sarah Van Horn, Sydney Anderson, & Eve Zelickson ILLUSTRATION BY Sophia Meng DESIGN BY Bethany Hung

Business in the Front, Party Outback Fighting for Fitness Chess Notes Indy writer SVH to Column Two. This week marks the close of the Aeroflot Open Chess Festival and of another week of chess journalism. The Aeroflot Open, inviting players of varied skill levels from all over the world, is held every year in a 1,700-room hotel in Moscow. Last Sunday, Natalija Pogonina, one of Russia’s best chess players, faced off against Germany’s up-and-coming Rasmus Svane in a match marked early-on by questionable positioning decisions and a lot of action around chess squares C4 and E5.

What is perhaps more interesting than Pogonina’s slow death on the checkered tiles is the reporting niche that is the column “Chess notes.” In what is evidently routine coverage, the Boston Globe’s Chris Chase narrates the rising action between long strings of digits in bold font. “A typical freeing maneuver,” writes Chase after White’s ninth move, beginning a commentary that slowly increases in emotional intensity. “Don’t forget Black’s raging assault on White’s king,” he implores us after move 25.

Chris Chase of the Boston Globe is not to be confused with Chris Chase of FOX Sports, who was deemed,

by Twitter, to be “the most hated blogger in America.”

Whatever emotions Chase’s ‘Chess notes’ inspire, it is not hate. Nor is it, the Indy doubts, any kind of strong universal feeling.

“17NxD5?! seems dubious to me,” Chase notes.

More than simple narrative diversion, this seemingly unprofessional punctuation has specific meaning in the world of chess reportage. According to Wikipedia, the question mark and exclamation point (known in some circles as an interrobang) indicates a ‘dubious’ move. An exclamation point followed by a question mark, meanwhile, signals an ‘interesting’ one. This code is extensive, including punctuation whose significance ranges from blunders to brilliant maneuvers.

Additionally, the Globe’s daily chess section includes not only the real scenarios in bold, but computer-generated hypothetical moves. “The computers,” Chase writes after move 22, “think that White’s situation is so dire that it requires 22. QxC7 already,” inviting your average ‘Chess notes’ reader to take out a second chess board (assuming they have been diligently charting the game thus far) and plot the hypothetical scenario of a queen capture on square C7.

The Globe continues in the tradition of Chess Notes, a bimonthly periodical published in the 80s and conceived as “a forum for aficionados to discuss all matters relating to the Royal Pastime.” The Indy wants to know when the death of White’s bishop on square G6 first became news.

The American perception of chess, however, is changing. Chess, enjoyed by 39 million people nationwide, is a game only 11 percent of Americans consider to be a “geeky pastime,” reported the National Chess Survey with pride. Even President Trump (?!) commented on the phenomenon of ‘grand chess masters,’ stating: “We don’t have any.” While the US certainly does not have any grand chess masters, it boasts a whopping ninety chess Grandmasters, ranking just below Germany and miles below Russia.

When it comes to national security threats, you’ve heard of North Korea, you’ve heard of Russia’s troll farms, and you’ve heard of the man who threw his shoe at George W. Bush in 2007. What you may not know is that another, darker cloud looms ahead—America’s unfit youth. A retired army lieutenant recently co-authored a report entitled “The Looming National Security Crisis: Young Americans Unable to Serve in the Military.” A crisis indeed.

When underfunded, underserved, and underrepresented communities face decreased food and education access, they’re largely ignored, but when no one can serve in our military because they aren’t fit enough, we have a real crisis on our hands. Forget global warming and chemtrails; the commander of the Center for Initial Military Training has called this lack of American fitness “the next existential threat we have.”

The army has compared its soldiers to its weapons, citing the obvious fallacy that if the army has an entire system of “armorers, mechanics and training ranges” to keep weapons in top condition, what are they doing for its greatest weapon of all—the soldiers? Right now, over 100,000 soldiers are ineligible for deployment because of injuries sustained during training that they weren’t prepared for. With the general lack of fitness in the American public now bleeding into the armed forces, the army is aiming to change its ‘culture of fitness’ through a series of acronymed tests, programs, and services. The Indy recommends cardio.

Unfortunately for the Indy, the US Army prefers to start from the ground up (a very grassroots organization). The APFT (Army Physical Fitness Test) has been around since the ‘80s and involves a measly two minutes of push-ups, two minutes of sit-ups, and a two mile run. Apffft, says the Indy. Now, Command Forces is developing the “Holistic Health and Fitness Initiative” (HHFI), which involves the creation of SPRCs (Soldier Performance Readiness Centers—pronounced ‘Sparks’—intended to serve as centers for psychological and spiritual advice) and the SRT (Soldier’s Readiness Test) to replace the APFT. The SRT must be completed by soldiers while wearing body armor and boots, and includes tire flips, dummy drags, sandbag tosses, and a mile-and-a-half run. In light of this public health crisis, the Indy recommends the SRT also include bouldering up the Statue of Liberty, jumping onto the third rail (shock training) and getting everyone in the military the newest Yeezy Boosts to, well, boost them. Pull yourself up by your Boost straps.

The man spearheading the operation, Major General Malcolm B. Frost, has assured the public that these efforts are truly an investment in the army’s future. Frost is “absolutely confident that the investment we make in this will pale in comparison to the costs if we don’t.” If five acronyms and a seemingly unlimited military budget can’t solve America’s fitness crisis, then what will?

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term mullet was “apparently coined, and certainly popularized” by the Beastie Boys in their 1994 chart-chopper “Mullet Head.” In the song, the band categorizes the mullet as a “number one on the side and don’t touch the back / number six on the top and don’t cut it wack, Jack.”

Not only do the Boys describe the hairstyle, but they stereotype those who rock the cut, singing, “You’re coming off like you’re Van Damme / You’ve got Kenny G in your Trans Am / You’ve got names like Billy Ray / Now you sing Hip Hop Hooray.” Safe to say the irony of their typecasting was lost on the all-white, hardcore punk turned hip-hop group.

Despite the grimaces mullets have been met with in popular culture post-1990, proud mullet-heads from across the globe (or at least across Australia) gathered in Kurri Kurri, Australia at the Chelmsford Hotel for the annual Mulletfest on February 24. Over 150 contestants entered the competition and were ranked in five different categories: everyday, grubby, ranga (ginger mullets), women’s, and junior’s. Unfortunately, only one sheila showed up for the women’s division: an 11-month old infant. The winner of the junior division, 12-year old Alex Keavy told the Guardian he plans to use the $50 prize money to buy his girlfriend a pie.

The winner of the “Best Mullet of Them All 2018” was Shane ‘Shag’ Hanrahan, who has been growing his waist-length mullet since 1986. To put that in perspective, 1986 saw the Chernobyl Disaster, the debut of the Oprah Winfrey Show, the US smoking ban on public transport, and the premiere of Crocodile Dundee. Taking the stage to accept his award, Hanrahan bellowed, “This is the first trophy I’ve ever had. I can’t believe it.” He then chugged a Jim Beam from his trophy and led the performing band, the Stunned Mullets, into a rendition of “Dirty Deeds” by AC/DC. Event organizer Laura Johnson (who sports a shoulder length bob with no traces of mullet) disagrees with the Oxford English Dictionary’s mullet origin: “Here in Kurri, we believe that we actually created the mullet. We’ve had it the longest and we thought we would give our locals a chance to strut their stuff and see if they’re still up with current trends.” While the mullet seems to be the anti-hero of trendiness, Johnson believes Kurri Kurri’s mullets are here to stay. “Some people are just a mullet-wearer in their soul, and it doesn’t matter what the fashion does, they’re going to stick to it.”

-EZ

-SA

-SVH

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

WEEK IN REVIEW

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ALL AMERICAN

The paradigm of the exemplary immigrant A clear voice amid the static: “I will be rewarded. I worked my hardest and I will be rewarded.” The pronouncement of Mirai Nagasu echoes on, as it is relayed to viewers by station after station, commentator after commentator—ESPN, CNN, NBC, Fred Roggin, Arlo White, Jon Champion, Liam McHugh. The Olympics is a stage where a nationalist posture is adopted with little reservation and supported both by those competing and enjoying. It has become one of the the many symbols that signifies a healthy and inclusive country, and a symbol which is amplified by the media as it turns statements like Nagasu’s into soundbites. As reporters were quick to note, Nagasu’s story readily resonated with the chorus of the American dream. The immigrant story, characterized by a strict work ethic and fervent determination, always culminates in rewards, but only when following an obedient, law-abiding narrative. The dream is plastered everywhere—yet another projection of an explicitly white America that always fails to materialize. Yet myths, like any sort of national symbolism, are nevertheless productive, sustaining mass events like the Olympics.

Upholding these emblems of the American dream is the “exemplary immigrant:” the humble, rule-following immigrant who casts off their prior national identity and quickly assimilates. These paradigmatic expectations have come to fruition in the form of various icons, symbols, and signifiers. The idea that immigrants must be superhuman to become American reinforces unrealistic narratives, such as the model minority myth, which the media perpetually underscores and reinforces in their accounts of non-white American Olympians. Lately, however, this mythology seems to have abandoned the identity of the immigrant entirely, now calling for a sort of immediate assimilation into a corporate American culture.

This cultural erasure was most recently solidified in the US Citizenship and Immigration Services’ (USCIS) latest mission statement. The USCIS no longer sees America as “a nation of immigrants.” Rather, the phrase has been replaced with a call for “administering the nation’s lawful immigration system,” stating its main goal is not to “promote an awareness and understanding of citizenship” but rather to “efficiently and fairly adjudicate requests for immigration benefits.” A similar shift can be found throughout the coverage of America’s new Olympic team. Though dripping with the immigrant fantasy, American ideals were never concieved for

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immigrants. What rang in the ears of all watching Nagasu and Kim and the 18 other predominantly East-Asian Americans of this country’s team was the chorus that America had attributed to its immigrants, the rhythm written to be followed. What exactly does the prefix of “American” mean to these athletes? +++ Nagasu’s record-breaking triple-axle and Chloe Kim’s golden half-pipe win were quickly cemented within the American Olympic canon—their faces were everywhere, but what they represented was much more than just a win for the team, it was a win for the American team.

The reporters didn’t hold back from reminding us of that distinction. Frills aside, the attention put on both Nagasu and Kim presents an age-old issue regarding the model minority myth—a skewed theory that justifies the relative success of certain minority groups over others. Nagasu and Kim, both emblematic of a privileged, East-Asian background, are the poster children for such a myth— one which asks those immigrating into this country to be eternally bound to a stage, to perpetually prove one’s worth and one’s abidance by American ideals. News outlets, reporting on Kim’s success, valorized her father.

He made sacrifices like driving her long distances to practice, giving up a job to ensure Kim’s continued interest in snowboarding—things not unspecific to immigrant experiences. He has shown his will to fight through hardships and thus, as an NBC reporter applauded shortly after her win, “put an exclamation point on her family’s quintessential immigrant story.” In that same article, “Meet the American Snowboarder Who Won Gold,” Kim was not allowed to keep the title of ‘American’ for long, the essay concluding on Kim’s roots: “Chloe is partial to calling herself ‘the California girl,’ but she went into her victorious day with Korean folklore at the front of her mind.”

Focusing on an athlete’s journey is not uncommon.

Focusing on the achievements of immigrants while simultaneously limiting their access to the country’s opportunities is not uncommon either. In fact, as of February 22 of this year, these attitudes live permanently in the mission statement of the agency held as the symbol for how America perceives immigrants. As the release of Olympic success stories was coming to a calm, USCIS surfaced with a big blow. These changes, spearheaded by newly appointed USCIS director Frank Cissna, subtly

reflected deep-seated ideologies set forth by constructs like the model minority myth. What Cissna and the new statement were adamant in revealing is that these beliefs live far beyond the confines of the model minority myth.

AMOR, a Providence-based emergency response network of community organizations, has dealt with this fluctuating and increasingly hostile anti-immigrant sentiment since the launch of its 24 hour hotline on February 14. In an interview with the Independent last week, an anonymous AMOR community member discussed a recent Atlantic article, in which Trump’s ban on Dreamers was portrayed as more concerned about the “national origin and race of immigrants than the methods they used to enter the US.” They noticed a shift from the nation’s previous interest in ‘legal versus illegal’ immigration to a racist framework aimed at maintaining a majority white population in the US. Saddened by these particularly violent changes to the mission statement, they admitted that, nonetheless, they were not surprised. This is simply, to quote the AMOR member, “the latest incarnation of US imperialism and white nationalism, furthering an ‘us’ vs. ‘them’ narrative that serves to only recognize an immigrant’s utility, rather than their humanity.” +++ The conversation surrounding this recent change has cast a light on Cissna, who has managed to stay mostly behind the scenes throughout his career working on immigration issues—the bulk of which was highly praised by the Trump administration. Prior to assuming his position as director of the USCIS, Cissna assisted Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley on Homeland Security, where, under Grassley’s name, he helped intensify department oversight on immigration. Among the letters drafted by Cissna were ones criticizing the March 2016 initiative that would give “Dreamers” the chance to obtain travel documents and work permits. Cissna, an immigrant himself, is fighting for approval not among fellow immigrants, but by those granting immigrants certain privileges. Cissna is not shy about his background, oftentimes citing it as the motivation for his decisions. In a statement to the Washington Post, he dwelled on his experience as an immigrant, stating that “[my] family is literally a product of our nation’s legal immigration system” and goes on to hallmark his success with what this nation has afforded him.

MARCH 09, 2018

BY Wen Zhuang ILLUSTRATION BY Hantian Xue DESIGN BY Eliza Chen

As the coverage surrounding Chloe Kim’s gold medal has worked to co-opt her success as nothing more than an immigrant triumph story, Cissna is doing the same thing to himself. For immigrants like Cissna, “success” means his inclusion in the “our” in the end of his recent mission statement, “securing the homeland, honoring our values.” Cissna’s strict abidance to white America’s judicial system mirrors the lens through which the success of immigrant athletes has been judged. By working to champion an idea of the model citizen, an exemplary immigrant, Cissna turns a blind eye to the fact that the USCIS statement glaringly accepts immigrants as perpetual “others.” Cissna states that “all applicants and petitioners should, of course, always be treated with the greatest respect and courtesy, but we can’t forget that we serve the American people,” a group which would not have included Cissna's own family, who petitioned for citizenship.

The role that Cissna has performed thus far is a convincing one, one that has surely earned him a spot as the ‘model immigrant,’ upholding a certainty that the worth of all immigrants can only be measured by their ability to provide for Americans. Chloe Kim has cemented a spot in this ideal as well, but Shaun White, a snowboarder who equally amazed the world in his 2008 gold medal-run, didn’t start with nearly the level of expectations that Kim did. White, in an interview, mentioned Mountain Dew and donuts, and alluded to the medal as a great substitute for the usual parking pass one would have in their car. To this day, not much more is asked from White; 18 medals later, much of us have no clue about White’s family life and upbringing. Kim, however, remains forever attached to her roots. White America has been quick and desperate to position Kim as the ideal immigrant, stationing her alongside someone like Cissna, as another pawn in upholding American meritocracy. A similar fate was dealt to Nagasu in her failure to make the 2014 Olympic team, even though she had checked off all the requirements of a traditional Olympic athlete. The same team that now lauds Nagasu’s achievements chose Ashley Wagner, a white woman, to compete instead, forcing her to further prove herself as a valuable asset to the team. As attested by reporters Irene Hsu and Sharon Zhang on The New Republic last month, Nagasu and Kim have been added to the US Olympic canon, but “we should celebrate their achievements as Americans without co-opting their stories into reductive

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

narratives.” An AMOR spokesperson pointed out that “this conversation is a way in which immigrant solidarity is disrupted by narratives of ‘good’ vs. ‘bad’ immigrants.

It is essential that we recognize that all people deserve dignity, respect, and a home. All too often, government actions, such as this USCIS statement, seek to separate the immigrant community and further disenfranchise immigrants who do not fit a certain narrative of deservingness. All immigrants are deserving.” +++ The USCIS’s portrayal of America as “a nation of immigrants” is probably as credible a symbol as the nationalist promises of the Olympics—ultimately these hollow vessels are used to bolster a faulty and fragile American reputation. For immigrants, it is evident that espousing a model minority construct proves a pyrrhic victory, as the ultimate cost of their assimilation outweighs any possible benefits. High-achieving minorities, in this sense, do not escape their essentially foreign identities; rather, their accomplishments cement their place as exceptional, but

no less excluded players. Their hard work is mechanized as fodder for illuminating the American dream and further alienates all those that this nation deems somehow inferior. Americans uphold their arguments for this dream, oblivious to its mythical nature, remaining uncritical of the discriminatory narrative.

The new Trump-era logic hopes to instill in immigrant groups across the nation that those seeking citizenship can have a role on America’s stage as long as they commit to being perpetually subordinate. The solution to this subordination is not to stop acknowledging immigrants for their achievements and work ethic, but rather to stop attributing these feats exclusively to the exceptionalism of American nationhood.

WEN ZHUANG RISD‘19 doesn’t want a piece of this pie.

NEWS

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TRACTOR HACK The fight for the right to repair

BY Julia Rock ILLUSTRATION BY Rémy Poisson DESIGN BY Katherine Sang Tom Schwarz is a farmer in Bertrand, Nebraska, where he lives on the same farm his family has owned for five generations. A Motherboard Vice documentary from February 14, 2018 features Schwarz explaining why he joined a movement in Nebraska, fighting against companies like John Deere, Apple, AT&T, and Tesla, for the right to repair his farm equipment. As Schwarz gives a tour of his farm and his equipment, the camera focuses on the tractor that he first learned to drive on in the 1960s. “The beauty of that tractor in terms of repair is that I can go anywhere and get parts for it—we could tear this thing down and overhaul it in a week’s time,” Schwarz explains. The camera moves to a much larger, bright green John Deere tractor. “The seat in that tractor, over there, is more complicated than this entire tractor,” referring to the older model.

Schwarz explains that he could repair the older tractors easily and cheaply by buying used parts to make his own repairs. Schwarz can’t do this with his newer models because John Deere has placed digital locks on all of the software which operates the tractor, preventing Schwarz from running diagnostics on the tractor or replacing individual parts. Almost every part on a tractor made in the past decade has a sensor which communicates with computer operating systems that farmers can use to monitor the tractor’s operations. If a part breaks, such as a hydraulic sensor, the tractor’s entire operating system might break down. The individual sensor can’t be replaced by a farmer, because replacing the sensor requires a factory password to bypass the digital locks in order to calibrate the new sensor with the tractor’s operating system.

Some farmers in Nebraska and elsewhere in the United States have circumvented the digital locks by buying software, most of which is developed in Eastern Europe, from online forums, allowing them to hack their tractors. Kyle Schwarting, a farmer in Atlanta, Nebraska, purchased this software to repair his own tractors when they inevitably require maintenance. Schwarting explained to Motherboard that taking his tractors back to the dealer to be repaired is both expensive and logistically impossible; as farmers face narrow windows to fertilize their crops or finish a harvest, the idea of taking a tractor to a certified dealer for a simple repair is, broadly speaking, unfeasible. Not only do these sorts of off-site repairs eat up valuable time, they also can cost the farmer an inordinate sum of money. As Schwarting explains, simply loading a tractor onto a truck to ferry it back and forth from the dealership can cost upwards of $2,000.

In an effort to circumvent these expenditures, Schwarting found a website that allowed him to buy software that would connect his computer to his tractor, run diagnostics on it, and make repairs himself. This type of ‘hacking’ is not illegal under US Copyright Law, which provides an exemption for farmers who need to break

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digital locks to repair their equipment. However, John Deere requires tractor buyers to sign licensing agreements, agreeing that John Deere owns the software in the tractors even after farmers purchase them for use. These licensing agreements allow John Deere to retain ownership over the tractors’ operating systems, and farmers who modify the software are liable to be sued for breach of contract. +++ Farmers trying to maintain their tractors aren’t the first people to recognize the need for a “right to repair.” In 2012, 86 percent of voters in Massachusetts voted in favor of a ballot initiative mandating the right to repair all automobiles. The legislation requires all automobile manufacturers to sell tools and information to car mechanics at a “fair and reasonable price,” and use a standard interface so that mechanics can access a car’s operating system in order to run diagnostics and perform upkeep. In response to the Massachusetts legislation, the auto industry agreed to make the right to repair the national standard. The legislation in Massachusetts set a precedent for activists to extend repair beyond cars to include tractors, consumer electronics, medical devices, and other products which require maintenance but can’t be repaired by consumers due to digital locks.

Kyle Wiens is the CEO of iFixit, a company which publishes and sells repair manuals and kits for electronic devices, providing consumers with the knowledge and tools necessary to repair their products. Wiens explains that the “right to repair” is actually an ownership right of consumers. “The core of a small American town is a gas station and a garage,” Wiens told the Independent.

“Americans have been fixing things as long as they’ve been making them, and taking that freedom away seems un-American.” For Wiens, the right to fully own the things you buy and modify or repair them as you like is the individual right and freedom of the American consumer or small business owner. The local mechanic, the small farmer, or the creative tinkerer fits the bill of individualism and entrepreneurship that this vision prescribes. Wiens explains that cars in the 20th century could be fixed by local mechanics or by car owners themselves, because replacement parts were widely available in the market. Today, large technology companies hold a monopoly on repairing their own devices, which harms both local repair shops and consumers who wish to repair or tinker with their devices.

Over the past two decades, the face of consumer goods in the United States has changed as more devices are digitized and connected to a network. As consumer products have become highly technical and embedded with copyrighted software, consumers have lost the ownership rights they once enjoyed. Wiens and Gay

Gordon-Byrne, executive director of Repair.org, wrote in October 2017, “In past decades, companies that made electronic equipment typically provided the information needed for repair—and usually free of charge. Computers came with schematic diagrams showing how the various components on the circuit boards were connected.”

However, manufacturers have increasingly kept this information secret in order to maintain a monopoly over repair services: “It’s ironic. We live in the age of information. And yet, at the very moment when information about how to repair electronics should be easiest for owners to get their hands on, it has dried up.”

Not only have manufacturers kept necessary repair information about their products secret, but federal copyright laws protect the software in personal electronics, cars, tractors, and other devices with digital chips from modification. In 1998, Congress passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which, among other things, grants a unique legal status to software in consumer devices. Much of the software in personal electronic devices is protected by this law, which means that attempting to modify or repair this software could constitute a copyright violation. As more and more devices become embedded with software, the grip of this legislation tightens over objects we long thought of as our own. Not only are consumers purchasing countless new devices over which they do not have full legal ownership, but technology companies frequently design these models to require upgrade and replacement frequently so that consumers must continue to purchase new goods.

Matt Zieminski, who works for iFixit and Repair.org, explained to the Indy that Apple’s environmental guidelines state that their smartphones are expected to last three to four years. However, the batteries on the devices start to degrade after about two years, which causes the phones to slow down and prevents new operating systems from functioning properly. In December of last year, after news broke that Apple had been intentionally slowing older phones under the guise of software updates, the company decided to offer a discounted battery replacement to customers who had recently purchased their iPhones. Of course, to install such a replacement would require handing the phones over to Apple’s own repair team. +++ Eighteen states, including Massachusetts, have introduced legislation mandating a “right to repair” or “fair repair” for consumers. As Zieminski described to the Indy, “Remember that time that you dropped [your phone] in the ocean or … in the toilet at home by accident. Well guess what: despite what Apple may say, we can actually repair these things easily and cheaply, but it requires us to have access to information and tools the manufacturers

MARCH 09, 2018

won’t let us have right now.” Much of this new legislation would require manufacturers to release service and repair guidelines, so that consumers can repair their own devices, or take them to third party repair shops where mechanics will have the necessary expertise to make repairs. Wiens explains that the repair information which the legislation makes available would not threaten the privacy or security of devices, as it only requires manufacturers to provide enough information to make repairs.

“There’s a big difference between repair information and engineering documentation,” Wiens told the Indy. “One is what the engineer in California has, and one is what the Apple Genius in Providence has.”

The movement is growing quickly. This time last year, only eight “right to repair” bills had been introduced in state legislatures: this number now stands at 18.

However, the farmers, consumer advocates, local repair mechanics, and iFixit bloggers are fighting an uphill battle: large companies such as Apple, Nikon, Tesla, and John Deere have spent remarkable amounts of money

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

lobbying against the popular legislation. Zieminski explains that advocating for legislation which will benefit most Americans, local businesses, and the environment remains extremely challenging when the legislation’s critics have immense funding and political power. “It costs about $60,000 to pay for a good lobbyist to go and fight in a state for this bill. That’s a lot of money. Repair shops will certainly donate, and they have donated, but if you look at a consumer, they’re not usually the ones to just throw money here and there. So how do you get the money and how do you fight these big corporations like Apple—they could just wait you out in court at that price.”

The digital “right to repair” legislation that was introduced in Massachusetts last year is expected to be reintroduced in the current legislative session. Wiens and Zieminski are optimistic about the legislation’s potential to pass, especially as the movement is seeing growing support nationally and pressure is increasing on large technology companies to allow consumers to regain

ownership over their property. Few issues have united farmers in Nebraska, tech bloggers in California, and mechanics in Massachusetts. Repair and ownership have different meanings for different people: for farmers, “right to repair” legislation is a means to a livelihood and to keeping up with harvest cycles, while smartphone owners will be able to extend the lifespan of devices and maintain upkeep at lower prices. “You have every single citizen on one side of this issue, wanting it to happen. And you have entrenched companies with lots of money and lots of lobbyists on the other side,” Wiens told the Indy. The outcome of this struggle between Big Tech and everyone else will have significant implications for the rights of consumers in the digital era.

JULIA ROCK B’19 thinks more hackers should be farmers.

TECH

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SELLING SMALL (Mis)Adventures in branding the Ocean State

BY Lucas Smolcic Larson ILLUSTRATION BY Ivan Rios-Fetchko DESIGN BY Amos Jackson

In March 2016, Rhode Island made an ill-fated foray into the wild world of state-branding. Lawmakers put $5 million into the RI Commerce Corporation’s campaign to promote tourism in the Ocean State, part of Governor Gina Raimondo’s plan for economic development. The result? A sail-shaped logo and the slogan “Cooler & Warmer.” It was a disaster.

Rhode Islanders, even those who realized that “cool” was a double entendre (as in ‘hip’ and the occasional temperature of the ocean), were quick to criticize the campaign. Blunders in its rollout didn’t help the state’s case. The “We Are Rhode Island” promotional video accompanying the new slogan included footage shot in the Icelandic capital of Reykjavik. Its website featured restaurants in Massachusetts and over 100 factual errors. Governor Raimondo quickly scrapped “Cooler & Warmer” but kept the sail logo, encouraging local businesses to “make it their own.” She also fired Betsy Wall, the Chief Marketing Officer of the Commerce Corporation and a guiding force behind the campaign.

RI Representative Thomas Winfield called the launch a “colossal screw up” on Twitter, wondering why the Commerce Corporation had awarded the design contract to several out-of-state companies. The group paid $400,000 to New York-based Milton Glaser, the celebrated graphic designer behind the “I Heart New York” slogan and the Brooklyn Brewery Logo, for the campaign and contracted Havas PR, also based out of New York. Glaser told the New York Times that the sail logo and slogan are meant to evoke “billowing sails, pleasure, relaxation and optimism.” He blamed Rhode Island for failing to present the end product to the public effectively. “The whole thing became enshrouded in negativity,” he said, “The social media thing is a killer.”

Alternative slogan suggestions from the Providence Journal’s online comment section included “Rhode Island: We haven’t sent a Governor to jail for a few years now” and “Rhode Island: Close to Boston.” On Twitter, photos of Rio de Janeiro’s Christ the Redeemer and the Great Wall of China circulated with “We Are Rhode Island” bannered over them. They were a reminder that no advertisement could faithfully convey the everyday hum-drum realities of a tiny state sandwiched between other bigger, more culturally significant urban centers. A 2013 Gallup poll found that only 18 percent of Rhode Islanders thought their state was “one of the best possible places to live in,” the lowest percentage of any state in the nation.

And yet, “I never leave Rhode Island” bumper stickers are a common sight. For every bit of negativity around the Ocean State, there is also pride. Take Warwick native and URI grad Lara Salamano, hired to fill the vacant Chief Marketing Officer position at the Commerce Corporation in the wake of the “Cooler & Warmer” fiasco. “I love Rhode Island,” she told the Independent, “I grew up here. I left for 20 years, [then] I left a thriving career in New York so I could raise my kids here.” One might expect to hear this from someone

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tasked with boosting the Ocean State. But talking to Salamano, you get the sense she means it.

Salamano has indicated that the Commerce Corporation will not be attempting a full-scale rebound campaign this year. Instead, at the end of January, it released a series of seven-second promotional videos of recreation opportunities around the state, ending with the tagline “Rhode Island: Fun-Sized.” Poking fun at itself, the state is using the campaign to make its small size an asset. Within the cliché-soaked terrain of state-branding, Rhode Island’s latest efforts are perhaps some of the most honest. “Cooler & Warmer” flunked, but it brought out the best in Rhode Island cynicism, maybe saying more about the state than an ad campaign ever could. Now, “Fun-Sized” has embraced the state’s contradictions while continuing to try to sell Rhode Island to the rest of the nation.

+++ Broadly speaking, state tourism slogans are the domain of dad jokes and hyperbole. Some make sense, drawn from well-known geographic features (Missouri – ‘Where the Rivers Run’) or cultural tropes (New Hampshire – ‘Live Free or Die’). But most range on a spectrum between generic (Pennsylvania – ‘Pursue Your Happiness’), headscratching (Connecticut – ‘Full of Surprises’), and laughable (Idaho – ‘Great Potatoes, Tasty Destinations’).

In 2016, states budgeted an average of $20.1 million on destination marketing, according to data from the US Travel Association, with oft-visited states like California spending about three times that. Salamano explained that tourism is the fifth largest industry in Rhode Island, employing 80,000 people. The state-level promotion done by the RI Commerce Corporation is funded by a five percent hotel and room tax, diverted for this use by state lawmakers. Salamano told the Indy that tourists spent $6 billion in Rhode Island in 2015. She touts the financial benefits of attracting out-of-state visitors and businesses. According to the Commerce Corporation’s 2015 economic impact study, tourism generated $719 million in state and local taxes that year, equivalent to $1,750 in taxes per Rhode Island household in the absence of the visitor economy.

But the measure of success for state tourism campaigns is often silence—no objections or public ridicule. One does not have to look far for examples of botched placebranding. In 2013, Floridians condemned their state’s ‘Perfect Climate For Business’ campaign logo, which featured a large orange tie, saying it reinforced exclusionary gender norms in the workplace. Florida dropped the slogan this year. 2014 saw NYC & Company, New York City’s official marketing and tourism organization, name Pennsylvania-born and Tennessee-raised Taylor Swift as the city’s “global welcome ambassador.” The announcement was timed with Swift’s single “Welcome to New York,” which was called a “gentrification anthem”

by Jezebel, echoing broad-based criticism of the notion

that a wealthy, white out-of-towner should represent the city.

These examples show that while officials may tout tourism advertising’s economic benefits, this kind of branding carries implicit messages about who is wanted in the state. Reading between the lines of Rhode Island tourism campaigns illustrates this dynamic. The white sail of the “Cooler & Warmer” logo and the upperclass forms of recreation depicted in the “Fun-Sized” campaign suggest that the Commerce Corporation is focused primarily on reaching those with economic capital.

+++ According to Salamano, the ongoing “fun-sized” branding is partly meant to “bring millennials into our fold.” The slogan was released via a series of seven-second videos, meant to be placed on travel sites. They feature shots of people rock-climbing in Lincoln Woods, kayaking in South County, and birdwatching on Block Island, which quickly pan out to a wide aerial view of each location and the slogan. “We looked at what really differentiated Rhode Island from all the other states, and it’s our size,” Salamano said. She explained that “the food, the drinks, the culture, the museums, the mansions, the beaches” are all easily accessible—without the crowds of New York or Boston.

When questioned on the decision to brand the state with an advertising slogan first attached to candy bars, Salamano said the videos reflect a form of self-deprecating Rhode Island humor. “This is how we are; we never take ourselves too seriously,” she told the Indy.

Salamano acknowledged that Rhode Island has historically struggled to be a place of economic well-being, for a long time boasting one of the highest unemployment rates in the country. Times are changing, she said: “We’re not the underdog anymore.” She hopes the “fun-sized” videos will be a rallying point for Rhode Island pride. +++ For future inspiration, the RI Commerce Corporation might turn to their state song, “Rhode Island, It’s For Me.” It was written by Charlie Hall, a local comedian and founder of the “Ocean State Follies” troupe, who make a living satirizing their state. The song is an ode to over-the-top campy place-branding: cheesy rhymes (“don’t sell short this precious port!”) mixed with overwrought images (“water rich with Neptune’s life”) and odd-ball humor (“Residents who speak their minds, / no longer unaware”). It contains no illusions of greatness, just unabashed tongue-in-cheek pride. It works. It’s funny, weird, and self-aware—just like Rhode Island.

LUCAS SMOLCIC LARSON B’19 can name all 50 state slogans.

MARCH 09, 2018

LESSONS ON CORPOREAL GRAMMAR

BY Anna Hundert ILLUSTRATION BY Alex Westfall DESIGN BY Amos Jackson

There’s something unfailingly secure about reciting charts of conjugated verbs. Something about the rhythm, the way everything seems to fit neatly into a pattern. If you ask a former Latin student what they can remember, they will often first say amo, amas, amat, amamus, amatis, amant: I love, you love, she loves, and so on. It’s a present active indicative conjugation of ways to love, amare.

When a language uses structured form-changing like that, it is said to be ‘highly inflected,’ from flectere, to bend, the same root as for flexing muscles and genuflecting. Which is to say that it might help if you can think of conjugating a verb as hinging meanings around the limited rotation of an elbow or knee: “let me count the ways.”

The idea of counting becomes tricky in grammar as we apply ordinal numbers according to different relationships between the speaker and the meaning. We call ‘I’ the first person, ‘you’ the second, and ‘she’ the third.

This type of counting depends upon bodies, because the body producing the word ‘I’ would, of course, change the meaning of the word.

But that relationship isn’t what the term ‘grammatical number’ refers to.

Most English speakers only know of these two grammatical numbers: singular and plural. There’s being alone, and then there’s everything else. But of course we know that it’s not so simple. We usually navigate the complexities of singular and plural categories with ease, swapping between phrases like everything is and all things are.

When we’re using ‘they’ to indicate a singular subject, either as a specifically gender-neutral pronoun or as a general designation, we still use the verb form marked as plural, only because it sounds right to say ‘they are’ rather than ‘they (singular) is.’ (If any English teacher tells you that you can’t do this, they are mistaken. Language is as fluid as water, as blood.)

There is also a grammatical number somewhere in the in-between, neither singular nor plural. It doesn’t exist in English, but in some languages the quality of two-ness is not considered plural. It’s a separate category, the ‘dual’ grammatical number. Languages with a consistent dual, such as Sanskrit, require three columns in the verb conjugation chart instead of two, and so we read across: I love, we (two) love, we (three or more) love, let me count the ways.

In English, we still hear traces of our long lost “dual” when we say both of us instead of all of us for two people, and when we say either instead of any. The distinction between dual and plural seems to still be alive, if only in a vague way. Some instinct in the back of our Proto-IndoEuropean teeth tells us that two is different from three in a way that is more significant than the way that three is different from four.

Or maybe we know it from observing how only two people can make eye contact at once, how it is impossible for three to manage that feat.

As a twin, I think a lot about two-ness. My twin

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

sister and I like to call ourselves wombmates. As fraternal twins, we don’t share any more genetic material than two regular sisters would. But we know that there is a two-ness about us because of our original shared home, a distinction that English grammar can’t describe. There’s no place for it in the conjugation chart. +++ Twinhood, while interesting, isn’t the real reason why I’m so preoccupied with grammatical numbers. I think I like the idea that there is a way to linguistically distinguish the plural verb ‘are’ in ‘we are (members of a group)’ from the rarer, more beautiful, dual ‘are’ in ‘we are (just the two of us, you and I, together in a café, or perhaps in bed, or joined only on the page as you read my words)’.

That difference has something to do with how the distances between us are necessary for deciding which words to use. In order to use a word like ‘you,’ I have to draw a line, decide where I end and where someone else begins. I draw these lines over and over again without even thinking about it.

There is an inherent separateness between your interior life and mine, even between my twin sister’s interior life and mine. People like to joke about how twins can read each other’s minds, but I don’t like to think about how frightening that would be, eliminating the essential difference between interiority and exteriority, how that might unhinge us from ourselves. We probably wouldn’t be able to use language at all after such a fundamental breach, wouldn’t be able to call each other ‘you.’

One thing I like about verbs is how the rules for conjugation have exceptions, and distances can feel smaller than others. For example, the conjugation for being changes between the ‘I’ and ‘we’ forms in English (I am, we are), but the conjugation for loving does not (I love, we love). +++ It’s easy to forget that every piece of communication is fragmentary by nature and that we must speak in fragments in order to be understood. If written language is the mind on paper, then punctuation is our reminder that the mind can never make it onto the page in one piece, that sentences have to be broken apart from other sentences in order to be whole. The brokenness of spoken language is also innate to our bodies. We will always have to stop to take a breath, which is to say that we will always have to break off momentarily in order to continue. But of course, not all languages are spoken aloud, or can be spoken aloud.

The Greek word komma is derived from the verb kopto, to cut or strike. Sometimes I worry that I overuse commas, just because I want all the ideas to be touching each other, because I want to fill my paragraphs with little crescent moons, as if to say to the reader, here, take this

and put it in your pocket, this way we will never fall out of touch, which is one of those English idioms that get sadder when you think about the wording for too long, falling out of touch.

But I love the idea of staying in touch. What a beautiful phrase, the idea that the occasional letter or text can be a type of touching. When someone says stay in touch, I imagine the pads of our fingertips gently pressing against each other from far away. +++ In my writing, I tend to feel that I’m in the business of stitching threads between self and other. But sometimes I prefer to use other methods for that act of connection; sometimes instead of typing behind a laptop screen, I find myself bridging the spaces between bodies in more of a physical sense, which is not to say that sex and writing are the same thing, only that they are both ways of drawing myself closer to others, finding new verbs to conjugate in the dual or plural.

It isn’t easy to write about sex. The words never seem quite right. I think that part of why the language of sex is so strange is that language evolves with usage.

Maybe the taboos surrounding intimacy have produced a less-refined system of expression. I like to believe that this language would somehow improve if we talked about sex more. You can have sex with someone but not to someone, though ‘making love’ can use either preposition, and the word ‘fucking’ often implies a messy dialectic of subjectand-object that ascribes passivity to one of the actors.

But discussing power structures in the language of sex is nothing new, and sometimes I get tired of thinking about the active and passive voice, tired of being told that the passive voice is somehow lesser, or that it necessarily indicates an absence of autonomy. I’m more interested in another kind of two-ness, the division between the inner world and outer world, the division between myself and everybody else.

When I hear phrases like ‘personal agency,’ I often think about what it means to be an agent in the grammatical sense of the term, to set a verb into motion, and I think about how the Latin verb agere equally means ‘to do’ and ‘to make.’ The etymology of agency itself has its own duality or twinhood in that way, a duality of doing and making. I wonder if agency could be as simple as the ability to draw the curve of a comma, fracturing ideas in order to connect them, folding them into each other so that they’re just a little bit closer.

ANNA HUNDERT B’18.5 recommends that you also check out Jane Argodale’s “A Loss For Words” from the Indy’s February 16 issue.

METABOLICS

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LOVE NEVER FAILS The February release of Car Seat Headrest’s Twin Fantasy (Face to Face) wreaked more psychological havoc on me than any other cultural event in my memory. Unwilling to wait until that evening to hear it, but with a day of backto-back classes ahead of me, I walked between lecture halls in an anguished trance, playing the short snatches of the album I had time to listen to so loudly that the occasional passerby shot me an annoyed glance. During class, I could feel that my face was set in a rigor mortis of agony.

Some of my friends asked if I was sick—it was, after all, flu season. I told them there was a new Car Seat Headrest album; they were all justified in rolling their eyes at me.

Face to Face is a remake of Twin Fantasy (Mirror to Mirror), an album Will Toledo, front person of CSH, originally released to Bandcamp in 2011. I love Mirror to Mirror fanatically, as do other nail-bitten, somewhat snotty gay teenagers almost everywhere. Face to Face sees Mirror to Mirror not only re-recorded, but also restructured significantly, with major lyrical and orchestrative changes throughout.

Twin Fantasy is, in both its incarnations, about a relationship. It follows its narrator through the tumultuous journey of falling in love and breaking it off with someone he refers to, variously, as “my boy,” “cute thing,” and somebody “in love with late-stage youth.” At the album’s start, the two “don’t see each other much”; later, the narrator doesn’t “know if we’re boyfriends yet.” By the end, he sings, “these teenage hands will never touch yours again, but I remember you.”

That is the key to Twin Fantasy’s take on love: the albums experience a relationship in reverse. Memory is everywhere in these albums. “Beach Life-in-Death,” the tragedy-in-three-acts of a second song, is framed by remembering: “Last night I drove to Harper’s Ferry and I thought about you,” the song begins, before describing a rainy picnic spoiled by a maybe-homophobic train conductor. Both albums take place in a similar past tense.

2018’s “High to Death” contains the repeated line, “I can’t turn this thing off / It keeps following me.” So, too, does this very formative, very difficult affection and its object. Twin Fantasy isn’t against the process of moving on, but the album’s narrator has little hope for his ability to do so. His development, arrested early on by the brutal kind of love, doesn’t quite seem to have resumed.

When I first listened to the 2011 incarnation of Twin Fantasy, I had just sent a text reading, “are u still in love w me”; it felt like fate. For years, my greatest guilt, a guilt over both how stunted I felt and the fact that I felt stunted, had been escalating. As every functioning heterosexual I knew seemed to go through the rites associated with aging—its passages and forgettings—I clung to things that had happened years ago with increasing fervor. To stop being in nascent love with the various friends I fell

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in nascent love with felt not so much like a betrayal as like an obliteration of self. I couldn't separate from them, even when I tried, because they had become me, and I them. Moving on seemed like an oxymoron—moving on to what? Any place I moved would contain places I had already been; no new place could contain me, because I couldn’t see past the old.

Mine was, at base, a hysteria over correct timelines.

As a friend of mine put it, “You either have gay sex too early or too late.” Being a queer kid means doing everything at the wrong time and in the wrong order; it means never getting properly clear of your past or finding a recognizable home in your future. I couldn’t fathom my future self, and when I tried—gay-married, probably in a poorly heated row home in the city where I grew up, with, what, a sheltie?—it felt like I was writing fiction.

Such futures never feel real; it seemed more probable that I would vow celibacy, or give up and marry a male friend, or die in one of the ways dykes usually die on TV, by breast cancer or a drunk driver. I felt, acutely, like I would be crying at a gas station over some imagined slight from a shiny-haired friend for the rest of my life.

Twin Fantasy’s most critical insight is triple-pronged.

The albums see first, what matters so much about first queer loves; second, why first queer loves can be so frustratingly unshakeable; and, third, what it is actually like to live, every day, with something you cannot shake.

What makes first queer love matter? In Twin Fantasy, the narrator’s desire to merge with the one he loves is central both to their relationship and to the narrator’s conception of himself. In “Twin Fantasy (Those Boys),” Toledo sings, “They just want to be one, walk off into the sun / They’re not kissing, they’re not fucking—they’re just having fun.” Wanting to see yourself in another person, for your two faces to become one, is a part of most coming-of-age stories and of most relationships. But in this relationship, as in many early queer ones, two different modes of mirroring—as romance and as self-reflective tool—are bewilderingly blurred. When the person you see yourself through is also the person you are learning to be yourself from, both processes become much more fraught and much more frightening.

Usually, gendered expectations relegate ‘what-can-Ibe-and-what-do-I-look-like-from-this-particular-angle’ to same-gender friendships and ‘who-am-I-really-andwhy-do-you-love-me-anyway’ to straight romance.

When same-gender friendships entangle with romance, these two very different kinds of mirror must merge into one. The resulting self-insights can be very, very intense, and not always pleasant.

That unpleasantness comes through clearly on Twin Fantasy. “The ancients saw it coming. You can see that they tried to warn us … They said sex can be frightening,

MARCH 09, 2018

BY Cate Turner ILLUSTRATION BY Justin Han DESIGN BY Mariel Solomon

Car Seat Headrest and my twin fantasies but the children were not listening,” Toledo sings on “Beach Life-in-Death,” concluding that “everyone grew up with their fundamental schemas fucked.” Rarely does one come out of their first queer love without having been frightened, by sex or by any number of other hurdles.

Even more frightening, though, are the ways that these relationships can alter fundamental schemas. It has crossed my mind that my own schema may be fucked beyond repair by what I can’t stop remembering.

One of the binding refrains of “Beach Life-inDeath,” a line that repeats at the song’s end in an interminable trance, is “The ocean washed over your grave / The ocean washed open your grave.” At the center of this song is the conviction that certain pasts are impossible to get properly clear of: some bodies are buried and disinterred anew each day.

Some bodies, through their sheer power, are impossible to keep dead. First loves scar and warp and build; first queer loves scar and warp and build without blueprint. First loves usher the lover into adulthood, but first queer loves usher the lover into a territory for which there is no map, no path, no getaway vehicle. That might be a fair definition of adulthood, but to realize all at once that your life will be scriptless because of your love is different

from realizing that your life will be scriptless in spite of your love. First love insists the latter, first queer love the former. It is almost impossible to excise the memories attached to such a brutal realization. Growing up is often framed as a process of discrete stages, each one cleanly entered and exited. Personally, I have emerged—to whatever extent I’ve emerged—covered in the viscera of what was.

But Twin Fantasy (Face to Face)’s largest revelation lies in its even deeper conviction that to live with a past is not a death sentence. The album’s earlier incarnation plays like an hour-long fever dream of grief. This 2018 version is sad—sometimes excruciatingly—but it makes an argument best summarized by the end of “Famous Prophets (Stars),” during which Corinthians 13 is recited: Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away.

For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I abandoned my childhood, I put these ways behind

me. For now we see only a reflection, as in a mirror: then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part: then I will know fully, even as I am fully known.

Sometimes, it’s necessary to stay in the past until you can see it clearly. This verse—and Twin Fantasy as a whole— lets nobody off the hook for the suffering and transgressions of their past selves. They call on us to turn back and examine the pasts that contained those selves with the final clarity of love. Our duty is to put childish ways behind us and look for what we could not see before— to know fully, even as we are fully known. To meet the people we loved, and the people we were, face to face, and look them in the eye.

Since Will Toledo made the decision to re-record this entire album seven years after its original release, I doubt I will stop being in some version of my fifteen-year-old love any time soon. I am, anyway, still a queer kid, only a slightly older one. But I no longer see dwelling on love as a tragedy, or love itself as tragic. I am lucky to have been known fully, and I am lucky, now, to be nearing the point of fully knowing. Corinthians 13 is an argument, more or less, for truth as a function of love. Three years ago, I would have rolled my eyes at that. Now, remembering who I used to be and who I used to know, I think I have only ever seen truth, whatever that may be, through the lens of love.

I don’t know that I can go so far as to say I’m grateful that my life is so structured around seeing backwards, archiving my own history. Maybe it does stunt me; I wouldn’t be surprised. But I know that the process of archiving has made me more capable of unclouded sight than if I hadn’t known what it was to gain and love and inhabit and lose a twin. It is rare that queer kids grow into callow adults; the lucky ones resist the opposite pull toward jadedness, too. We have no choice: the ones we love early on are mirrors to us, reflecting us as we reflect them, and mirrors break.

“When the mirror breaks, I wouldn’t miss it for the world,” Toledo sings in “Famous Prophets (Stars).”

Neither would I. My initiation to myself was fast and growing-painful—so, I still have stretch marks. I am glad to have grown, and I am glad to carry indelible reminders of that growth.

Twin Fantasy ends, in the album’s titular song, with another refrain: “When I come back, you’ll still be here / When you come back, I’ll still be here.” It is a blessing to have someone to come home to, even in memory.

CATE TURNER B’21 prefers the King James version of Corinthians 13, but forgives Will Toledo for his translation choice.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

ARTS

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IMAGINING THE BLACK COWBOY

On a Wednesday afternoon, I’m sitting in the conference style classroom of my workshop in front of a dark wood table with 16 other students. With ten minutes left in class, my professor, who prefers that we refer to him as Ed, suddenly scatters dozens of eclectic postcards in front of us. He instructs us to pick one to write about for the rest of class. Whatever comes to mind. I shuffle and sift my hands through the pieces of cardstock trying to find the best one, or at least something that ‘speaks to me.’ I almost settle on a really pleasant picture of a clock in front of a blue background. It depicts slightly chubby pale Renaissance figures encircled by yellow crescent moons. It looks like something that could have been done

by Salvador Dali if he had learned to lighten up. Just as I started preparing myself to write something corny about how my soul, my body, and my spirit are aligned with the moon, another postcard catches my eye.

Nic Nicosia. The Cast (Otis, Larry and Big Mike).

1985. Pictured in the foreground: three white cowboys posed behind a table, enjoying plates of warm Texas barbeque and glasses of sweet tea. They look happy and jovial, with mustaches stretched above their giddy smiles.

Hats are perched on their heads, fringe hanging from their chests, bandanas and bolo ties dangling from their necks.

Surrounded by dark marbled wood, checkered red and white table cloths and some hand sewn curtains to match, they create a classic American tableau.

At first glance, these characters reminded me of the figures from the blurry drawings of cowboys in the American history textbook I lugged around during the 10th grade (which I continue to blame for my prolonged back problems). Figures with wide stances, glaring gazes, scruffy brown hair, and hands on their pistols just itching to pull the trigger. These textbook images are usually accompanied by a description of Westward expansion— attempting to portray the expansion of the US empire throughout the American continents as both justified and inevitable. Despite the figures on the postcard being neither outdoors nor engaged in any form of action other than munching on some scrumptious barbeque, their garb and aesthetic is enough to evoke images of the Wild West. An idealized representation of Western expansion.

Behind them, a Black cowboy is caught in action at the rodeo, riding a grey bull with his fringed pants billowing in front of him. The stadium is filled with Black and Brown figures in colorful garb. Also pictured, a Black rodeo clown. They’re dressed in a color coordinated red-and-white polka dot ensemble that goes perfectly with the curtains, and a pair of blue overalls on top. A rodeo clown has the complicated and dangerous task of making sure the audience is amused while providing a distraction for the bull in case the cowboy is ever in

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danger. This Black rodeo clown is pictured stabbing the bull in his right eye as the cowboy is thrown back by the bull’s bucks. A bullseye. The roles are clear, the scene is set, and the players costumed to part. The visual markers tell us where and what is happening, but something is missing from this classic rodeo scene. These Black southern figures have no faces. Just brown circles smudged on a canvas.

I didn’t know about the deep and complex history of Black cowboys until very recently. But why would I? My dad always boasted about the Western classics he had watched growing up, starring white male actors like Clint Eastwood and John Wayne. Such movies, like The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, The Searchers, and Once Upon a Time in the West explore the complicated and difficult lives of white cowboys. Their protagonists are handsome, brave, and strong horse-riding white men engaging in the difficult labor of cattle herding, while constantly brushing up against danger. In these movies, cowboys are typically depicted as lawless and contentious heroes, simultaneously loved and hated by many. They are awarded multidimensional characters and stories as well as autonomy, a quality rarely attributed to Black characters in Hollywood. Black actors, in Westerns as well as in other movie genres, have historically been cast for roles such as the sidekick or caretaker—someone who is always willing and eager to serve and assist the white protagonist.

What Hollywood has promoted as traditional white cowboy lifestyle actually originates from ‘Vaquero’ culture in Latin America. As the Spanish colonized the Americas, they asserted their domination by establishing ranches and missionaries in regions such as northern Mexico, the first of many links between cowboy-hood and colonial history. They began importing cattle from Spain and coerced indigenous people, whose land they stole, to begin adopting their ranching practices. These forms of cattle ranching eventually spread to Texas. By the nineteenth century, Anglo settlers sought out new methods of herding cattle, this adopting these Spanish traditions. However, this is only a small part of the history of cowboys. +++ While fighting in the Civil War, white ranch owners often designated enslaved people to watch over their cattle.

Many Black Americans gleaned experience in the practice of cattle ranching. In addition, directly after emancipation, ranch labor was often the only work available to free Black Americans. All of these factors led to the emergence of Black cowboys, and not just a small number

of them. An article published in Smithsonian magazine notes that over a quarter of cowboys were Black.

Learning this after hours of internet searching took me from wondering, “Why would I have heard about Black cowboys?” to asking, “Why the hell haven’t I heard about Black cowboys?”

“Why haven’t I learned about Black cowboys in history books?”

“Why haven’t I watched Black Westerns?”

“Why haven’t I been taught to look at Black cowboys as heroes?” +++

This is not to glorify the figure of the cowboy or to disregard the genocide of Native Americans as a consequence of the imperialistic westward expansion of white settlers.

In fact, this erasure is what the image of the white cowboy relies upon. In classic Westerns made prior to the mid-20th century, such as 1939’s “Stagecoach,” Native Americans are often portrayed as unintelligent, savage, and inferior to the white cowboy, therefore justifying the white cowboy’s domination of Native people. Alternatively, in more recent and well known films such as The Lone Ranger, white cowboys and Native Americans are sometimes seen as getting along in harmony, which erases the repeated violence and genocide white settlers enacted upon Native Americans. Native people are constantly confronted with reminders of this genocide, as it is often trivialized through games (Cowboys and Indians, for instance), movies, and other forms of American culture.

Cowboy culture in and of itself is embedded in a colonialist framework that perpetuates violence against Black and Brown people. Through slavery, Black people were forced to take upon the figure of the cowboy, bringing along a violent history of how Black Americans have interacted with this framework. In moments in which Black Americans were still not completely free, they constantly found ways to assert their autonomy.

However, these histories and moments of Black freedom and independence are so often erased, as American narratives typically only focus on moments of Black American struggle.

This is instead to comment on the erasure of Brown people from the history of the great American West and its creation. This is instead to voice my desire for more depictions of Black characters as simultaneously heroic and exempt from the law without fear of being criminalized, for more Black characters who aren’t only seen for their labor, but also for the complexity of their lives. In a way, after emancipation, becoming a cowboy meant freedom, escape, and the possibility of making a

MARCH 09, 2018

BY Babette Thomas DESIGN BY Eliza Chen

Recovering an alternative history of the West

livelihood, but this didn’t provide escape from erasure.

And it also didn’t mean that Black and white cowboys were on completely equal footing. Yes, it’s true — because of the nature of ranch labor, cowboys often had to depend on each other regardless of race; however, Black cowboys faced discrimination in the towns they rode through, unlike their white counterparts. Cowboy-hood didn’t provide escape from segregation, nor from being denied service at an establishment.

+++ Picture this: a tall, Black, dark-skinned cowboy done up in the appropriate dress—pointed boots, sturdy pants, a fringed shirt and a color-coordinated hat. He is as strong as he is elegant. He is riding through a small town in Texas, looking for somewhere to grab a drink and rest his feet. He spots a “Whites Only” sign dangling from a weak nail on a tall cavern-looking bar. “Perfect,” he thinks to himself. He stops his horse and ties it up to a post outside. He enters the establishment while chewing on some tobacco, wide stance and all. He demands to be served a drink. The white man behind the bar uses some unpleasant language and refuses to serve him. The Black cowboy purses his lips, standing tall with his head high, hands on his hips, and nods. He calmly, yet proudly walks out of the bar. Everyone in the bar is surprised, as they were getting ready for a fight. As the Black cowboy exits the bar, he turns left to where he tied up his horse. He mounts the animal, grabs the reigns and rides it towards the sunset.

He then turns the horse around so that he’s now facing the tavern door. He begins to whip the strong and majestic animal, while letting out a big “Hyaaa!” The animal whinnies and charges towards the tavern. The cowboy squints his eyes, one hand gripping the reigns, the other one on top of his hat. He tries to figure out how much he’s going to have to crouch to fit through the small opening, but as he passes through the doorframe, he ducks effortlessly and times it perfectly. He looks out at the shocked expressions of the white cowboys in the bar, all ready to grab their guns. But he’s too quick for them.

He shoots out every single light in the place with perfect accuracy until it is pitch black. He turns around and rides off into the sunset for real this time, patting his horse on its side, thinking to himself, “perfect,” once again.

If you’re wondering about the identity of this man, his name was John Hayes, also known as the ‘Texas kid.’

Unfortunately, not much more information is known about him. He was a Black cowboy, one who reclaimed the white violence so often used against Black and Brown people in order to assert his place in an American West

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

that constantly tried to erase him.

Okay, now moving to Cascade Montana. Imagine Mary Fields, a Black woman who would ride around in her wagon, wearing an apron, under which she carefully tucked her six-shooter rifle. Mary loved to fight.

If anyone ever approached her, she would remind them that she was known for knocking out any man or woman with a single punch. She was born in Tennessee as an enslaved person, but was freed after the Civil War. She was constantly talked about in the newspaper because of her fighting abilities and being able to hold her own. She drank large amounts of alcohol and enjoyed smoking her fair share of bad cigars.

One night, while she was making a night run in her wagon to carry supplies for the nuns of St. Peter’s convent.

She was going down her normal trail, wolves emerged from the dark in front of her path. Her horses begin to kick and whinny and knock the wagon over while she’s still in it. The toppled wagon makes a loud thud, and stirs up dust that gets inside her lungs. Meanwhile, she sees from the corner of her eye that the wolves have started encircling her wagon. So she dusts herself off, fixes her apron, from which she pulls out her rifle, and points it at the wolves while yelling, “You get back!” The wolves snarl at her, but she advances towards them unafraid. The wolves eventually begin to retreat. She uses this as an opportunity to make sure her horses are alright: petting their manes and cooing (almost singing) to them. She then sits atop the toppled wagon—feet dangling, holding her rifle across her chest. And she camps out just like that for the rest of the night. Come morning, Mary was able to safely drive the supplies to the convent, for which the nuns were forever grateful.

Fields was very complicated both in terms of her interests and her reputation. While she loved a good brawl, one of her other favorite pastimes included growing and picking flowers for the local baseball team.

And although Mary was loved by the nuns, the Catholic Bishop forced her to resign working for the convent, because of her fighting tendencies. However, this didn’t stop Mary’s birthday from being made a Cascade school holiday every year. With this, Fields stands as a lesson in Black female duality: navigating being both hard and soft.

About a month ago, I started browsing Amazon for cowboy hats. I was searching for one that felt festive, but not too over the top—one that falls in line with my personality. I finally found the perfect one: a cow-print cowboy hat. My love of cow-print dates back to when my family took a trip to Halifax, Nova Scotia, where we spent two hours in a cow-themed creamery. I brought home stickers, bookmarks and water bottles with puns

like “Hannah Moo-Tana" and the “Jonas Br-udders".

Anyway, at home, I anxiously awaited my hat. It finally came in a large box so as to not damage or smash the precious cargo. My dad handed the box off to me, giving me a look that read as “what the hell is this?" I shot him a look back that said, “you don’t want to know." I opened the box, and picked up the hat, placing it on my head and adjusting the strap. I was elated.

Today, there are subtle, yet exciting, ways in which Black cowboys show up in American culture. Movies like Django and Posse depict the experiences of Black cowboys. In terms of fashion, for 2018, Mardi Gras Solange wore a hand-embellished black cowboy hat with a sparking crystal fringe made by her and her son Julez.

In 2016-2017, the Studio Museum had an exhibit titled “Black Cowboy,” containing art depicting the lives of modern-day Black cowboys. Finally, the Federation of Black Cowboys, stationed in Queens, New York, ensures that kids from the inner city are able to learn about Black cowboy-hood and interact with horses.

I walked out of my bedroom and into the living room, never having been more proud of a purchase than the one atop my head. My parents looked at each other and then both looked at me with an oh dear god expression stretched across their faces. They both begged me to not wear it outside the house… but I didn’t listen.

My family comes from various parts of the south: Tennessee, Oklahoma and Louisiana, as do many Black Americans who are the descendants of formerly enslaved people. Whenever I wear my cowboy hat, it’s not simply a frivolous accessory. I am honoring a lineage whose stories and narratives have been intentionally erased. I am reimagining and inserting myself within a new narrative of what we think of as “American Classics.” I am thinking of my ancestors who have continually been displaced because of white violence. In terms of understanding my own personal narrative, reclaiming, imagining and grounding myself within histories of Black autonomy that are so often skipped over is an important stepping stone in imagining histories that exist completely independent of a colonial framework.

BABETTE THOMAS B'20 tips her hat at Black women reclaiming their histories.

FEATURES

12

BODIES OF

THE WATER

The Bogotá River and Tequendama Falls

BY Maria Camila Arbelaez Solano ILLUSTRATION AND DESIGN BY Gabriel Matesanz

Pollution Two great floods are burned into my memories of those days.

Memory, for a child immigrant, often feels like a mirage. Before the landscapes of my new country, I question the accuracy of recollections of home. I thirst for sensory visions of the past as the possibility of not returning to the place I remember stretches wider and wider before me until it meets an interminable horizon.

I left 11 years ago.

Yet in rare moments, I divulge a memory that seems surreal to an older person who lived it and hear: yes. They say yes, I remember, then they squint and think eleven years back and trace the geographies of change in our city of Bogotá that dances with the waxing and waning topographies of violence in a country that has borne conflict as it has borne joy for its whole existence.

I am oddly glad to confirm that the two great floods of my childhood days are real.

When the Bogotá river and I first touched, I did not go to her—rather, she came to me. Nobody in my family would dare to touch the river. Perhaps they would have if they could be researchers collecting pollution samples, or making money in the leather industry that dumps its waste in the water. Until very recently, not even the usual North American migratory birds would come to the river due to its contamination: birds who had traveled there for thousands of years.

Ensconced in so much filth, the river had gained a similar disdain amongst the crowds as the disdain shown to poor and displaced people (who are called disposables in popular discourse by anyone who does not share their fate) in our violently classist society. My father said a lot of the life that revolved around the river was displaced when the factories on the riverbank started dumping their waste onto it, a practice that has continued from the Industrial Revolution until today. He called it a dead river, and said he’d declare anyone who drinks the water dead too. Its white chemical foam looks like marble dancing in the current.

The river emanates a bad smell. The city structured itself so that the lowest classes of people would reside near its banks. Due to inadequate living conditions, a lot of trash is deposited into the river. This tragic and immense contamination is paired with the historical amnesia of colonization, allowing people to forget that the river was once filled with life, and that it must be filled with life again. Life has organized itself around the river differently from Spanish colonial ways. Bogotá was once called Bacatá and controlled by the Muisca and Chibcha indigenous peoples. This remembrance cannot be treated as a mirage. The indigenous legacy in the river is material, not a romantic myth.

The Bogotá river came to me, in the first great flood, as it overflowed after heavy rains and inundated the municipality of Chia (moon in Chibcha language) where my school was located. When I was in school I remember

a very rural environment, but by 2011 Bogota’s expansion was already reaching the area. Today it is unrecognizable from the open fields that I remember. The flooding was extremely difficult to combat, as Chia was a swampy area, so, for a year, we had school in a rented house in the city.

Sometimes the flooded areas looked peaceful, like reflecting ponds, but then a classmate would quickly remind us of the filth of the waters. In popular culture, people called the river by all sorts of darkly comedic names. They called her river of piss and shit, “el rio chichicaca.” They called her lifeless. They called her by what was dumped in her. They called her a problem that cannot be fixed, a metaphor for our whole country.

They called her by the city that forced itself on top of the earth around her. To build Bogotá, the Spanish colonists first built twelve houses in 1538, representing the twelve apostles of Jesus.

I remember my mom talking about learning how to swim river-style in her childhood, and I asked if she ever got to swim in the Bogotá river. She laughed at my ignorance. “I am not that ancient,” she said. “I swam in rivers in small villages when we got away from the city.”

The arrival of the first settlement of colonizers in Bacatá marked the beginning of the era of death for the river, after endless urban growth was wrought out of of the earth through iron and brick and steel and zinc and blood. They called the river by the chemicals inside of her. The migratory birds didn’t call her anymore, and she didn’t call the birds to her. They, in their journeys to the south, did not recognize her as a safe place to rest. She never stopped calling out however, in a voice more and more isolated from the language we are have no other choice but to speak.

The second flood I remember was the flood of displaced peoples from the war that came to Bogotá.

Children were selling things on the street. At the red lights and traffic jams they’d come out selling candy and washing windows. I remember specific faces. I remember people who had been wounded by anti-personnel mines in rural areas and migrated to the city. When I recently came back to visit Bogotá, there were fewer people on the street, although the conflicts causing displacement remained. I asked my elders, “where have they gone?”

The answer was often, “Peñalosa is clearing up the city.”

These days there is talk of decontaminating the river as part of Mayor Enrique Peñalosa’s urban renewal plan. In many residents’ eyes, cleaning the city is akin to getting rid of the “undesirables.” For instance, at the same time that huge efforts are being made to deploy expensive purifying machines and clean up parties in the river, Bogotá is gentrifying its low-income areas at an incredible speed. A low-income neighborhood called el Bronx has recently been completely destroyed and rebuilt, displacing hoards of people. Amidst this chaos, the mayor posted on Facebook yesterday in a celebratory tone that some Canadian migratory birds have been able to come back to the river, finding a home as others are losing it.

Blood The Bogotá river holds the leftovers of the city’s violence and despair. Bogotá has been the center of armed conflict many times, from the riots that began another civil war in the late ‘40s to the M19 guerrilla takeover of the palace of justice, the headquarters of the judicial branch of the Colombian government. Blood and bodies have been spilled in the river. My father told me that during the riots of April 9, 1948, parts of the river flowed red. Rivers flowing red are also present in our literature. In recent years, especially in works about sicarios and narco traffickers, rivers of blood and streets paved with skulls make their way to the pages as they do in my father’s stories.

As the river veers away from the city and into more rural areas, it becomes El Salto de Tequendama.

A large and sudden rocky waterfall. Its waters used to flow thick, but today, because of pollution, the stream is much thinner. The site, in an area called Cubsio, is sacred to Muisca indigenous peoples, who have a legend that speaks of a creator breaking the earth open to drain a flood. Other indigenous communities share similar stories about the fall’s creation. Such stories are full of spiritual and cultural significance beyond my understanding.

El Salto de Tequendama is also full of Catholic significance and very provincial paranormal stories, myths, and legends. This is because for years the Tequendama Drop has been a preferred site of suicide. This phenomenon has excited the imaginations of many. Why is this fall magnetic to suicide? Some say it is the steep drop and swift flow of the river that makes bodies difficult to find.

Some say the souls of the dead call out from the river for more to join them. A statue of the Virgin Mary is placed on top of the waterfall to overlook the drop. A plaque is nearby saying that Jesus is the way. In this site, rich stories and blends of tradition collide.

The bloody and contaminated river needs urgent tending, respirators, purifying machines and conflict resolution. Yet who are we to do that which people who have been at war and tending the wounds with fire and dirty water, and dropping the discarded bodies into the river have to do?

Eleven years later, long gone from Colombia, and living in Pittsburgh, I heard of a dead body found in the Ohio River. It felt darkly ironic. Students were laughing.

Another dismissal of a river’s past genocide. They had forgotten that many indigenous peoples have died in this river, that colonial wars have been fought in its surroundings, seeing this body as a freak accident. A river that holds coal bargers, where people fish just to throw the fish back into the water, and where kids who don’t mind a bit of filth swim and feel the small fish around their feet. It is beautiful and ugly and not yet on fire. Though foaming with dirt it was not bad compared to where I’d come from. So I swam. I was finally able to swim in a river, with my head out at all times, like my mom did when she got away.

MARIA CAMILA ARBELAEZ SOLANO B’19 misses home.

13

ARTS

MARCH 09, 2018

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

EPHEMERA

14

BREAKING TIME An interview with novelist Max Winter

Max Winter does not know why he was fired from the Brown Bookstore two weeks after Exes, his novel, was bought by a publisher.

Or maybe he has a semblance of an idea. “I say I don’t know why I was fired, but I imagine it had a lot to do with my inability to feign any interest in pennants and mugs and teddy bears and shit, which is where they make all their money.”

Winter grew up and has spent over thirty years of his life living in Providence. “The place feels like part of my body,” he explains. He has lived in every part of Providence “other than the Boulevard” and has worked, in addition to the bookstore, all over the city: as a landscaper, substitute teacher, college writing instructor, and a technician in the Brown Facilities department. In the '90s, he was part of the Providence noise music scene, which drew inspiration from punk and experimental rock.

He remembers fondly the art collective Fort Thunder, founded by RISD students and a base of operations for Providence noise—and also how it was torn down to make way for a Shaw’s parking lot.

He thinks, nonetheless, that certain pieces of Providence are fixed in time. Louis Family Restaurant, for one, is one of few places where he has seen the worlds of Brown students and Providence locals intersect. But he warns about the long-term effects of the food. “There was one year I think I ate there once a week,” he says.

“My cholesterol numbers skyrocketed. The rest of the week I think I was just eating buckwheat and water because I was a broke landscaper. But that weekly visit was damaging enough.”

Exes, Winter’s first book, is set primarily in Providence and took Winter fifteen years to complete.

Ostensibly, the novel is narrated by Clay Blackall, whose brother Eli died five years prior, though his voice only shows up in sections: the majority of the book consists of short vignettes told in the voice of Eli’s acquaintances (and, yes, exes). In one, a man catalogues his chores as a caretaker for a house in the Narragansett Bay while bemoaning a lost love; in “The Quaker Guns,” a man tries to finally expel the Canada geese from his backyard; in “Louder than Good,” a character moves into a neglected storage room in the basement of the Providence Place Mall. Each chapter is followed by a section where Clay annotates each story with bits of Providence lore, personal interjections, and snarky comments in the form of footnotes.

Winter says he’s not sure exactly what kept him coming back to the book for fifteen years. At times, he was working three jobs and raising a small child. He also once had to retype the entire book after a French

15

METRO

edition of Microsoft Word, donated by his father-in-law, corrupted his file. But Winter wonders if that process actually made him more likely to finish Exes: as soon as it became a physical rather than creative problem, he says, it activated his “natural stubbornness.”

“It became an entirely unintellectual endeavor. It was like, I’m going to fucking finish this thing if it kills me. And it felt like at points it was close to doing exactly that.”

The book also changed radically up until the very end, when he was told by his publishing company that he had to remove a character for legal reasons. But at that point, he felt confident that he could do whatever was needed, because it had changed so much during the entire writing process—so he stayed up for two weeks straight to reconstruct the narrative. “I developed such an unsentimental, ruthless, almost brutal approach to shaping it,” he says.

He’s not planning to wait another fifteen years to complete his next project, which he is working on from his new home in Berlin. He says, “Actuarial tables suggest that this is not a good pace for a forty-five year old firsttime novelist.”

We spoke with Winter on the phone from his home in Berlin.

The Independent: I imagine it takes a certain kind of love to write about Providence the way you do in Exes. The novel includes so many different voices, but it seems to me that the main character is the city itself. How did you conceptualize that when you were writing, and how did you balance your fictional Providence with the real one?

Max Winter: I started writing it when I was living in Los Angeles. It came from a place of—I wouldn’t say homesickness, but it was closer to homesickness than the way I miss Providence now. I moved back to Providence when I was still relatively early in the process of writing the book, which was probably a bad idea for a lot of reasons.

That made it a lot harder. When I was living in LA, the world around me was different from the world on the page. Memories didn’t cause things to blur or bleed. That was not the case when I moved back to Providence, at which point I started working at a much more deliberate—which is a euphemistic way of saying slow, really painfully slow—pace.

I agree, the main character is Providence as far as I’m concerned. When I was writing, I wanted to pull it away from reality as much as I could. I wanted to rebuild it in miniature, the way one would a diorama. I wanted its sense of scale to be true to the fictional project. But it was

always important for me to know where one ended and one began. Which was sometimes difficult, when I would run into the real live ghosts. In the last year of writing the book, I was almost literally smack-dab in between the house I grew up in and the house I moved to when I was nine. It wasn’t a pleasant reminder. You feel enough like time is standing still or moving backwards when you’re writing a book as it is. But to have the streets confirm that can be—at best—exhausting. And I was definitely exhausted at the end.

The Indy: Brown does not play a huge role in the book.

Is Brown University distant from the Providence that you know? Is it somehow inextricably separate from the city as a whole?

MW: Yes and no. It’s such a huge part of my consciousness, and it’s such a huge part of my experience growing up. It’s interesting, because I’ve always been on the periphery of it. I’m a townie, and there’s the towngown thing. I remember being hyper-aware of the fact that I was living in an alternate reality compared to your average Brown student; I realized that they had their version of Providence and I had mine. Wherever you work in Providence you can’t help but depend on [Brown’s] presence financially: I was mowing the lawns of Brown professors. I was buying Robert Coover’s used books at the bookstore. That said, I had the petty, superficial resentments that a Rhode Islander does have toward the forces of the college.

It was perhaps amplified because my grandmother hated to visit us in Providence, in large part because when she had applied to Brown in the '30s they denied her acceptance because she was a Jew. It’s hard to think of such a time, but there was a time when Brown, like all Ivies, had quotas, and she wound up on the wrong side of those quotas. So she always had this resentment toward the place itself and this understanding of it as an elitist, WASPy, anti-Semitic, old money kind of town, which so wildly contradicted my understanding of my home.

I grew up in what was then the Orthodox part of town where the delis were, and the synagogues, and [I did not fit] into that Providence but also [did not fit] into the Providence of the reformed, wealthy, assimilated Jews.

As long as I can remember I’ve always thought of myself as of this place and outside this place. The town versus gown provides a cartoonish manifestation of that.

It’s easy. It provided a sort of relief. It’s visible.

The Indy: I can see some anxiety in Exes about the changing face of the city. What’s the rate of change, do

MARCH 09, 2018

BY Liam Greenwell ILLUSTRATION BY Katya Labowe-Stoll DESIGN BY Ella Rosenblatt

you think, in Providence?

MW: This is the most Providence thing of all: Providence kind of breaks gentrification and breaks time, in a way, for better and for worse. But it ultimately can’t fight money.

Especially [in Fox Point], because there are neighborhood equivalents of microclimates. [There are] rainforests of blue collar, hand-to-mouth existence that are still just managing to survive.

Going to Fox Point feels like going back in time.

Apart from Tallulah’s Taqueria, apart from the donut shops that come and go, there are parts of Fox Point that haven’t changed visibly at all since the '70s. And there’s nothing they can do about North Main Street. It almost can’t change. It’s like, this is where we keep our tire shops.

There’ll be a barn next to a tire shop in a photo from the 1930s. It was a choice: do you want a horse or a car? If you want a car, you’ll need tires, so go to North Main Street.

The fact that I could take walks that were identical to the walks I took thirty years earlier—that was a source of relief or angst, depending. Fox Point has shrugged off many iterations of this exact same pressure, for better and for worse. When I would visit [other] American cities, I would look for those qualities: that sort of stuck-in, dug-in, time-breaking feel. Pittsburgh had it, once upon a time, but there were very few cities that met that basic criterion. Increasingly, America is either/or. I loved the many ways in which Providence would break that dichotomy. That’s the one real aspect of Providence that [Exes is] trying to recreate. That rejection of either/or.

The Indy: Have you ever thought about writing about Providence’s former mayor, Buddy Cianci?

MW: He’s a part of so much of my brain. He was a cartoon character. But he damaged a lot of real people in an incredibly intimate way. At a certain point it just feels gross to make any hay out of that. He was a nightmare.

Just a total piece of shit. I gave up trying to write about him, because it’s sort of like, how do you satire the self-satirizer? This is someone who cannot be shamed. What are you reconfirming by trying? There’s very little about him that should be treated reverentially. He was just about as gross as the most cynical of us would imagine.

The Indy: Tell me about your process of writing Clay, the novel’s narrator, who inserts his own thoughts in the form of footnotes after each section of another character’s story. What was his role and how did he change?

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

MW: Clay was there to nag me. I created him as a coach of some sort. A guy who would blow a whistle at me and tell me to knock it off and stop. I knew I needed to create a character who would insist on the page that this was about him. That became interesting to me, the extent to which he takes over the novel and solipsizes the various narrative threads and funnels them back into his consciousness and his experience. I needed to create an enemy. This is probably going to sound like a tortured analogy, because I haven’t worked it out, so it may be sloppy. When you do deep-sea diving…

The Indy: As one does.

MW: …as one does. You go way, way down. You get kind of high—something about the oxygen in your blood. You get so high that it’s sort of pleasurable to be down there.

If you’re training to become a deep-sea welder, which a friend of mine was, to help weld underwater oil rigs, the problem is that you send these deep-sea divers down there and they get mellow and happy and interested in what the flame is doing underwater. So part of your training is continuously refocusing your efforts on the task at hand.

You have to remind yourself why you’re down there even though there are so many elements to distract you. I feel like that’s what Clay was doing, reminding me of my job.

Because I do have that tendency to get lost in a story, get lost in a voice.

There needed to be something fascistic about Clay.

There’s something bullying about his presence. Only a deeply wounded and megalomaniacal madman would

thread these stories together and insist that they added up to this thing. The final stage of the revision process was finding Clay’s humanity, and allowing his various contradictions to exist on the page simultaneously. Because that’s what interests me most: people who are contradictory and uncategorizable.

The Indy: What do you have planned for your next project?

MW: It’s very different. I’m interested in following a straight plotline. It’s a relief. And setting it somewhere other than Providence.

The Indy: Where?

MW: It’s an imaginary town. And it’s a college town, it occurs to me now. Clearly this matters to me. Because I recreated exactly what I attempted to reinvent the first time around the second time around, even though I had every intention of doing everything differently.

The Indy: You can’t run too far.

MW: No, you can’t.

LIAM GREENWELL B'20 can't stay away from Providence either.

METRO

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238. seen a half-shut door a half-dirty plate have you ever seen something so close it was only one pull away as close as pull is to

179. hands that molded it and the hands that may have

who ever heard of my self opening, breathing (half-open, half-breathing) my self my self my self I

925. distance 444. wanted inside them to speak ) (horizontal and vertical but with her without the eyes angles between to dare the rest of us into ) silence: the distance is the spoke and the horizon and the the rim valley and the overgrown and this is not stagnation that masks itself as how she would have

436. quit holding the sound of the tools falling into the mud and they sound like coins falling onto cement and the coins have already fallen but you are just hearing them

120. now, which is really synonymous with the silent slipping of horse hooves at the bottom of the river

%% this poem was generated by using MATLAB to parse william faulkner’s AS I LAY DYING and generate a list of the 1000 most frequent words in it, % in order of frequency. I then used MATLAB to generate a 5x5 matrix of random numbers between 10 and 1000 which mapped onto 25 words from my % list. I then made a matrix poem, starting each cell/stanza with its respective word.I picked this book because it is the only book i have read % more than once and i have read it 6 times and every time i try to write or think anything i loop back into it and that’s something of a system %vi am trapped%in 538 shut 626 float 238 seen 235 tull 193 here 357 lifts 441 such 591 store 846 saved 906 breathe 940 flour 215 mind 203 between 318 black 980 myself 878 tote 308 stopped 233 leg 925 distance 444 wanted 555 anybody 476 carry 179 hands 436 quit 120 now

17

LITERARY

MARCH 09, 2018

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

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18

FRI 3.9 Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Tashi Dorji 8PM, Columbus Theatre (270 Broadway) $30 LW had never heard of

Godspeed You! Black Emperor before learning about this show, but someone they followed on Twitter had a play on the name in their display name. Now they get it!

SAT 3.10 SV Presents: Mura Masa (DJ Set) 9PM, The Strand (79 Washington Street) $20~ See the British producer who brought you “Lovesick” on the deej right here in PVD.

SUN 3.11 Edgewood Yacht Club Open House 1–3PM, 1 Shaw Avenue, Cranston

The Edgewood Yacht Club has been rebuilt! The people are The Edgewood Yacht Club has been rebuilt! The people are probably old and rich and insufferable but I’m sure there’s booze or BBQ or something. Probably free...

... but is anything ever truly free? o.O hehe

MON 3.12 RISD illustration senior show 6–8PM, 55 Canal Walk, fur freee.

The first of a series of

weekly receptions for the senior show, featuring the work of some members of the Indy staff.

TUES 3.13 Bummer Club RI #3 9PM, AS220 (115 Empire Street) $5 donation to Sojourner House, which provides support services to people experiencing sexual and domestic violence. Come participate in or watch this open mic of sad stories.

WED 3.14 Wangechi Mutu: In Conversation 5:30PM, Granoff Center for the Creative Arts (154 Angell Street), $=Eventbrite RSVP See the Kenyan artist discuss the influence of African art on her work with Performa curator Adrienne Edwards.

THURS 3.15 Northeast Hardscape Expo

ASTROLOGY Finally! You will be DRAINED of all this WATER soon enough! So maybe your tear ducts will be able to rest, but don’t take off your armor, angel! Jupiter is going into retrograde while Mercury is going into its “shadow phase,” which is as dark as it sounds! Luck will 100% not be on your side and you’ll do weird with your words. Do crunches and don’t trust anything; maybe go to Bummer Club since you’re not so sad anymore but will do better listening than talking. yeah b ur astrology

8AM–2PM, Rhode Island Convention Center (1 Sabin Street), $10 with early registration, $25 there Sounds manly.