The Sellout Issue

Wow, wow, wow, what a semester of The Nass. Here’s our last one.

The Nassau Weekly

Volume 48, Number 8 May 23, 2024

In Print since 1979 Online at nassauweekly.com

2

May 23, 2024

The Sellout Issue

Masthead 4 6 7

Jeff Nunokawa Has Nothing to Lose

By Ivy Chen Designed by Vera Ebong

Nass Recommends: The Princeton French Film Festival

By Tyler Wilson Designed by Sydney Tyler

My Month on Meat

By Eva Vesely Designed by Tatiana Nazlymov and Chloe Kim

Telescoping Melt

9

By Emily Yang, Sasha Rotko, Sophia Macklin, Melanie Garcia, Isabelle Clayton, Sofiia Shapovalova Designed by Jasmine Chen and Chas Brown

13 19

What We Know

By Roya Reese Designed by Hazel Flaherty

Pitching Ideas Over Boxed Wine: Former Nass Editor Harold Parker ‘08 Reminisces

By Jonathan Dolce and Harold Parker ‘08 Designed by Evan Wilson

Editor-in-Chief Events Editor Charlie Nuermberger John Emmett Souder

One or several elephants: this final issue’s back cover, which looks like a full-page ad for PNC bank because it is. We’d ask that you hereafter refrain from calling The Nass anything other than PNC Bank Presents the Nassau Weekly. The following is an abridged version of the toast I planned on delivering at the Thai Village dinner that our banker-collaborators only partially financed.

Wow, so good to see you all here. (Applause). I had a really tough time putting this toast together.

We put out more than 160 pages of student-written content each semester, so it’s a little tough to crystallize the whole of The Nass into these brief moments of speech. Usually when I talk about The Nass, I get real nationalist about the whole thing because it means so much to me. I care so deeply about the mission of this mag and the people that sustain it. (Pause to wipe tears). But I’m not going to get so sappy about it. Caring about this publication means engaging seriously with the eternal project of making it cooler. Brutal, unforgiving work.

We’ve got money now. Our first ad in who knows how long. Over the summer, we’ll metamorphize.

We’ll get sleeker, skinnier, cooler. No one’s going to believe exactly how much cooler we’ll get.

Love, love, and more love, Charlie Nuermberger, EIC

Publishers Isabelle Clayton Ellie Diamond Managing Editors Sofiia Shapovalova Julia Stern Creative Director Otto Eiben

Alexander Picoult

Web Editor Abani Ahmed

Historian Jonathan Dolce

Trustees Alexander Wolff 1979 Senior Editors Katie Duggan 2019 Frankie Duryea Leah Boustan 2000 Eva Vesely Leif Haase 1987 Marc Fisher 1980 Junior Editors Rafael Abrahams Ivy Chen 2013 Melanie Garcia Robert Faggen 1982 Teo Grosu Sharon Hoffman 1991 Marisa Warman Sharon Lowe 1985 Hirschfield Mia Mann-Shafir Alex Norbrook Aiko Offner Sasha Rotko Head Copy Editors Cailyn Tetteh Sabrina Yeung Design Editor Vera Ebong Art Director Alexander Picoult

Cover Attribution

Audiovisual Editor Mia Dedic

3

Volume 48, Number 8

Verbatim:

Overheard over cereal Cereal snob, side-eyeing M&Ms in milk: “It’s okay what you’ve done.”

Overheard in pitch meeting Editor of the Nassau Weekly: “My family hires Amish people because they’re cheap.”

Overheard in SLA345 Professor recounting his weekend: “I gave a little speech comparing marriage to the Soviet Gulag.”

Overheard while discussing literature Aroused, yet learned academic: “He’s some sort of existential masturbator.”

Overheard in Firestone, C Floor 11th-year grad student: “The only reason we’re not insane right now is truly just a lack of imagination.”

Overheard in Civil Liberties Robert George: “The way he came up to me in a fuck ass bob and straight up asked me what kind of gay I was…it was the highlight of my night.”

Overheard in VIS seminar Millennial dudebro professor: “I had a friend in high school, we called her ‘Sniggles,’ because she laughed with her lips closed… like… teee heeee… heee hee heee…”

Overheard during the last week of classes Upper-class professor: “What’s your plan for next year?”

Upper-class senior: “Probably some unserious grad program.”

Upper-class professor: “Well, there are plenty of those. Just make sure it’s paid. Paid grad programs are welfare for the upper class. ”

Overheard on Murray Dodge Vegan Day Voice of reason: “Just make shortbread. The people will thank you for being brave.”

Overheard over Cap lunch PTL GSS Senior: “Burrata is the manliest cheese.”

Overheard in Kwanza Jones Hall People-pleaser with a streak of narcissism: “If people ask me to do something I am often too flattered to say no.”

Submit to Verbatim Email thenassauweekly@gmail.com

Overheard in the CJL Just declared SPIA: “Athens, the land of my people.”

Greek: “Are you half Greek?”

Just declared SPIA: “No. I just believe in democracy.”

About us:

The Nassau Weekly is Princeton University’s weekly news magazine and features news, op-eds, reviews, fiction, poetry and art submitted by students. There is no formal membership of the Nassau Weekly and all are encouraged to attend meetings and submit writing and art. To submit, email your work to thenassauweekly@gmail.com by 10 p.m. on Thursday.

Include your name, netid, word count, and title. We hope to see you soon!

Read us: nassauweekly.com Contact thenassauweekly@gmail.com us: Instagram & Twitter: @nassauweekly Join us: We meet on Mondays and Thursdays at 5 p.m. in Bloomberg 044!

4

May 23, 2024 PAGE DESIGN BY VERA EBONG

JEFF NUNOKAWA

HAS NOTHING TO LOSE A Second Look contributor profiles an English professor who really needs no introduction

By IVY CHEN

I

n the artificially-lit basement of East Pyne, Professor Jeff Nunokawa is hurtling at breakneck speed through a lecture about Francis Bacon. It’s the first day of class for English 203: The Essay, and Nunokawa is on a mission to convince the fifty-odd students watching that there’s a lot to learn from Bacon’s seventeenth-century discourses on truth and anger and love. He’s in constant motion, slashing an arm through the air, shaking his head vigorously, absolute conviction echoing through his entire body.

Even the initially sleepiest of the students sits up straight when Nunokawa first breezes into the room, already exuberant, exclaiming hello to those he recognizes.

The rest wear expressions that fall at varying points between utter bemusement and mild awe, eyes locked on the agitated figure arguing that the essay form is inherently connected with the pursuit of truth, cramming an improbable volume of words into each breath, almost yelling when he arrives at a particularly striking point, never slowing until, at last: a pause.

Furious huffs. Then, he barrels onward again.

Halfway through, he singles out a sweater-attired upperclassman in the third row, who turns slightly pale at the attention: “Has anyone ever told you that you look like a young F. Scott Fitzgerald?” Everyone turns to

Nunokawa in his office. Photo by Frankie Duryea ‘26.

look. I surreptitiously Google “f scott fitzgerald” and click on the Images tab. He’s not wrong.

This is Jeff Nunokawa: beloved Princeton professor, scholar of English literature, legendary campus personality. His hair is graying; he can’t stand much taller than five-foot-six. He wears shorts even in the dead of February, paired one time with electric blue knee-high socks. On Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, he delivers impassioned lectures on longdead literary giants, from Vladimir Nabokov to Samuel Johnson. He sits on top of a desk, kicks his legs, asks if anyone has an energy drink and, upon acquiring a brightly-colored Bang energy from a student in the second row, chugs it. Papers rustle as he flings his notes into the air. He scribbles the names of philosophers and movie stars alike on the board, writing so frantically that the chalk snaps mid-word. He pauses halfway through a sentence

about sex and Bacon’s “Of Truth” (more connected than you’d ever expect, he’ll have you know – there’s a downright dirty allusion three lines in) to point at the back of the room and shout a student’s name, as if reminding himself.

I catch at least a couple of bewildered looks that first day, students casting around the classroom for confirmation – what the hell is going on? Nunokawa is more aware of these reactions than his wholly un-self-conscious manner might suggest, describing his own personality as clownish.

“It’s a way I have of getting through to people,” Nunokawa tells me. The class is held in a relatively small lecture hall, allowing him to see every face. It’s common for him to call on “Scott” or another student – he seems to have learned nearly every name. He’s not bothered with over-formality; that’s part of how he cultivates an interactive classroom, encouraging

5

Volume 48, Number 8

students to ask questions or even argue with him. “A certain amount of sass is really good. It allows people to engage in a way that is direct.

It emboldens them.”

When I suggest that it lets students let their guards down, he nods.

“Totally.”

I

t’s a rainy day in April, the tail end of multiple days of terrible weather, and I’m meeting Nunokawa in his office in McCosh.

“I almost tried to reschedule this,” he tells me. “I’m not going to say I’m not myself today, but I’m at the lower end of the spectrum.” He’s more subdued than in class, but a subdued Nunokawa still operates at a higher frequency than most people, full of vivid anecdotes and winding literary asides.

His office looks like the last stronghold of a bibliophile preparing for doomsday. Books are crammed tightly into a towering shelf that fills an entire wall, stacked in piles feet tall on the floor, heaped inexplicably in a shopping cart. There’s a neon yellow children’s sized jersey with “Aguilas” printed across the chest dangling from the highest shelf.

What little wall space not taken up by bookshelves is papered with posters, from Act Up slogans to Ingres paintings to an advertisement for a Friedrich Schiller talk on October 16th, 2005. Somehow, he knows where everything is, weaving between the stacks to snag a book he wants to show me.

There’s a sense of certainty, and of an almost unfathomable depth of knowledge. He’s the same way in class, shutting his eyes tightly to recite stanzas of poetry by Auden and Keats or to quote rambling verses of the Bible.

Nunokawa has always had this passion. Born in Oregon in 1958, he lived there until he was nine before moving to Hawaii for one year, back to Oregon for two more, and returning again to Hawaii in 1969.

The last move would be permanent for the rest of his family, but one that would for him only last until 1976. He felt that he couldn’t escape quickly enough.

“My brother would say, ‘Jeff never lived in Hawaii, he just stayed here for a while,’” Nunokawa recalls. One draw of the mainland was the promise of education. “I felt this enormous enthusiasm about the things I read, but I would often quote these things and people weren’t interested,” he says. A gap existed between what he cared about and what his high school friends cared about, a disconnect he was acutely aware of but didn’t

Nunokawa believes his family was an embodiment of that “midcentury dream of racial integration,” living what was for others only an abstract idea. At the same time, that dream left an enormous pressure on the marriage. His father had a complicated relationship with race; his resentment of white people was occasionally displaced onto Nunokawa’s mother. This tension only grew. He recalls: “When I was young, I don’t remember my father ever talking about race. By the time we moved back to his home, I don’t remember him talking about much of anything else.”

Chaotically-stacked books clutter Nunokawa’s McCosh office. Photo by Frankie Duryea ‘26.

know how to bridge.

Internal strain further spurred him to leave. The series of backand-forth moves were the manifestation of familial drama, the deterioration of his parents’ marriage. The town in Oregon where Nunokawa grew up, Lake Oswego, was exceedingly white, as was his mother. Hawaii, meanwhile, was majority nonwhite, a political landscape his Japanese-American father wanted in on.

His parents’ marriage was the tentative forefront of a new time – interracial marriage wouldn’t be legalized nationally in the United States until years later, in 1967.

In 1969, Nunokawa was 11 years old. He had just moved back to Hawaii, and parts of his own identity began to feel untenable.

“I knew I was very white-identified because of my mom, who was very white, and I knew that I was gay. My father, I was sure, knew both those things too,” Nunokawa says. He felt like he was waiting for something to break. He knew he had to get out, and he knew how he was going to do it. His senior year of high school, he sent in applications to colleges on the East Coast.

W

hen Nunokawa left for Yale in 1976, he’d been sure it was the right decision. Upon arriving in New Haven, though, he found the adjustment bracing. The East Coast, at the time, was a long way from Hawaii in more than just a geographic sense: the distance was cultural, financial, technological.

“It was a bigger culture shock than I knew it would be,” he says.

He’d left an insular community in Hawaii and suddenly been thrust into a world of privilege and intellectual heritage. That first semester was difficult. For the first and last time in his life, Nunokawa found himself homesick. He credits part of his adjustment to the friends he made, the community he found.

Most of all, though, his teachers loom large in that delicate period of metamorphosis. A high-school debater, Nunokawa came to college certain he was going to become a lawyer. His freshman year, though, he was placed into a lower-level English class taught by Bart Giamatti. Giamatti would later become the university president, but that year, he was teaching English 15. He was a strict, conservative guy. The students were Mister and Miss; they had assigned seats.

Hand-raising was required.

And yet, what has stayed with Nunokawa all these years is the sense that the gruff professor treated his students with great respect, raising them up to the level of equals. He finds himself thinking about one story in particular. A student had interrupted an intricate argument Giamatti was making, informing him that a quotation he’d based his lecture upon was actually incorrect. The class was composed of students from underfunded public high schools, the one you took if you didn’t place into higher-level English.

CONTINUED ON PAGE 15

6

Nass Recommends:

May 23, 2024 PAGE DESIGN BY SYDNEY TYLER

The Princeton French Film Festival

A Nass Contributor, who does not speak French, attends this year’s screenings

P

By TYLER WILSON rinceton French Film Festival, founded just last year by Yassine Ait Ali, a fourth-year Ph.D. student in the Department of French & Italian, is a true testament to the power of the public humanities. The 2024 iteration, which I had the pleasure of attending, featured an incredibly passionate and impressive slate. The opening night screening was a showing of The Braid (La Tresse), written and directed

by Laetitia Colombani, which was preceded by a book discussion on Colombani’s source material held at the Princeton Public Library.

The film, which is in French, Italian, and Hindi, united various spheres of the Princeton community while also highlighting cinema from nearly every corner of the Francophone World. The first event I attended was a Tuesday night screening of the Alice Diop’s 2022 Cannes breakthrough, Saint Omer: a gorgeous, nuanced story

of two Senegalese-French women, one of whom is an author, and the other is a student on trial for infanticide. The screening, held in McCosh 10, was followed by a question-and-answer session with Diop. It was in French, which I cannot speak. Nevertheless, it was clear that Diop was passionately responding to the crowd’s questions, despite her admitted jetlag.

Wednesday was for legendary film critic Richard Brody ‘80 (and one of the original writers for The Nassau Weekly). He dropped into East Pyne that afternoon to discuss his love of cinema, all the way from Princeton to The New Yorker, where he has written since 1999.

During the fall of his freshman year, Brody attended a screening of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless organized by the campus film society, after which he decided to dedicate his life to movies. At the time, Brody didn’t feel a strong connection to contemporary Hollywood films. In Breathless, Godard references Humphrey Bogart in dialogue. Brody confesses that he did not even know who the Hollywood legend was at the time. However, Breathless, one of the seminal films of the French New Wave, represented a “cinema of youth” and “insolence” that completely changed his perspective on film as an artform. The French New Wave was driven by young filmmakers who were also critics for Cahiers du Cinema, one of the most important global voices in cinema. They first introduced the now intuitive concept of auteur theory, where the director is considered the primary artist of a film. Brody posits that France was the ideal breeding ground for this transition of film

into a subject of serious artistic and academic consideration because he views Paris as France’s D.C., Hollywood, and New York.

There is an artistic, political, cultural, and cinematic convergence that facilitates a continuity between the arts in a way that does not exist in the United States. The New Wave gave cinema its deserved legitimacy. The rise of film studies presented a new conflict, however, between that of academics and critics. A select few have been able to bridge this divide, including one of Brody’s earliest influences, Gillberto Perez. Perez, a physics graduate student who wrote film criticism in his spare time, was the only professor of film studies at Princeton during Brody’s time.

According to Brody, Princeton was not totally hospitable for Perez. He left for Sarah Lawrence in 1983, but they remained close until his passing in 2015.

That evening, Brody screened the 2023 film Passages at the Garden Theatre, followed by a Q&A discussion with Yassine. Brody quipped that Passages, made by an American director, co-written by a Brazilian screenwriter, and starring German and British actors, was the best French film of last year. He concedes that nationality is hard to pin down with cinema, and that it is more valuable to discuss the flow of culture and the ways in which ideas move.

Passages follows a Paris-based film director, Tomas (Franz Rogowski), asphyxiated by sexual and romantic confusion. We watch as he is pulled between his husband (Ben Winshaw) and new lover (Adèle Exarchopoulos). It is a beautiful, sensual film that, on the surface,

reads as a “really engaging portrait of an asshole.” Brody, however, doesn’t see it that way. He sees it as a story of a man liberating his passions: Tomas ends the film heartbroken and alone, but his life has gotten bigger. Brody calls the film’s final sequence “a happy ending without happiness.”

When asked what he thinks of contemporary film criticism, Brody speaks joyfully. He thinks it is far superior now to when he was coming up. The tastes of critics are much more interesting, mostly thanks to the democratization of criticism allowed by the internet.

Social media is a “hellhole” and a “boon,” he says. He lives in fear of missing great films, a fear that grows with the proliferation of filmmaking. Richard Brody seems to believe that the proliferation of criticism, as carried out by people of all ages across the internet, can be a necessary counterbalance.

After all, the French New Wave was started by a group of 20-yearolds at a magazine. Look how that turned out.

7

Volume 48, Number 8 PAGE DESIGN BY TATIANA NAZLYMOV ART BY CHLOE KIM

My Month

on Meat

“Don’t you think that things can be made special by being indescribable? That there’s a certain divinity in that?”

By EVA VESELY CW: SELF HARM

T

he first thing I think of when I remember my month on meat is brilliant, all-encompassing whiteness, like TV heaven.

It had snowed the night before I went to pick it up, and the sun was ricocheting off it all, making me squint when I stepped out around noon. Some of the snow was starting to melt, and if I listened, I could hear its orchestral dripping all around me, the water rushing by in the sewers below. I, too, felt like I was thawing out, finding myself out in the world for the first time in days, and though my face was numb by the end of it, I still thought to myself that maybe winter wasn’t so bad when it was like this. Whenever I got the chance, I would tilt my chin up to the sky and smile, a gesture that I could usually only muster when Nat was around. All this was happening before I even had the stuff in my hands, before I even put it in my mouth, as if I was already leaning

into the change.

My therapist, Monica, had written me the prescription five days before, after our weekly virtual call.

The past few weeks I’d been calling from my bedroom, which barely gets any light; the only thing my camera could pick up was my face shining in the darkness, lit up by the digitized brightness of my laptop screen. I guess what I was really looking for showing up to our meetings like that was some pity.

But that wasn’t Monica’s style, and that’s probably what makes her a good therapist.

That morning, Monica led me through a seven-minute meditation, which was a new thing we were trying, though it also didn’t seem like her style. When she asked me where my mind had wandered after it was done, I was too depressed to lie. The whole time I couldn’t stop thinking about Nat’s smell, which must’ve been lingering on the blanket wrapped around me. I was so preoccupied with describing it, attributing it to some perfume or other item she favored, that the seven minutes seemed to pass by without me in them. Maybe I was starting to forget her. All that I could conjure up were the oils on her skin in the early morning, my nose nestled in her unwashed scalp, and the feeling that by smelling I was somehow parting something and reaching

inside of her. I imagined us tangled up in bed, pressing together as if we could bypass the boundaries of flesh. How easy it had felt then, to know and seduce each other, to bore into her eyes and say things like, “I wish to crawl underneath your skin,” adoringly. I was certain that I had never experienced this lack of self-consciousness with anybody else.

“Don’t you think that things can be made special by being indescribable? That there’s a certain divinity in that?” Monica asked when I was done sharing my frustrations, furrowing her brow as she often did.

Of course, I knew that, but the knowledge did nothing to settle me. When I didn’t answer she pursed her lips, another classic Monica-ism. She was very attractive, her gray hair styled in a way that could only be described as “French” and thick glasses that framed intelligent, stony eyes. I often wondered if I trusted her expertise so much because of how expensive she was.

“Why do you think you’re so obsessed with describing Natalie?”

This second question made me feel like she was just showing off with the first. Like she had to prove how smart and insightful she was, even though her wisdom wasn’t relevant to my current situation.

8

May 23, 2024

“Do you think putting her into words will diminish some of her power over you?”

Monica was also very anti-Nat, as any sane person would be.

“I can’t help it. I just want to feel closer to her.”

This was when she made an expression that was entirely new: a furrowed brow and pursed lip combo, plus this look in her eyes like I was her own daughter telling her this. For a second I thought she might cry, but it turned out to be just a trick of the abundance of natural sunlight hitting her camera. Luckily, instead of committing me somewhere, she prescribed me the meat. She told me I wouldn’t be able to pick it up at my usual pharmacy, that I would have to haul ass to some facility for it. Except she didn’t use the phrase “haul ass.”

Nat was gone longer than usual this time, almost a month now.

We met at a gallery show near my apartment, six months after my mother died. She was one of the artists. There was a tough, lanky way about her, the way she held herself that I immediately envied, though it could’ve just been the beauty-induced confidence. The first thing I noticed about her, though, were her eyes. They were so dark that they seemed black from a distance; and she had this crazy, arresting stare, like she was

seeing into nothingness.

Our first date started right after the gallery show, in my apartment, and it was the kind that lasted a whole week. The first time she disappeared it was just for a few days, and it was no big deal. We’d just met, and I understood how these things worked. Afterward, she said she was busy visiting family. The second time, it was that she was swamped with work. Then an artist’s retreat for a week, then a research trip in Europe for two.

I had to take a bus to the facility. Its windows were all scratched up and dirty, but I could still see the sun going down, and the way it reflected off the snow and behind the snow, the water, sparkling like an infinite sea of diamonds.

Occasionally, the sun would catch on the grimy window, and its splintered rays would fill the bus with orange light, making me squint again. Usually, it getting dark so early in the day — especially with the bus crawling farther and farther away from my apartment — would freak me out; but I felt safe enclosed within the bus’s moving walls, with its dryness and funky odor. Like, for the first time in a long time, I was exactly where I needed to be.

The prescription was a month’s supply. That is, I was expected to finish the whole body in a month.

I sent the facility a spit sample the

day of my call, and they emailed me three days later saying it was ready. I’d heard of this type of thing in the news for about a year now, and Monica had brought it up before, saying she’d tried it with some of her other clients with positive results. I had filed the idea away somewhere between ketamine therapy and mothers who ate placentas, and whenever Monica brought up those clients, I always imagined the retired trust fund hippies who bought up all the kale juice at my local Whole Foods.

But apparently, the treatment is covered by most insurance companies now.

“Of course there’s a whole science behind it, chemically speaking, but I like to think of it more as a form of radical self-acceptance.

Like being made whole again,” Monica had said during her pitch.

We’d tried everything from journaling to Lexapro in the past, but nothing had stuck. I think I agreed partly because I wanted to please Monica, who reminded me of a more intelligent, helpful version of my mother. But it was also because as soon as she asked me what I thought, I had this strange vision of the future. I could imagine myself after things had run their course, basking in sunlight and warmth and the easiness of spring, and CONTINUED ON PAGE 17

9

Volume 48, Number 8

TELESCOPING MELT A much celebrated and reviled Nass tradition. To telescope, writers write a brief 300 word piece on a theme (this year, “melt”). Then, a 150 word piece.

Then, 75 words. Then, 37 and a half. You’ll see.

By EMILY YANG 300 words The following is an excerpt from Current Exhibitions at the Museum of Melting.

EXHIBIT A: Ice cube, melting. An interactive installation inviting visitors to engage with the physicality of water and its phase transitions.

This piece investigates the form of matter and inevitability of entropy.

Visitors are encouraged to watch the ice cube in an experience blurring the line between visual and performance art.

EXHIBIT B: Upside-down ice cream cone, melting. A critique of consumerism wrapped in a warm waffle cone, this sculptural encounter interrogates the waste generated by societies of consumption. Though this is an interactive exhibit, visitors are strongly discouraged from eating ice cream off the floor.

EXHIBIT C: Several clocks and watches, melting. This installation symbolizes the multiplicity of experienced time: we abide by arbitrary social constructions of time while simultaneously having the capacity to redefine it. We’ll admit, this one has been done before, but who doesn’t appreciate a reminder that time is a construct?

EXHIBIT D: Glaciers, melting.

Visitors are confronted with the reality of anthropogenic climate change and its consequences, embodied in the form of three glaciers

in an air-conditioned room. We’ll admit, this one has also been done before, but will be shown with allnew exhibition pieces!

EXHIBIT E: Sticks of butter and margarine, melting. A commentary on domesticity and interiority, represented by the slow but constant transformation of melting butter and margarine sticks in a mixing bowl. Be sure to check the Museum Events page for upcoming baking workshops and an exclusive recipe for buttercream frosting!

After your visit to the Museum of Melting (MOM), we encourage you to stop by the Museum of Modern MArt (MoMMA), which is currently displaying a limited series of immersive installations including Watching Paint Dry, Watching Grass Grow, and Waiting for You to Leave This Exhibit.

150 words 7:44 PM. Monday, in the dining hall.

Porcelain bowl, metal spoon. If this ice cream doesn’t melt by 8:00, I’ll eat it myself.

One scoop of Chocolate Thunder, one scoop of Cookie Dough. I like flavors with texture, names that need to be explained with more than one word. The ice cream bar had toppings today, so I went all out: chocolate chips, chocolate sprinkles, whipped cream, and two blue M&Ms. This is a slow process.

Anticipating it now: the melt. Yes, I live and relive this transformation: once by imagining it, once by seeing it happen.

Time is a slow motion drip to me.

But in the bowl, the ice cream

particles are working as fast as they can. Wiggling their toes back and forth to the beat of entropy — heat exchange, with tap shoes on.

What’s the line between solid and liquid?

Molecule by molecule, the structure shifts.

75 words Molten butter sunshine moved in blinds, Mundane as metamorphic rock.

Mold and moss manifested on my nose; It made me itchy, morose.

Of melancholy melodies and mashed potatoes, I don’t know which magic I’d miss most.

I’ll admit, mail might’ve reached you Better than muttering in meadows.

Message by mockingbird, next time.

Can I offer you an M&M in these trying times?

Hey, stop being so melodramatic.

Wasn’t there something you were meaning to do?

37.5 words My ice cream was melting into spools of yarn. Threads caught in my teeth.

I’d like to melt into your arms. Tell you my secrets. Tell you my fears.

But I won’t. Oh, I couldn’t give you my—

By SASHA ROTKO

300 words When I fell in love for the first time, something happened to my heart.

Physically, I mean. If I had taken out my heart that day and held it in my hands, I would have seen something melted, like liquid chocolate, ready to be dipped in-to. My heart has hardened over time. I’m not quite sure how to describe it to you, but the heat went away, and the cold front moved in, and my heart, which had been liquified, is now congealed all inside my chest.

It remains amorphous, in some shape no one has ever likened to a heart–but it isn’t melted. You cannot dip in-to me like you could before, not even if you wanted to, not even if I wanted you to.

I don’t want this all to sound like some sort of cheesy metaphor.

It isn’t. This is actually what happened to me. The splatterings of my melted heart stick to the inside of my ribcage, cold and unmoving. My aortas lead to nowhere. My heart doesn’t beat, but it hums, and this is how I know it is alive.

I’m not sure where the blood is coming from, when it starts coming out of me, because nothing has been pumping it through my body because my heart melted the first time I fell in love.

I walk around with stars in my eyes, looking for the fix for the mess in my chest. I watch the passersby with ambition. I watch from my perch all the potential heat sources, holding my heart out in my hands, waiting for some old flame to melt it again, so that I can shape it again, so that I can put my aortas back in their place. This is a pragmatic search. Love is a utile thing.

10

150 words I sit here with my mother at the counter, and I watch the pot on the stove emit criminal fumes into the clear Connecticut air. I watch my mother watch the pot on the stove.

Sometimes she stirs, sometimes she changes the burner heat. The room starts to stink as the cheese melts. In French, fondue means to melt. In English, it means stinky cheese or sweet, sweet chocolate made gooey so that we can dip things into it. In ballet, it means to bend your leg in a very specific way. My mother takes the fondue pot off the stove. She puts it on a trivet in the center of the counter.

We both stare into the pot, into yellow. There is nothing. It is perfect.

I don’t know what to think about this. I wonder if it is perfect because it is natural or because it is polluted.

May 23, 2024

75 words I don’t mean to sound all high and mighty when I say, I think it’s kind of stupid that you didn’t answer the text I sent to you, that you didn’t respond to me saying, “Hi, I hope you’re good and Berkeley is awesome.” I did all this work tearing up the scab over the wound you gave me. I did all this work defrosting. Now I’m melted again, and it’s all stupid, all silly.

37 words I left the oil pastels in the sun all summer while I was away, while I was running, or, as some say, gallivanting. I came back and there was a very pretty accident all over the cement.

By SOPHIA MACKLIN CW: illness 1.

She had been sick for a while.

Longer than a while. Her whole life, maybe. Once she got so bad, tired of being tired, everyone decided it was time to do something. There weren’t many people she trusted, but that small “everyone” convinced her that maybe there was a treatment out there. She laughed at the thought that help was just hiding instead of non-existent. But she wasn’t too proud to admit that there might be something a little better than the trudge. She was admitted, not for the first time but for the last.

It would have been worse in the summer. She was grateful for the cold, and she had always hated sweat. The gray of the sky went nicely with the gray of her skin.

The flowers were more beautiful because they were the only color in the room.

She watched a lot of reruns and movies she’d already seen on the mounted tv, not even bothered by the sticky buttons on the remote.

Sometimes she’d catch a movie playing two days in a row. That made her feel so good because she could anticipate everything that was going to happen. She would speak all the lines she could remember aloud.

In the end, there was one thing that she loved even more than the little she remembered of being healthy. When she could no longer eat or even sit up for a straw, she found a friend in faithful ice chips.

So good to her. Patient, kind, did not boast. They would just wet her dry lips with their loving moisture, coat her sticky gums in cool water.

So soft, she barely had to chew. How long had she waited for something

to give her exactly what she needed? How long had she been thirsty?

2.

Growing up, the fights with his older brother were never ending. They fought about the shower, what to eat for dinner, and who got to drive the car. They were complete opposites; it was a wonder they were even related.

The day his nephew was brought home from the hospital, premature but gaining strength, he met the beautiful little thing that his big brother took part in making. The baby’s fingers were so small--soft and searching for something to grip. The younger brother watched the new father lean in to say hello, breathing in the baby’s scent. He heard a voice he didn’t know his brother possessed, high-pitched and sweet, as he stroked his baby’s supple cheek.

In a way, he met his older brother that day, too. He finally saw the heart he had never seen before and watched it melt at the sight of new life.

3.

I will not unstick my spine from the sheet. I will not wipe my brow. I will not swing my legs around, rise to change the thermostat. I will lie here and feel my thoughts slide out of my sweaty ears, looking for solace on the underside of the pillow.

I’ll flip it over soon, press my face into the freshness. For now, I will lie here with my molasses brain, my dew-like skin.

4. hot brown butter, thousands of marshmallows, dip my finger in and singe it. that huge blue box from the cupboard, my mom pours the cereal into to the melted sweetness, promising a perfect treat if I’m patient.

11

Volume 48, Number 8

By MELANIE GARCIA Doing Home We’re wrapping up the mixer. Me and the other event planners step around the higher-ups (everyone else) and delicately lead them to the conference room, saying things like, If I may direct you inside, we’ll be starting the next phase of the event soon. They like it when I talk that way. Makes their faces pleasant, which I’ve learned is their closest thing to happy.

I glide through the multipurpose room. I’m carefully natural here, inconspicuous. I feel myself blending. Usually, The higher-ups laugh at only each other, but they smile at me when I pass. Their laughs and smiles are like the ones in Claritin commercials: neat and oval-shaped. Real people don’t work like that, I know. They make me comfortable and uneasy at the same time. I smile back, which makes them smile more. They like the way I blend well. They like how I echo their smiles. I’ve practiced them in the mirror. I’m their little ripple. If there’s something they love, it’s that.

Soon, most of the higher-ups are gone. The ladies and me — I’m the only male planner — pack up.

The ladies are feminists, so they take the tables. When I roll up my sleeves and carry three chairs below each arm, they call me a church boy. I laugh big — much bigger than I should.

One of the higher-ups laughs something that’s just beyond a Claritin Laugh. I ask if everything’s alright. It’s nothing, he says. But roll your sleeves back down maybe. He’s smiling all the way up to his eyes, which look a little cruel.

That’s the closest thing I’ve seen to happy here.

Just getting the job done, I say, with that light-chested feeling you get when you do something wrong.

He waves me off and strides into the conference room.

— On the drive to my apartment I think of home. Way Back Home.

It always comes back when I forget how to blend, because home’s usually the reason why it stops, because home didn’t teach me Claritin Smiles or walking smooth.

It taught me church boy chair-carrying and jaw-smacking and knee-slapping and joint-snapping.

Good-for-nothing place, I think. It didn’t have anything to give me.

I remember all the times I’ve been back. I stiffen more each time I step in Ma’s front door. Ma doesn’t like how I smile anymore.

She says it makes me look stuck.

I always try to unstick myself, but I’m a gummy person that Way Back Home spat out a long time ago. I’m a student that Way Back Home stopped teaching how to be home. How to do home.

Do Home. That sounds like it should be sweet. But my breath tastes like seawater.

— Do Home.

I do work just fine. But doing home? Leaning on the back legs of my chair to holler on the porch is a thing I’ve done a thousand times. But my body’s lost its slack.

It doesn’t remember sweating in noontime sun and sticking to the air and to my chair and to myself.

It doesn’t remember days so wet, walking’s like swimming.

Home wants me to swim again.

But I’ve forgotten how.

— In my apartment, I sit. At first, I feel like I’m drowning. But I know that’s not right; I’m still afloat, still slightly alive. I feel like a sugarcube, dissolving someplace where I’m not allowed to swim.

By ISABELLE CLAYTON Trouble was the boy who rolled chewed gum between his fingertips to paste beneath those desks that only looked like wood. Packs and packs of gum just to leave some trouble-making Troublemarks. Maybe he wanted to do some justice by his name. Maybe he just wanted to imprint himself somewhere, anywhere.

Clocks turned to dry the spitsoaked gum; beheld a plop-plopplopping in every classroom. Gum raining down onto linoleum floors.

The janitor swept up the gumbits into the checkerboarded hallways where girls wore bell bottoms and walked with their hips swinging side to side. They sipped on lukewarm Fanta; slammed orange lockers hard because they were in high school and the force of their palms on a door felt like a power they never thought they could know. Once, Sloan slammed a locker so hard that the sparkly pink chandelier hanging from its ceiling fell and shattered. Imagine what it must have looked like inside that orange cell as it filled with a thousand sparkling gemdrops, ricocheting around like something alive.

That year, spring felt more like summer, and the two-mile trek home burned Sloan’s shoulders just as much as it dampened her with sticky sweat. She gripped the railing to heave her haggard limbs up the steps and onto the front stoop, only to find her palms blackened with paint and with rust. Deep breaths in and breaths out. Turn the door handle. Step your right foot inside first. Throw your backpack on the carpet and hurry up to your room. Get under the covers. Shut your eyes.

But then a bang in the kitchen would jolt the frame of the big, old house, would rouse Sloan from her slumber, as it did, every afternoon.

The house was shaking, she could feel it. The neighbors probably felt

it too.

— Unfurl the covers, just a bit. Sloan’s eyes could peer up to the photographs peeling from her walls; down to the blanket of ink memories laying atop her moth-eaten sheets. Photographs fluttering through the air like ashes around a bonfire. She fascinated herself with these moving faces, places, for fascination could muffle the voices booming beneath the trembling legs of her bed.

When silence came, so did stillness. Sloan collected her photographs and retrieved the tape. She reinsulated her room until every inch of wall was covered. Out the window, Sloan’s mother knelt among her flowers. In that spring that felt like summer, at least the heat could grow the plants. At least the water flowing down Mom’s cheeks could make something beautiful out of tulips and daffodils; could nurture the bushes to grow up and cover all the paint that was peeling from the exteriors of that ancient house.

— It has something to do with the fact that every second becomes the past and sometimes, memories do not warm but scorch the skin.

You can never know what you’ll remember, can never control what you’ll leave behind for the remembering. Sloan keeps putting her images back up. She’s running out of tape. One day she’ll wake and realize the ephemerality of it all; and her photographs will sleep beneath her bed, obfuscated in dust. ­— The tape has run out. Sloan’s looking out and locking eyes with a pair in the window across the way.

Under the sun, the yellow paint is peeling from Trouble’s house. His house, she reckons, is shaking, too.

12

May 23, 2024

By SOFIIA SHAPOVALOVA There is a city that sits in the east, in the grey. Energy’s gift, dropped on the south bank of a clouded river coursing through an ancient, ashen country. It is meant to generate light, but it has been stifled by some coal-fired power that battles with physics. Pulsed, plasma power. The city’s subject to drab, daily schedule. It is peppered with people, barely over some fifty thousand. They are specks in the smoke, easier to forget in the grey which turns blacker by each pass of the night that never ceases its advance into the darkening of this world.

It is an estimate. One cannot count all the bodies, shaded in this swirling of all colours’ presence and all colours’ absence.

With sun’s rise and sun’s set, the residents, like meagre mice, scurry between the dull silver blocks they call shelter and the core of this dying energy. There are hardly any scraps to bring back to the hungry, much less to nourish the grey rotting within their own intestines. It has been rotting since birth. The grey emerges from within – the body, the city, the east. The grey comes with the clink of the boots and the crack of the rifles. The deafening tanks, a sombre occupation. It is not possible to count all the bodies eaten up by the grey.

When the bodies still breathed, they lined the roads with sand.

Barricaded them with bags and vehicles meant to hinder the grey.

A refusal to acknowledge. Bring back the gold, they cry. Our golden ages and golden domes! The fields of wheat that bring us our daily bread!

They are dusted by blood’s rust.

The people are hungry while the sky has lost its blue. The grey tears the sky, which tears the fields in its misery.

A leaden war, over two years of violation; the sprawling fields and

steppes of freedom turn to sheets of death that no longer dance with the wind’s whisper, under the sun’s warmth. The grey plagues the fields, the grain, the flour, the dough. The bread and the people’s bellies. Out there in the east, only scarlet remains to dapple the numbed soil bathed in unforgiving moonlight.

The grey snakes past the fields until it has infected each city, stalking through the streets and the stomachs of a ravished nation.

The grey has bent and swallowed the light. It is in the cough of the dacha chimney. The goose’s last feather and the serving of kasha scraped in the bowl. Grey like a long winter without snow. Rain with not a drop of heaven’s paint to follow.

And the waiting. For the sun to return and bring back the gold.

Though, such a restoration would not be based on the mere glitter of precious jewels and coins. The gold brought by the sun is found elsewhere. In the bones and the fibres of being that animate this city in the east, built when a bit of the sun flowed down from the heavens and fused itself to the banks of the river.

The city waits now for the sun to resurrect the gold.

Life would flow in the people again. The wind would raise its whisper, run once more through the shining stalks of wheat that sway against the cerulean stage’s background. The grey would fade to brightness. Energy’s gift.

13

Volume 48, Number 8 PAGE DESIGN BY HAZEL FLAHERTY

Meditations on learning Farsi at Princeton, with the department’s only professor

By ROYA REESE

M

y family is from Iran. This means my mother grew up on a small street in the capital city of Tehran, one single block where her entire extended family lived. She played with cousins and second cousins and third cousins and ate delicious chicken and rice dinners at a crowded table on the floor, a korsi, every night.

But this comfortable childhood only lasted about eight short years. During the Revolution of ‘79, my grandfather was one of many protesters in the streets. His bookshelves are lined with history books of Iran and US relations.

He ultimately decided his family would have to leave — so they packed bags meant for a business trip to Italy and told no one. When they landed in the United States with only $300, they told my Mom and her sisters that they were never going back.

So I’m a first-generation American immigrant

— half-Iranian, half-WASP. While I was forced into Farsi lessons as a child, and heard the language spoken around my grandparents’ house, I never fully embraced it as a part of myself. I dreaded the lessons every Sunday, reading and repeating old Persian fables meant for second graders. I could feel myself losing interest, and frankly, I think I was too young to appreciate the way the language could connect me to my grandparents and an even broader community outside of my family. And I remember thinking: what’s the rush? I have my whole life to learn Farsi, and I will. When, at around age twelve, I was finally permitted to quit Farsi lessons, I did.

Part of what drew me to Princeton was the strong Near Eastern Studies Department: particularly that Farsi was a language offered. I put it off my freshman year, completing the language requirement with French (which I already spoke nearly fluently), but as sophomore year was approaching, it seemed like it was time.

Learning Farsi felt critical, even if I wasn’t willing to admit it to myself, like perhaps I wouldn’t be a fully formed or realized person until I did. I am steeped in American

culture every day of my life, but it is Persian culture that shaped me.

Of course, there are ways to be connected to a culture without learning the language, but Farsi is beautiful and poetic and the language of my family, and I want to speak it. I enrolled in Amineh Khanom’s small intro Persian class.

She’s the only Persian professor at the school, teaching every single Persian class offered — three levels, each with two classes. When I asked her if she’d consider adding a class just for conversation practice, she said the university wouldn’t allow her to teach more hours — she’d reached the maximum that policy allotted for.

Now, in my second semester, I am the only undergrad in the class, with the other three students being graduates in the NES department. Each Tuesday they have a seminar that meets at the same time as Farsi, so I go to Amineh Khanom’s office and drink saffron tea and read stories, just the two of us. Sometimes, when it’s nice out, we take walks in Prospect Garden and she teaches me the names of plants and flowers. I love sitting in her light-filled room, smelling rosewater and the scents of my grandparents’ house, and seeing

what I remember, what I know.

And we’ve discovered that what I know is a funny combination of things. I know the names of almost every Persian dish, cutlery, and household item — window, door, table, room, light. I know basic conversation, the names of my cousins, but not usually what their names mean. The months. The colors. I can understand whole sentences that are spoken to me, but not point out what the words individually mean. I know almost every verb not as an infinitive, but in its imperative form, the commands I’ve heard: be careful! Bring me a glass of water! Don’t scream, eat your dinner, wash your hands.

I know three different words for beautiful, but none for smart.

I know things my grandmother says over and over, learning the true meanings of her funniest sayings: if I ever wear a shirt that shows too much cleavage, she says despairingly, dust on my grave!

(Essentially meaning for shame).

When my brothers and I piss my mom off by saying her name too many times, she says: Mommy mord; I just recently found out that this literally translates to mom’s dead.

I’m always surprised and

14

May 23, 2024

usually amused to find out which words I know, the ones that have stuck in my subconscious. It sometimes feels like learning Farsi is just dusting off old artifacts in my mind, available but dormant phrases and grammatical structures.

There’s also an interesting (and surely well-researched in a classist sense) difference between spoken Persian, called goftaree, and the formal Persian seen in writing and academia. Goftaree often includes dropping letters and sometimes words from sentences and phrases; in my professor’s office the other day, I learned this is sometimes called “kitchen-table Farsi.”

Of course, learning Farsi makes my family think I hung the moon.

My grandparents are overjoyed that I’m able to follow their kitchen-table conversations, laughing at all the right spots and fetching them the correct items from drawers at their request. But this isn’t why I want to speak Farsi. It feels almost disrespectful not to speak to my grandparents in their native language. I want to read Rumi and Hafez in their original language, to be able to talk to my relatives when it’s finally safe enough to visit Iran.

And I want to cook the recipes my grandmother has always made, and welcome Persian culture into my own household one day. I won’t tell you of the difficulty my mother had assimilating to life in the United States, or of the struggles my grandparents faced with raising their three children in a country where they knew no one, I’ll only say this: in a country that is so cruel to outsiders, learning Farsi seems

the least I can do.

And on a global scale, amidst all the conflict in the Middle East, can we humanize countries whose names we’ve only ever seen in the news next to “threat of nuclear attack”? And how can we ask people to learn about and understand the cultures and citizens of other countries if those of us who are actually, technically, from those countries aren’t even able to do so ourselves?

So it feels important for me to walk to Frist 212 for an hour every morning and read Saadi and Rumi and Hafez. And understand what I maybe already know.

15

Volume 48, Number 8

PAGE DESIGN BY VERA EBONG

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 5

The interrupting student, a “sort of rambunctious young lady from east LA who wore a lot of knit hats,” in Nunokawa’s words, hadn’t been someone he’d expected would be taken seriously. But in that room, she was.

Giamatti had looked miffed, paging through the text he was analyzing. “But finally, he stops, and he looks up, and he says: ‘Miss Rodriguez, you’re right. Kids, we’ll take our smoke break early, I gotta regroup.’”

Nunokawa is still struck by Giamatti’s willingness to concede he was wrong. “To be seen that way, to be honored that way, I think that was the most amazing thing he taught.” He’ll speak glowingly of all the teachers he’s had: a political science professor he’d been terribly intimidated but who had kindly asked him if he had Thanksgiving plans, a professor who gave his paper the feedback that she might just have misunderstood it, which he calls “very modest, because she knew everything.”

He wants to echo that grace he received for his own students. “I care enormously about the things I’m teaching,” he says. “But I also care a lot about the activation you can do for a student, and so much of it is about respect.” That’s why he’ll thank a preceptee who offers an incorrect reading of Oscar Wilde, or why he’s thrilled when students come to his office hours and tell him they have no clue what Samuel Johnson is saying in Rambler No. 8.

“I’ve been really lucky to be able to trust my teachers, and I want to be someone whom students can trust, no matter how crazy I am,” he says. And yes, he’s aware some of them do think he’s losing his mind. “I mean it as a way of letting people in, not keeping people out.

Because every teacher I’ve known has done some version of that for

me.” His goal is to pass that feeling forward.

A

t the end of that freshman-year English class, Nunokawa remembers Giamatti telling him he’d done well, and suggesting that he consider graduate school. He hadn’t even known it was an option before that moment. All he’d known was how much he loved the close-reading they did in class, uncovering something new. He still gets that feeling now, like he’s being given a key to understand everything in the world. “I never looked back,” he says.

So he graduated from Yale. He did his PhD at Cornell. And, in 1988, he came to Princeton.

He taught as a preceptor, then a co-teacher, and eventually, he got his own classes, somewhere around 1991 (he can’t quite remember the exact year). First was a seminar on AIDS, then a course on gay literary studies, then a 19th century novel class that’s been running ever since.

The Essay has become a signature class of his. He initially proposed it as an addition to several existing introductory courses in the English department, primers on poetry and fiction and drama, an almost tongue-in-cheek idea. He’s well aware that the topic sounds far from interesting.

“No one likes the idea of writing a freaking essay,” he says. “Just to start there, with how un-effing-fun the essay form is, and why? Largely, it’s institutional.” He’s right – the word immediately brings to mind a dull, academic task conflated with grading.

But Nunokawa will claim that there’s something uniquely compelling about the essay as literary form, that it bridges the gap between the drier realm of the academic and the more accessible world of the conversational. His syllabus traces across disciplines, dipping into economics and

sociology and film. The themes he proposes in lecture almost always deal with a balancing act: concealment and revelation, subjectivity and objectivity, the written and spoken word.

During a February lecture on George Kennan, Nunokawa highlights the diplomat’s attempt to define a middle ground between objective, intellectual reports and intimate, diary-like confessions.

Kennan’s solution is to make the self present only by implication, for the writer to reveal something about themself by writing about a separate subject.

This theme has even made itself relevant in his own life. In 2015, Nunokawa put out a book of essays. In it, he compiled hundreds of short Facebook posts he’d published over several years, reflective responses to poems or literary excerpts that earned him a large following. He looks back with regret, though, worrying that the writing became too revelatory, too much about him and not enough about the texts he was responding to. “I’m not proud of that book. It could have been something real,” he says softly.

He’s writing a new book, nearly ten years later. The book will be about his parents, both of whom have passed away. When Nunokawa thinks of his mother and father now, he’s struck by how young they seem. “They had such responsibilities, and they had such hopes, and my father was so naïve, and himself such a plaything of history,” he reflects. The book is about that tenuous time, the arc of his parents navigating it.

It’s also an attempt at redemption, à la Kennan. This new volume is trying to strike that balance, strip the story of the merely personal. He’ll place his parents in the foreground. Nunokawa himself will rarely appear in the story, but readers might find that they learn something about him anyway.

N

ow, at the age of sixty-five, Nunokawa finds himself idolizing modesty. He’s drawn to the quiet humility he saw in his professors, people who didn’t live glamorous or flashy lives, just showed up, day in, day out.

He recognizes that lifestyle as a familiar one. His parents were the same way. He calls his childhood “not a happy world, but a thrilling one,” with moments of greatness.

His parents were at their best when they were “proud, but modestly so, quietly so.” They didn’t announce their beliefs. They lived them. He’s chasing that.

This ideal might seem at odds with his lectures, which are almost a performance, one where he’s “on” the entire time. He’ll reference his therapist or his relationship with his father as he breaks down essays by Erving Goffman or Mary McCarthy. Nunokawa worries that the lectures become too personal sometimes, the same anxiety that infuses his regret about the first book. He wishes occasionally that he spent his younger years writing more purely academic essays, a style reminiscent of his teachers and parents.

“I miss the modesty of that mode. That self-transcendence,” he says. “I just feel that I put myself out there too much.” It’s not necessarily that he’s afraid of being vulnerable, more that he doesn’t want his “thinking or writing or teaching – most of all my teaching – to be too much about myself.”

That’s his biggest fear, the one that leaves him feeling anxious when he drinks too much coffee or wakes up on a bad day. Nunokawa believes, though, that there’s a point to the performance. “I go too far sometimes, maybe even a lot, but I feel like my students can see that I’m trying to get something right, to show how these books, these words, can illuminate our lives.”

It might just be, actually, that

16

May 23, 2024

Nunokawa’s outlandish lectures are their own form of self-transcendent humility. You won’t see students looking intimidated or self-conscious in the classroom; how could they, when he’s swigging Red Bulls and talking about old movie stars and sweating through his shirt? They’re freed from fear to raise their hands and say they don’t understand his claims, or even challenge him.

Before lectures, he sends out emails with important passages from the texts. The subject lines are delightful, often in all-caps and punctuated with dozens of exclamation points, referencing Melville and T.S. Eliot with the same ease as they nod to 1930s American gangster films. One from March reads: “I AM AWARE THAT I RENDER MYSELF RIDICULOUS WITH THESE MESSAGES, BUT PEDAGOGY MUST TAKE PRECEDENCE OVER FOOLISH AND FUGITIVE NOTIONS OF DIGNITY.” There’s something resonant in the hasty message: Nunokawa isn’t afraid of making a fool of himself. He’ll do it a thousand times over if it means he can reach his students, make the old writings clear to them.

“That’s a joy for me. It’s maybe the greatest joy of my life,” he says.

F

Photo by Frankie Duryea ‘26.

rom 2007 until 2017, Nunokawa was the head of Rockefeller College, one of Princeton’s residential colleges.

He says he was addicted to it.

“When I was in that role, literally every person I ran into, I knew. I was really all in. Twenty-four seven. I did that, and it did me.” You can still see some of it in how he runs his lecture, the unending enthusiasm, the desire to know every student. His favorite part of those years was being able to sit down at random with a student and, as he puts it, “have a real conversation.”

He’ll still wander into the dining hall from time to time. His goal is always to disrupt the student from

answering the classic questions – What’s your major? Where are you from? – in the same way they’ve done uncountable times before.

Last week, he steered a chat with a first-year to religion and faith within five minutes. “We got deep fast.

Because I have nothing to lose and neither did he. He didn’t know that at first,” he says. Those conversations where each person’s guard is down, where trust abounds, are important to him.

Nunokawa is all in during lectures, his arms flailing, his voice sounding at an urgent staccato.

When you’re speaking one on one with him, though, he’s somehow more present than ever. His words still spill out impossibly quickly, but when he reaches something that he really cares about, he slows down. He looks at you. His voice gets softer, like he cares – and he does. He knows how powerful it is to grant another person the respect of truly listening to them, to erase the often-stark line between teacher and student. As he’ll tell you, that moment where that divide fades away is where the magic lies. “That’s where things get real.

That’s where things get beautiful.”

17

Volume 48, Number 8

PAGE DESIGN PAGE BYDESIGN TATIANA BYNAZLYMOV PIA CAPILI

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 8

I felt the typical relief as well as a certain sadness, a tenderness that I couldn’t quite identify no matter how far I reached within. I got the silly urge to time travel then, feel all these things through and figure out what they were.

Essentially, the facility clones you and grows some of your meat in a lab — the parts that taste decent. And then you eat it.

Something about eating yourself was supposed to do wonders for your mind, cure the depression that even ketamine couldn’t touch.

Of course, the meat just looked like meat and bore no resemblance to you. This particular service stored each cut in a vacuum-sealed tray, with preparation instructions printed on the sleeves in a trendy font. The process of picking it up was straightforward and reminded me of this fancy dispensary by my apartment. You just waited in line amongst the fake plants and lo-fi beats, gave the lady your ID and insurance, and got the bags. That’s all I saw of it, though I could tell from the outside that it had at least 20 floors. They kept the lights dim in the pickup lobby and there was an ATM in the corner, which also made it similar to the dispensary, but it smelled very strongly of antiseptic, which made it different.

I received two big insulated bags, something I’d failed to anticipate for the journey home.

The trouble started when I got back to my apartment. It’s funny the way these things always take me by surprise, right when I start

to think that maybe it’s possible to just trudge along like this forever. I’d already unloaded the entire supply into my freezer and confirmed that the meat did indeed just look like meat, deep red and marbled with fat. I was taking stock of the few ingredients I had in my kitchen, opening cabinets I hadn’t touched in weeks, when I stumbled on Nat’s spice rub. She’d hyped the stuff up since the day I met her, calling it her “signature blend,” and claiming that it would “change my life.” She was into that type of quiet luxury: perfectly dialed-in espresso, sourdough

had been cooking, and it smelled foreign and delicious, like nothing I’d ever made myself before. Nat, hovering over the stove, turned her head when I came in, offering me a knowing, welcome-home smile.

I realized that I’d forgotten what her face looked like — the softness around her eyes and the stun of her cheekbones — and then remembered again. There was this shimmering quality about her that I only noticed after we’d been apart for a while, some mysterious force that slowed time down and made our surroundings fade away, like in the movies.

starters, and good vintage leather.

It was another thing I liked about her.

She finally brought the rub over one night after disappearing for two weeks. I came home to find her in my kitchen because, of course, she had a copy of the key.

The apartment was alive with ambient lighting and some Ethio-Jazz record that was playing in the living room, a stark contrast to how I’d left the things on my way out. It was immediately obvious that she

Maybe that same magic was what made me forgive her for leaving, just as I always did. Despite its familiarity, the decision still came as a relief. It was the easy thing to do: to forgive, to burrow my face into her back, firm and warm under the soft fabric of her t-shirt.

The ends of her hair, impossibly soft and smelling of citrus, tickled my forehead. And here again was that familiar feeling of love’s steady ship. Of two becoming one.

Of falling and being weightless.

The thing Monica would never understand in her entire dusty, shriveled-up life.

“You’re going to love what I’ve been cooking up,” she said, and it was really her voice; she was really back again.

“Did you change your shampoo?” I whispered in return. I couldn’t place the smell.

Nat had always been careful not to leave anything behind when she disappeared, and I’d grown used to it this way. At the sight of the rub, so innocent amongst my other pantry items, my heart dropped through my chest and my body filled with cold sludge. I worried first that something medical was going on, and then that I had fallen into a parallel universe, one devoid of any love or warmth. I got the urge to do something big, like open up the freezer door and slam it shut on my hand, or knock my face against the counter. Instead, I sank to the floor. There was this metallic clang of me coming up against some truth: that things had run their course, that Nat was gone, and that I would never again come home to find her in my kitchen. Each time I thought of the rub, in its cute hand-labeled packet, the truth resounded again. There was nothing to do except let the waves wash over me until I tired myself out.

“This is good. It’s good to let yourself experience the … loss, and everything that comes with it,” I imagined Monica telling me when I eventually described what had happened, sans hand-in-freezer door. I thought I knew what she was getting at.

18

After sitting on the floor for what felt like a while, peering around my ghostly kitchen, I decided to invite my friend Julie over for dinner.

She was into that kind of thing, new technology and weird food, and I figured she’d be interested in trying a bite. I was right. She arrived about half an hour after I called, which was how long it took to walk over from her place. While I waited, I chose a tray labeled “Shank” to thaw out on the counter. I’d started chopping up onions, according to the instructions, before remembering that my mother used to make lamb shank for special occasions. I dug up the recipe — which called for double the chopping — in a box of her stuff that I kept in my closet. By the time Julie knocked, my eyes stung and welled with tears.

“Jesus! Is it working already?”

Julie asked as she stomped snow onto my doormat. I must’ve looked as tired as I felt.

“Ha! No, it’s just the onions.”

“You sure? I saw this one girl online who tried one bite and started bawling immediately. It was like the floodgates completely opened up, you know?”

I hadn’t talked to anyone besides Monica in a while, and I was starting to feel a little awkward around Julie now, who was so alive and full of energy that it was hard to keep up. Her hair, which had been blonde just a few days ago, now had sections dyed a dark red. The red was bleeding into the blonde in a way that made my stomach churn, and I realized then that I hadn’t eaten all day.

“Which part is the shank?” she asked, inspecting the tray.

May 23, 2024

I wasn’t sure, so I looked up a diagram on my phone.

“Like the outer thigh area, I guess.” I turned my screen around so she could look at the divided-up cow.

“Oh. Gross.” We both took a second to squirm at the thought of all that residing under our skin, of being cut up and eaten.

As I cooked, pausing every now and then to decipher my mother’s faded scrawl, I wondered what it was about my meat that was distinct from another’s. Would it taste different? Would it be fattier, compared to say, Julie’s, who’d been born with ballerina legs? I’d always been insecure about my thighs, and I could feel my face growing warm at the thought of Julie experiencing them so intimately. As I gingerly poked the meat with my tongs, I had a flashback — like I often do when looking in a full-body mirror — from middle school, when I was just starting to grow familiar with the feeling of my skin being too tight. I had come into the kitchen wearing shorts for the first time that spring — particularly tiny ones that rode up my ass — and my mother had stopped whatever she was doing to stare at me. I was already starting to forget some things about her, the way her ears looked and the way she smelled, but I knew I would never forget her eyes as she told me that I couldn’t wear those shorts anymore. She’d said the sight of me made her nauseous.

Truthfully, my mother rarely crossed my mind at that point; I was too busy with Nat. But I felt an archaic flash of anger

remembering her then, like some strange hibernating animal that was finally peeking its head out the cave. I kept thinking of her as I cooked, wondering what she would say about all this and concluding that she might also try a bite after warming up to the idea. Above all, she had always loved good food.

By the time our meals were ready, the air in the kitchen was thick and my mouth watered. I couldn’t help it. I plated my shank and slid a small chunk that had detached in the pan onto Julie’s dish, which housed a complicated-looking grilled cheese. Julie poured both of us some red wine, and we sat down at my tiny table in the living room, right by the patio door, which she had cracked open at some point. It was finally dark out, but despite the temperature drop, there was a certain friendliness in the air which told me spring was coming. Someone was enjoying a cigarette. Julie started playing dinner party jazz on my speaker, semi-ironically, like everything else she does.

“I think Nat and I are done,” I blurted out after a few unbearable seconds of jazz, somewhat surprising myself.

“Oh! Did you end things … officially?” Julie was suddenly beaming ear to ear.

“Well, I’m not sure if she’ll even come around again.” I heard myself let out a nervous laugh, which I knew I would cringe at later. “But either way, it’s done. For real this time.”

Julie nodded like she believed me, taking a pensive bite of her sandwich, but I wasn’t sure if she did. I felt my cheeks heat up again,

despite knowing I’d prove her wrong. The lack of human conversation caught up with me all at once then, and I clutched the edge of the table as if to tether myself to the present moment.

“We should take a trip somewhere — to celebrate! We haven’t gone anywhere in forever,” she finally said, to my relief.

“Remember that one time on the shore, with the mimosas?”

“Oh, yes! And that stupid seagull? God, I should’ve cooked him.”

We were both laughing hard now, and all I could think about was how good it felt to laugh like this with your friend. But the fact that I was thinking about it instead of just laughing made me a little sad. I suddenly remembered my weird vision when Monica first brought up the treatment. Here I was, feeling the same tenderness that I had anticipated so vividly before. But now — in the midst of my laughter — I realized that the feeling was actually a question, or maybe a few: What was it all for? Would it happen again?

Will it happen again forever? And if so, what’s the point? I was sure Monica would know.

I cut off a piece of myself, surprisingly soft, and took my first bite.

19

Volume 48, Number 8

PAGE DESIGN BY EVAN WILSON

Pitching Ideas Over Boxed Wine:

Former Nass Editor Harold Parker ‘08 Reminisces

A Nass alum on the latenight, wine-fueled energies that continue to power the magazine

O

n Thursdays, Nass Alum Harold Parker couldn’t be found in the ivory towers of Princeton, but rather amidst the chaos, camaraderie, and cheapboxed wine of the Terrace Library.

By JONATHAN DOLCE Though now housed in Bloomberg AND HAROLD PARKER ‘08 Hall, the Nassau Weekly was a place where Parker could “throw ideas around for upcoming issues,” and let conversation run as freely as the vino. The Nass workplace was far more than just the weekly assignment of developing the upcoming issue. It was a refuge, “an all-hours hangout-spot.”

“I looked forward to it all week, and I loved hearing the ideas, reactions, and discoveries of my brilliant classmates, which I found, and still find, dazzling.”

Parker noted how even today those uninhibited Terrace library sessions stuck with him: “That milieu has always remained a sort of social and cultural

ideal for me.”

“As a writer, and unfortunately as an editor as well, I was a chronic blower-through of deadlines,” he admitted. But in those straining hours before an issue was to be printed, he and the other members, “powered by some disgusting food from the U-Store,” worked through the night to organize the upcoming issue. “I feel like 5:30 AM on Wednesday morning was a typical submission time.”

Beyond the late nights, Parker remembers that “physically getting the printed issue was always an arduous task.” Despite being barely able to drive, [he] once had to rent a Zipcar to pick up the printed issues.

Funding was another struggle as staffers “scraped together enough ad money each week to actually pay the Packet” (the Princeton Packet was the previous printer of all Nass issues until 2015).

But between the struggle of completing issues and finding funds, the Nass still maintained its free

spirit. Parker recounts that “once putting together an issue in the middle of the night with [his] co-editor, a Senior Writer showed up at the office door with a bottle of vodka.” Parker went on to say, “[the Senior Writer] had just finished his thesis, and was looking for friendly faces to celebrate with. We were happy to oblige.” It was in moments like these, amidst “various running jokes and riffs,” that the Nass cemented its bizarre memory in Parker’s undergrad years and beyond.

20

May 23, 2024 ART BY ALEXANDER PICOULT