What's Under That Rock?

We’re writing poetry, watching Dune, and having problematic relationships with moms. Take a look.

The Nassau Weekly

Volume 48, Number 11 October 3, 2024

In Print since 1979 Online at nassauweekly.com

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October 3, 2024V

What’s Under That Rock?

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Sun Stroke

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Where are all the dogs?

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Rangoli

By Julia Stern Art by Eden Reinfurt

By Sasha Rotko Art by Danny Flaherty

By Shravan Suriyanarayanan

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I pray I grow old

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A Memento of Nintendo

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English Battle

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An Amateur Review of Dune 2

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By Nsebong Adah

By Oliver Berke Art by Danny Flaherty

By Harry Gorman Art by Julia Stern

By Arnav Vyas Art by James Swinehart

It was the fall of freshman year and she called me

By Isabelle Clayton

A list of things you can find under this rock: Anti-hegelians, anti-Deleuzians, negation, Gummo, cats, cryptids, the original Planet of the Apes sequels, psilocybin, Chestnut blight, dutch elm disease, emerald ash borer beetle, the Great American Tree, Jim Morrisons’s 1978 An American Prayer, rush, Bleeding Kansas, freedom, rewilding, degrowth, wildflowers, corvids, meadows, field recordings, the prairie, the poster with all those geographical features such as isthmus, Leatherface, Marfa, big summer storms, delta 8 edibles, Kentucky, spelunking, earthworks, Trappist monks, homesteaders, everything I eat in a day, freshwater fish, freshwater fish admirers, lovers, skinny dipping, car sex, wetlands, ecological productivity, outlaw country, your childhood dog, parasites, botflies, prion diseases, ok now a silly one, birthday parties, slumber parties, mezcal, dab pens, secondhand smoke, Carti, Bloodstone, having to go pee really bad, old people, the Mesozoic, protista, creepy crawlies, and the like.

Love on top of more love, Charlie Nuermberger, EIC

Events Editor Editor-in-Chief John Emmett Souder Charlie Nuermberger Audiovisual Editor Publishers Mia Dedic Isabelle Clayton Ellie Diamond Web Editor Abani Ahmed Managing Editors Sofiia Shapovalova Historian Julia Stern Jonathan Dolce

Creative Director Trustees Otto Eiben Alexander Wolff 1979 Katie Duggan 2019 Senior Editors Leif Haase 1987 Frankie Duryea Marc Fisher 1980 Robert Faggen 1982 Junior Editors Sharon Hoffman 1991 Ivy Chen Sharon Lowe 1985 Melanie Garcia Teo Grosu Marisa Warman Hirschfield Mia Mann-Shafir Alex Norbrook Aiko Offner Sasha Rotko Head Copy Editors Cailyn Tetteh Sabrina Yeung Design Editor Sophia Macklin Art Director Alexander Picoult

Cover Attribution

Alexander Picoult

Masthead

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Volume 48, Number 11

This Week:

Fri

7:00p Fields Center, MPR 104 PHS Garba Night

Sat

7:30p Richardson Princeton University Orchestra: The Peter Westergaard Concerts Passport to the Arts

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Verbatim:

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Tues

Wed

Thurs

Sun

3:00p Richardson Princeton University Orchestra: The Peter Westergaard Concerts - Passport to the Arts

4:00p Fine Visualization Lab Advanced LaTeX Workshop: Fun Times Guaranteed

Mon

7:30p Taplin Auditorium, Fine Hall In the Footsteps of Bartók: Collaborations and Improvisations

11:30a Louis A. Simpson Got International Building, Events?

B60 Hispanic Heritage Month: Metal Embossing (Repujado) Workshop Lunch & Learn

Overheard on Firestone A Floor: Beautiful girlfriend: “I thought you liked me for my personality.”

Realistic boyfriend: “It’s okay.”

Overheard in Whitman courtyard

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8:00p Wallace Theater, Lewis Arts Complex A Thread of Golden Ashes by Le’Naya Wilkerson - Free tickets required 12:00p Wallace Theater, Lewis Arts Complex A Thread of Golden Ashes by Le’Naya Wilkerson - Free tickets required

Overheard at Scrabble rager

Hot senior, groping apple: “You look like an AI-rendering in the New Colleges.”

Overheard at aforementioned rager Hot senior, again: “What did that mean? Was that like a PewDiePie quote or something?”

Kinky Whitman/Butler frosh: “I’m going to Butman Dining Hall…”

Overheard at MAT104 Office Hours Beleaguered freshman: “If you see tear stains on my test, just assume they were tears of joy.”

Overheard on a Friday eve

A dreamer, gazing at the stars:

“Would you go to the moon?”

European: “I wouldn’t even go to fucking Wyoming.”

4:30p Richardson Atelier@Large: Conversations on Artmaking in a Vexed Era — Annie Baker & Kamala Sankaram 11:00a Firestone Plaza 2024 Fall Campus Farmers Market

5:00p Architecture Building, Betts Auditorium RBANUS: “Urban Village Coexistence” Book Launch

11:30a Fine Collaboration Hub NASA Launch Watch Party: Europa Clipper

12:30p Chapel After Noon Concert

Email Emmett Souder at js0735@princeton.edu with your event and why it should be featured.

For advertisements, contact Isabelle Clayton at ic4953@princeton.edu

5:30p Chapel Sound Journey with Ruth Cunningham

Overheard at Labyrinth Book recommender: “It’s about the whole idea of the gym. After break-up, you go there to create physical pain to ease the mental.”

Tall, blond man: “Sweet, I’ll read it this weekend whenever I start feeling too happy.”

Overheard in groupchat Pussy magnet: “Friend just adopted two kittens, they are so cute. They love to sit between my big meaty calves.”

Overheard after two cigarettes Freaky with fruit: “I find that smoking flavors the apple.”

Overheard at Boxers and Blazers Revolutionary, wearing heartprint bottoms: “It’s 2024. Time to be a wholesome whore.”

Overheard in ENG401 Male professor, excitedly: “We’re all women. College professors are all women. We get to spend our whole lives talking.”

Overheard on Elm Drive Has men figured out: “Even if his hair grows out, his maturity won’t.”

Submit to Verbatim Email thenassauweekly@gmail.com

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!

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Volume 48, Number 11

ART BY EDEN REINFURT PAGE DESIGN BY EDEN REINFURT

SUN SUNSTROKE STROKE Central Florida, melanoma, and a nursing home romance

By JULIA STERN

In one of Mark Twain’s stories, an obscure 57-page satire titled “Three Thousand Years Among the Microbes,” Twain transforms into a cholera microbe that lives on a putrid, filthy tramp named Blitzkowski. The germ world is a complicated one, with political factions, tribalism, and an astounding amount of wealth inequality. But the microbes know no world other than Blitzkowski: no other world than no other world than a single man’s flesh.

Blitzkowski is a majestic and grand and beautiful place to call home.

Florida is the drunken tramp of America, an infested swamp of heat and dirt. Florida’s humans and Blitzkowski’s microbes tend to see their

homes in an eerily similar way. The problem is elemental. There is very little to do in downtown Orlando at this time of year; for a while, this state of psychosomatic bliss was a great deal of fun for the old folks of Central Florida, but it has all grown a bit tiresome. Now, there’s a sinking feeling that all anyone can do in this back-water hellhole is nervously throw spoons at the wall.

Every Tuesday, a group of men wash the windows on the Orlando cathedral roof. It’s a cavernous Catholic cathedral with famous flying buttresses, which are photographed every year for the county Christmas card. The window-washers have to step over the buttresses, and their hips are always very sore. But they get great holiday bonuses and the buttresses are beautiful, so they have not unionized in 14 years.

A nursing home in Orlando sponsors a weekly bus to the cathedral that leaves promptly at 7:03, 9:25 and 10:11 on Tuesday mornings. Linda and Mark, two residents of the nursing home, go every week to watch the window-washers on the glass roof, except when it’s too sunny, because Mark had a melanoma scare in 2014. Linda does not know this, because he did not tell her. Mark texts her that his pectoralis minor is sore.

Mark likes to play it cool around Linda because she has great legs and loves expensive bowls and cutting boards.

Mark has always felt a bit on-edge around Linda. One weekend, she invited him on a day trip to the Orlando Shopping Center, where the mall authorities had scheduled their bi-monthly window washing. Glass ceilings are so popular in Florida that you can watch them almost any day of the week. While they were browsing in a Lacoste, waiting for the show to begin, Linda made a smug remark about the type of men that wear mesh baseball caps. Mark wore a baseball cap almost everyday to protect himself from the Florida sun. What could he do now? He credited this comment to Linda’s abject lack of toadyism, an inevitable and sorry result of her grueling career as a child psychologist. But it bugged him.

Like Orlando, or Blitzkowski, the problem with Mark and Linda is elemental. Mark had this epiphany one gloomy Tuesday while sitting in a pew next to Linda. Mark had been born in early April, 1961, a few days before Yuri Gagarin had gone to space, while Linda had been born a few days after. It was

one of those tragic and irreconcilable differences that had haunted Mark every night since. They operated on entirely separate planes; they would never really understand each other. Whenever he stared at Linda, he noticed that her right jaw twitched ever so slightly, a few times a minute. He reasoned that this twitching was an irrefutable cue from God about the dangers of Space-Racebased miscegenation. Mark knew that this was dangerous territory.

But in Orlando, where the weather is fair and sunny everyday, it is easy to lose track of time. Linda’s neck grew saggier; Mark’s toes grew yellower. Whenever they saw each other at the pool, Linda would tediously oil her bronzed thighs in front of Mark, and he felt nothing but a deep sense of affection. Mark took pride in being a moon-faced tee-totaler who never mentioned anything about Linda’s wine habit. He would gently rub her oiled leg and call her an “American beauty.” She took this as a petty insult about her weight. At a Yard Sale, he bought her a miniature portrait of a bleary-eyed girl with a sunhat; she found it depressing and gross and

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inaccrochable but still hung it over her powder room’s toilet.

And so the days passed pleasantly in Orlando, and Mark and Linda’s Floridian life was completely serene aside from the deep-seated and boiling thoughts of shame, guilt, and sadness.

It became hotter and hotter, and Mark found that his whole world revolved around Linda, despite the fact that he didn’t particularly like her. Liking, after all, is entirely beside the point in Central Florida. Especially when dry land is a fleeting luxury.

The morning after Mark had successfully completed his seventh melanoma treatment, they went by shuttle to the cathedral. Linda had used handcuffs during sex, and Mark’s wrists were throbbing in anticipation. It was a big day. There had been a thunderstorm over the weekend and the glass ceiling would certainly be dirty.

But the problem with Central Florida is that it’s so terribly hot, and the sun is so terribly bright, that glass cannot withstand even the weight of a 40-yearold contract laborer. At 9:54 AM, Martin Plommer, a young man from Pensacola, plummeted through the glass cathedral roof and fell directly on the altar, a candlestick piercing his back. He was declared dead on the scene. Linda and Mark both started sobbing; but then Linda side-eyed Mark and felt a little miffed that he wouldn’t offer her a Kleenex, and Mark felt miffed that her sobs were so high-pitched. The blood

dripped down from Martin Plommer.

It dried quickly on the cathedral tile because the Florida sun is so terribly hot and so terribly bright.

The next day, Mark and Linda helped scrub the cathedral floor. They paid for Martin Plommer’s funeral and donated a large sum to his widow’s GoFundMe. They were good and honest citizens with pure hearts. And when the cathedral re-opened, they went every Tuesday morning and praised God for letting them live in Orlando.

It became hotter and hotter, and the Nassau Weekly found that our whole world revolved around Julia Stern.

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Volume 48, Number 11

ART BY DANNY FLAHERTY PAGE DESIGN BY RAVEN REID

Where Are All the Dogs?

“I have been very quiet this past month, save for when I call mother and we talk about things like where all the dogs are.”

BY SASHA ROTKO

“W

here are all the dogs?”

I ask my mother.

Beside her on the phone is my dog, Charlie, with his yellow eyes, quiet and American. They are in New York. I am in Budapest, today. But I converse with my mother as if she is here because no one else is, because I am–in the senses that mean anything–alone, and I have been for some weeks now. I have not made friends, here. The only people that talk to me are men in their early forties, and I shut these conversations down quickly, because maybe I am just the only other American on this Slovenian gondola, but my father’s caution rings in my ears, and so I put in my earbuds and shut out the possibility of camaraderie in these foreign cities. I am not an experienced traveler. I have traveled, in the past, but with my family, and so my understanding of what happens to the soul when it is alone in a place where it does not speak the language was, before this trip, very limited. It was based on the movies, really, which is to say on the idea that

the soul opens itself up to scorn and embarrassment in order to find its way away from loneliness, but I know now that this is not the case. At least, it isn’t for me. I have been very quiet, this past month, save for when I call mother and we talk about things like where all the dogs are. I wonder this as Charlie responds to the sound of my voice across the transatlantic FaceTime, ears perking up at the sound of his name when I say it. The internet tells me that Budapest is the seventh-most dog-friendly city in the world, but I’m not inclined to believe it. I’ve only seen one dog all day, and it was a small dog– the “cop out” kind of dog that you can hide from a landlord, if you really need to. When I was in Barcelona, it was a lot like Los Angeles, a lot like where I come from. In Barcelona, there were dogs on every block. Big dogs. Real dogs. Purebreds–I could name every one of them–but real. At seven in the morning, as I perused that city, suffering through my jet lag, the streets were a sea of canine. Sometimes, the bipeds were outnumbered. There were panting huskies and trotting vizslas and (both) groomed and unruly poodles. In Paris, there were also big and real purebred dogs, but they walked themselves.

Some held their leashes in between their teeth, some didn’t have leashes at all. Their owners yapped commands from ten or fifteen feet back when they

saw the dog sniffing around a garbage can, but all-in-all it was an uncomplicated affair. In Luxembourg, the dogs were bigger than I had seen in any other place, and they were mutts.

They were all shaped differently than their coloring suggested. A dog with golden retriever fur had rottweiler eyebrows. A dog with the brown spots of a beagle was shaped like a husky. Dogs have been everywhere, in every city I’ve been to. But I can’t find them, here, in Budapest. I sit outside a dog park, now, and it is empty, like all the dogs have vanished. I used to sit at the dog park in Silver Lake, in Los Angeles, and watch Charlie chase tennis balls I didn’t throw, dirt becoming caked into his fur, but the turf is unmaimed, here. It looks like there hasn’t been a dog here in years. The other thing my mother and I talk about on FaceTime is reflection. Anyone who knows me knows that I am not adventurous.

This trip has been so unbelievably far out of my comfort zone that, during catch-up calls with friends and family, I get asked, “How are you feeling?

How have you changed?” They wonder if physical and thereby emotional isolation has done something other than improve my Italian and facilitate an addiction to Gossip Girl. And I wonder about these things, sometimes, usually at the high-up viewpoints in

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th

e cities I visit. I wonder if this view, or the last one, or the next one has changed me. Being alone is the kind of thing that gets harder over time. It hasn’t really gotten harder, for me–does that mean it’s gotten easier? Am I quiet now because I am quiet, or because I don’t speak Spanish, Slovenian, French, Hungarian? Life has passed, here.

I take my birth control but skip my period. I am, naturally, irregular. My car sits with a full tank of gas in the garage at home–it hasn’t run. Have I? There has been no witness to my experience, these last four weeks. I am a tree playing twister in the forest.

There is no one around to see it. Am I still improving? Are my limbs–my branches–still stretching farther in every direction if I am the only one that can gauge the difference? The ground cannot be seen beneath my feet. Maybe I have changed, but can I really know that, now? Can I really know that until you have put me back in my hamster wheel? My stomach doesn’t mind the dairy, here. There are no dogs, no lactose intolerance.

I tell my mother everything, I tell my friends everything else, like their commentary will make this real. When I get home, over a month from now, will it all be changed? Will I remember to be different? By what measure can I possibly gauge it? I could joke about the metric system, but I’ll joke about the temperature, instead. It’s hot today, hot on my skin, but I don’t know how hot because these numbers don’t make sense to me, and that is what it’s like inside my head. They ask me if I’ve changed, and I guess I could say, in some way, I have, in some way, it’s hot, but there are other words for everything I want to say, there are other

names for all I’m feeling. These are the things I should be contemplating, really, but I’m trying not to, because I’m still in it, still here, still changing.

So, instead, I wonder, where are all the dogs? What is this permutation of canine culture? “Can I see myself living here?” becomes “Are there dogs, here?” Do people let them on the bed, here? Could a dog lay at my feet on the patio at the espresso bar, here? These are useless questions, but I ask them, because what I want to ask must lay dormant, for now. That part of me is proofing, setting, steeping. My eyes wait for a dog to come into the park, to remind me that there is something usual about this place. I look down at my cell phone, away from the empty park. My mother is washed out by the light refracting off my screen. Charlie rolls over. I tell my mom it’s hot outside. She asks me how it is, otherwise.

I tell her, lonely. On the screen, her brow furrows. It’s okay, I tell her. I’m happy. I just don’t know how else to explain it. It’s hot and it’s lonely.

Sweat collects on the back of my neck, beneath the pieces of hair that have fallen out from the clip. When I hang up the phone, there is silence. There are no more dogs.

The internet tells me that the Nassau Weekly is the seventh-most Sasha Rotkofriendly newspaper in the world.

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Volume 48, Number 11

Rangoli Rangoli Rangoli Rangoli Rangoli Rangoli Rangoli Rangoli “Though he never explicitly murmurs to Lord Rama until midnight. mentioned his mother to her, they Arul went to bed starving that night, both knew it was who he was as did his father and Amma. When Arul pondering when he smelt her.”

By SHRAVAN SURIYANARAYANAN

CW: Graphic violence Amma had always been superstitious.

She would never allow anyone to clip their nails in the house, only in the backyard.

If you dropped anything, you would have to touch it and bring your fingers to your eyes – especially books, as knowledge is precious and one should never disrespect that. She would even refuse to hand Arul a knife or scissors or any sharp object directly without placing it on another surface first in fear of invoking the severing of their relationship. A mother and her son are forever inseparable, she would say. The list is endless. Arul never understood any of these inhibitions of hers, but he knew to never question what his mother would say.

When Arul was not even four years old, he had closed the door forty-five minutes after Amma had hand-painted the rangoli for Lord Rama’s return home. Arul knew nothing of gods then, nor of what a rangoli was, only that the pattern on the floor was beautiful enough that Amma could be a skilled artist if she really wanted to be.

When Amma had found the door closed, she had not only immediately opened it, but had smashed open every window and glass surface on the front facing side of the house and set forth to pray in hysteric

was nineteen, he still did not know who Lord Rama was, but he knew that whenever he saw a rangoli out in front of any door in the house, he would be the last person to shut it. When he was 19, he had a girlfriend, Isha, who he had met at a bar with his friends one night in north London. She was also Indian, with skin so dark it straddled the dim purple lighting they met under, and she was beautiful. He doesn’t remember much about that night except for the drunken sex in the backseat of his car – Amma’s car. Arul dropped Isha off near a train station stop the next morning and slipped his number in her phone case while she wasn’t looking, hoping she would ring him, then sped home to Amma waiting outside. She rushed him out of the car before driving off, noticing the used condom Arul had forgotten to pick up in his haste. Over the next few years, they continued meeting like this, in secret – seeing one another only when moonlight could touch them, making love in the clammy backseat of Amma’s car, doing whatever they could to divorce themselves from the speculation that would ensue in their communities had they been sighted. In these two years, Amma had collected four used condoms and around three-hundred loose strands of Isha’s rich, black hair, enough to form a fistful.

It was raining the night Arul knew he was in love with Isha. It had been exactly

three years since he first met Isha in that dingy pub by Islington. Amma usually slept at nine-thirty, so he would leave at ten o’clock just to be sure she was asleep and return by morning. But Amma did not sleep at all that night. Arul paced around his room for hours, waiting for her to go to bed, grabbing milk from the living room every thirty minutes to see if she was still awake.

“If you want any more milk, bring me a cow and you can drink it from the teat if you so please,” she said on his fourth reentry. Her body was growing frail, and she could not stand for more than thirty minutes at a time. Greyness had begun to lick the roots of her hair, and her skin sagged ever so slightly. Wrinkles ridging her face like dirtied tiles.

“Why are you still awake?” Arul asked her.

“I cannot sleep in this rain.” A slight unease had permeated the air.

“You can go. I won’t stop you.” She did not even look at him as she spoke. Arul grabbed the keys and drove out, manic.

Isha noticed the sweat forming all over Arul’s neck before he did himself. His hair was damp, he spoke with a parchedness to his voice, his hands felt dry despite the pools of sweat that had formed all over him. Isha had told him of the stipend her investment company had granted her for housing near central London, and they agreed to move out within three weeks.

The rain had stopped during the night, but Arul knew his mother was still awake. He

didn’t need the lights at home still burning away to know that she was waiting.

“You cannot marry her,” she spoke with that same metallic tone as Arul walked into the kitchen.

“What do you know about her? When was she born?” She asked, entirely still.

“What are you saying?”

“When was she born?”

“September 4th!” “What year?”

“98! Why the fuck does it matter?”

“What time?” There was a pause.

“Are you serious?”

“Watch your tongue. What time was she born?”

Arul knew that his mother was interested in astrology, but he didn’t know the extent of it. It wasn’t like the astrology his friends in high school or the white women at work would chat about –whether Paul was a Gemini rising and Leo Moon, or whether a Scorpio and Sagittarius could ever make it work. Amma had a splay of files on the kitchen counter, pages of charts and circular models subdivided into specific degrees based on birth time, birthright, caste, class, profession, education. There was one folder on the very edge of the counter with Isha’s birth time, location, previous relationship history, the same for each of her parents and siblings.

“She may be an illegitimate child.”

“What kind of background check is this?” Arul was screaming at this point.

Amma finally looked at him and hardened her voice.

“You cannot marry her.” She stormed past him towards the nearest kitchen knife

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and held it against her throat.

“Tell me you won’t marry her.” Arul stared as she said this, dumbfounded. Applying slight pressure, she felt the base of her neck lap up fresh blood. He was crying now, hysterically, and rushed towards his mother to grasp the knife from her. Frantically, she threw the knife across the kitchen, evading his touch, and sank to the floor. She would not let him touch it.

Arul moved in with Isha just three days later. The first few weeks were difficult. He would wake up to find Isha sleeping on the couch in the living room – she just needed one night where he wouldn’t whisper constantly, or sweat through their pillows or wrangle the sheets. Other nights, he felt Isha’s nails glide across his neck, only to suddenly scratch and claw deep into his skin, suffocating him to the edge of lifelessness before he would wake up, clutching his neck, entirely unharmed. He could never sleep for more than

three hours at a time, four if he was lucky. The first time they actually had sex, Isha’s eyes appeared almost light green, her skin lifted several shades, it even felt textured, as if she had aged years within seconds. Arul went to the bathroom and made up an excuse about feeling sick all of a sudden.

He never told her the truth.

What would he do if his girlfriend found out he was crazy? What if they broke up, and he was kicked out of the apartment and forced to return home to Amma? What if he would sleep at home and wake up to find his mother hovering above him – would she hold him dearly, or grasp at his neck? He could not go back, he had decided, and he would do everything he needed to to make sure Isha never knew. Within a month, he could control the tremors at night, he sweat much less if he just dehydrated himself hours before bed, he kept the apartment unnervingly clean, made regular date plans, made

enough new friends and kept up with old ones,enough that Isha wouldn’t feel suffocated by his presence. He got used to the sex too. He closed his eyes for months, burying himself into Isha’s neck, telling her that he loved her scent, woody and earthen, that whatever perfume she was wearing reminded him so much of the women in Kolkata where he spent the first four years of his life. Though he never explicitly mentioned his mother to her, they both knew it was who he was pondering when he smelt her. The sex became electric, tinged by the humidity of Indian air in the monsoons, a passion that was lathered in sweat and stickiness and unbridled heat.

Amma called six months after he left. He had watched the phone ring for fourteen minutes, more than forty missed calls. When he finally picked up, there was silence for several seconds before Amma spoke.

“Arul..? My baby Arul?”

Arul felt his throat close up.

Before he knew it, his mother was spiraling. She told him that she was sorry, she missed her beautiful son and she didn’t know what to do, she had burnt the horoscopes and all information about Isha and woke up one night with her own body doused in alcohol with a lit up match and she nearly dropped it before swallowing the match whole and sobbing relentlessly saying she wished her baby boy would come home. She began to paint the rangoli on the front step every day hoping he would return, not Lord Rama.

She never cared about him to begin with and all she wanted was her baby boy back.

She even made him all his favorite sweets like the laddu he liked and buckets of gulab jamun. When she realized he wouldn’t reply, she began to lose composure.

“Is it Isha… are you with that bitch now?”

CONTINUED ON PAGE 16

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Volume 48, Number 11 ART BY DANNY FLAHERTY PAGE DESIGN BY CHARLIE NUERMBERGER

A Memento of Nintendo

By OLIVER BERKE

When one thinks of a ‘game,’ hears its notes playing and effects sounding, Like a pot smashing or a brick bashing, When one smells a game, The cellophane of a case, or the rubber of an analog stick, When one touches it, feeling that red cap, that blazing helmet, that fluffy puff of pink, So often does the mind conjure up but a single name out of the great hat of studios and stories: Of cherished and churned-out Triple-A, of the humble Indie, An ‘N’ floats through the third eye, bearing that timeless shimmer in a Void of lost images and long-forgotten experiences, Still reminding us of our first flicks of fun.

Nintendo—doth one need further explain? Thousands of poems have been penned of play, Nay, millions, I say! All written by the rote memory of the world skip pipes Or the flagpole leaps, and the speedrun streams, These and many more have been sung into the senses of the players, Crafting entire worlds of thought and headcanon, these adventures Of the interactive heart.

O, Nintendo, if I could view 1/1985th of the pull You have had upon my soul, I don’t think I’d ever escape from the wanting surface of my keyboard, As I bore out the games of my childhood and the emotions therein, Baubles of the heart, with memories a-jingling, it’s easy to wonder Why to even bother.

I pen this for many sakes–to bear the touchstone for so many a childhood spent Working away at the buttons, so many brows furrowed To vault over the bottomless chasm, Or to make the thrust of the sword Reach the foe’s chest.

These images, these sensations, baked still fresh in our memories Like the lines in tree trunks that still have the phloem flowing, I feel there is something worthy in capturing that evanescent aura In a bottle, a fairy of fun, replenishing the hearts Of our youth.

But why Nintendo? What glimmers about that Unsuspecting letter of crimson, That entrances us today?

For so many hedgehogs, bandicoots, and dragons roam the land, So many warriors and adventurers; green-capped and amber-visored Soldiers marching across the sands and the valleys, observing the scene, Spraying bullets through the blue lines of the television screen, Steel and nickel shots grasping the eye; the whiz of light blaring out the ear.

Perhaps there’s a grandeur to simplicity? Like some unvarnished gloss to the bits And bytes of a bright Nintendo image—the single-toned red of Mario’s cap, The four pixels of Link’s outstretched mouth at a chest’s opening, Geometrically oriented, so computerized and digitized, these scenes, and yet, They still harness that je ne sais quoi Which hallmarks our history, inducting us into A lineage from 8 to 16, a leap from 16 to 64, a lunge forevermore Through the sparkles and cycles of time So that ‘fun’ could never feel the same, a thousand times played.

Or is it the insistence on something purer? The incandescence of the benign, What some would call censorship, others prudeness, still more artistic stifling, I say there is an immortal charm to the Lowered curtains on kisses and the cessation of blood to bleed, That, stripped of salaciousness and shot of violence, when the bits are laid bare They tell a story in fewer words, a song in shorter verses, And so all the more were the elements left to imagine, Flowers left to be planted in the great cornucopia Of a child’s questions about the world.

Where were the people in Hyrule, they wonder; were they hiding between the Wooden napes of the trees,

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Volume 48, Number 11 PAGE DESIGN BY CHARLIE NUERMBERGER

Or the orange slate of the rockslides, Or the watery abyss that took the name ‘Lake Hylia’ But was really just a long block of blue?

Why couldn’t the red-helmeter that helmed the voyages into space Fire at a slant, out those blotches of light, against the crawling creatures of the Azure caves, painted like a dusky sky, brimmed with danger and driven with the brine Of an unknown world: wet, wondrous, And all for the venturer to delve through?

Why couldn’t the plumber who could lope so high Jump over the block barring the path to the fortress, Fly past the sands and the swamps That marked the land of mushrooms, the cornerstone of biomes limned By raging suns and the shades of ships flung by the gales and propeller blades; Or was it the chains of gravity that held him down, So that he could somersault and spring for us common folks on the ground?

It’s ironic! Half-witted! But ingenious To grant the most potent form of liberty, giving the player a set of angel’s wings By clamping down on the rectangles and buttons in their grasp, And enacting a most emancipating set of Limitations: hard-wired, they endow us with a Structure, a geometry by outlining the hard-lines, the boundaries, that enable Linear movement, a progression, a gentle nudge down a set path.

But what if we could leave off the Princess in the cage after the iron bars clinked close, If we allied with Ganon and secured the Triforce for our own wishes, Would not such an agency impel A new dimension of play?

Perhaps when in the right mood for destiny, aye, But for those gamers dragging along the sloth’s path of life, Backs reeling, hands hotly callused, When the 7up cans line the four corners of the bedroom, The Police posters falling down the walls, and the stench of numbers filling the air– This month’s electric, the next’s heat— It’s easy to burrow one’s hands into hair, and muss the granules and tendrils Of the scalp, our youthful flower wilted, A loss in what supposes to be The height of one’s existence, yet plays out Like an elegy melody.

Did Nintendo make us forget the bills and whiskers of adulthood?

As if we can find in its panoply of worlds, of recreational intuition And iconic figures, marble statues of code plastered in pixels,

An antidote to the arbitrary, where there’s always a way to get past that unbreakable block, Always a key somewhere in the castle to unlock that next entryway.

That’s what Nintendo has always promised, no?

Or is it in the conquest of challenges across the screen, With each Goomba stomped and Moblin parried, each Waddle Dee slashed away And ghost sucked up in a great gust of air, That we don the resolve of triumph, and our mind becomes attuned To the trials hardcoded into our lives, so they become just a pinch less daunting: Just a coin deducted from the electric, Just a Rupee less to buy bread, With the wealth of the child spirit instead clattering in our pockets.

Nintendo has that aura, an authority over the consciousness of so many a spirit, Which makes it difficult to grasp, like water quickly streaming through the fingers, But in the attempt to fathom it does a second wind of satisfaction arise And grow as beans over seven years’ time, flowering in An art, a genre of discussion birthed from the games and beheld by the gamers, Which one hopes only to add but a drop of novelty in an ocean of the said And unsaid.

So join me, take up hammer and sword, blaster and bow, for a poet’s quandary At the machinations of a company that spanned across the seas from Japan To comprise the cultural globe like no other, Having molded the mindscapes of generations, A sculptor of the soul: O, Nintendo, O, my memento.

The Nassau Weekly—doth one need further explain?

Thousands of poems have been penned of Oliver Berke

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Volume 48, Number 11 PAGE DESIGN BY CHARLIE NUERMBERGER ART BY JULIA STERN

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Volume 48, Number 11 PAGE DESIGN BY CHARLIE NUERMBERGER ART BY JULIA STERN

English Battle

How to play the new game that you’ve heard everyone talk about

By HARRY GORMAN

Two players take turns saying words, with the goal of saying a word that their opponent does not know the meaning of.

All games must start with, “I challenge you to English Battle.” The player issuing the challenge says the first word. The opposite player will either say they do or do not know what the word means. If a player does not know what it means, they are put in “check.”

This player must then say a word that they think the other player will not know. If they are successful, they go out of “check,” and the game continues. If their opponent knows the word, the “checked” player loses.

Players may lie. They may say words of which they do not know the definition, or falsely claim to know the definition of a word their opponent said. The opponent may “call out” the opponent if they think the opponent lied in these ways. If called out, the first player must give the definition of the word. If they do not know the word’s definition, the person who called them out wins. If they do know the definition, the person who called them out loses.

Additional Rules: • No proper nouns (Japanese, McDonald’s, Milan) • No phrases (Hard Knock Life, Cabin Fever) • Loanwords are allowed (tsunami, schadenfreude, yoga) • If a word has multiple meanings, players only need to know one.

• No repeating words.

• A given definition must be deemed “good enough”, which is decided in good faith by the two players and any onlookers.

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Volume 48, Number 11

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 7

Arul hung up the phone and blocked her number.

He started to see her everywhere. The waitress at a restaurant for just a couple seconds; a taxi driver at a stop light, the receptionist at his dentist over the phone. It was her voice, Amma’s voice, that’s what it was. He thought that maybe she had killed the receptionist and found his dentist to try and let Arul listen to her voice one more time.

Then, it grew worse; everyone started having her hair, everyone’s eyes light green. The type of green on trees that hung lethargically from the sky, sweating itself onto Kolkatan soil in the 90s.

A type of green that was infectious, plague-like.

Sometimes he wondered what would happen if he drove home and strangled her, watching her green eyes pop out of her skull. Or if he went home for chai to catch up and spiked the milk with just enough bleach to watch her spasm on the floor before him. Perhaps he could douse her bed in the leftover whisky his dad left before he passed and set her aflame. He would do it at 2:45 in the morning, so she wouldn’t be awake.

After two more years, Arul had proposed to Isha, and she said yes. The two of them knew that neither of them were truly in love with each other; she barely smiled when he had shown her the ring, but he was the only love that she knew.

Arul kept his eyes closed now whenever he could,

and he was used to seeing the exact same face and body in every person he met, though he was not sure he even remembered what she even looked like back then, years ago. He often wondered what she looked like now.

They had planned the wedding quickly, it would happen in a few months with just Isha’s immediate family and close friends, and they would do it in West London at the cheapest church they could find. Isha’s family was catholic, so they insisted on this. There was no need to go to India for a wedding neither family would attend. Three days before the wedding, Isha found out she was pregnant. The two of them slept on separate beds that night. *** Arul had not seen Isha in three days now.

He was pacing frantically, unnerved at the fact that she was missing, but shaking because what if Amma had found out? He shut the thought out of his head, and on the fourth day, he went to the police station to file a missing person’s report. A week later, the police reported that her body was found, albeit lifeless. Officers had found the body in West London, a few streets away from the smallest Church there, with a slit throat and her eyes gouged out, replaced with glass eyes bearing light green lenses. Her uterus was extracted from her body and in that empty hole in her stomach was placed a lock of her own hair. Using her blood, the murderer, currently unknown, had painted a pattern on the ceiling

Rang

BY SHRAVAN SURIYANARAYANAN

above her dead body that was unlike anything the police had seen in prior cases. Arul, finally, had to return home.

At the base of the front door of his house, now dead silent, was a rangoli just like the one he had seen etched into the ceiling of Isha’s workplace that morning, painted entirely in black. He walked in, leaving the front door open. The first thing Arul noticed was that the house, besides being almost pitch black inside, smelt of damp rain. It was so dark he could not even identify the silhouettes of any doors or wall paintings, or any ceiling lights. The only thing he observed was a candescent red light that radiated from the very end of the corridor leading into the kitchen. He called out into the corridor only to find his voice swallowed entirely by the walls. Hollowed, he walked forward into the kitchen, entirely calm.

He was ready to see her.

Lay on the floor of the kitchen was a woman with light wavy hair, wearing a black lace dress.

Her breasts were clearly visible, and her figure jutted out at her stomach, brimming with life. She was pregnant.

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Volume 48, Number 11

PAGE DESIGN BY ANABEL REID

goli “Isha? ” Arul called out, again hearing nothing. The walls had swallowed his sounds, and he started screaming her name over and over again until she turned to reveal light green eyes, olive skin that looked as if it was licked by the sun. Beauty itself was immortalized in her – but it was not Isha.

Scattered on the floor were lockets of withering hair, as black as the rangoli from the front door, and precisely four condoms with rotten clumps of jaundiced semen inside of them. Inside most of them, except one. The woman before him caught his gaze and pressed her hand against her stomach, oozing with birth. On the button of her stomach was the center of another rangoli, etched into her with blood. The room reeked of urine, as he saw bottles upon bottles of yellow fluid dispersed throughout the kitchen. Arul felt a delirium tread his veins. The room was getting warmer and he started to lose sensation in his feet, as if pricked by a thousand needles until all the blood had seeped out and he was standing on his knees – that’s where he felt the most pressure. Right against his kneecap, he could feel his patella cracking with each second going by.

He was suddenly aware of a hotness melting down his face, boiling at his eyes. Arul, wiping the

RIYANARAYANAN

thick honeyed substance from his cheeks, stared at his fingertips. In the beetroot light, now bleeding throughout the house, all he saw was a streak of sticky blackness across his hands. Screaming now, he scratched at his face and closed his eyes, hoping the hot blood that was pouring forth would congeal and seal them shut forever – in vain, for each time he tried to close his eyes it felt as though he was staring directly into the sun. Amma bore a smile hiding her teeth, crying the same honeyed tears as Arul, reaching to him with her arms outstretched. Shaking, he kicked her down to the floor and grabbed the nearest kitchen knife, slitting his arms. Entirely rabid now, Amma was lapping the blood like nectar, ensuring nothing was lost. Her baby bump grew, as if she was entering labor then and there. Debilitated by the scene before him, Arul was now conscious of the numbingness of the heat in the room. As if he had been led into a furnace, he was depleted, falling to the floor and barely clutching the bloodied knife.

Amma dropped down, reaching out to him with her malnourished arms, whispering imperceivable chants in his ears. His eyes were slowly giving up on him, his body finally feeling slumber wash over itself. As she closed her arms around his emaciated frame, Arul felt the weight of her emblazoned breasts sink him further into the floor.

Amma grabbed his empty hand and pressed it against her stomach.

“Do you feel it? Do you feel his kick? It’s a boy,” she whispered. Arul could feel his heart barely beating, as if dragging itself through quicksand.

He fondled her stomach, clawing for a kick or a

beat or any sign of life at all, but he felt nothing.

In his barren state of mind, he considered mustering all the energy he had left to batter his mother’s stomach, to slaughter the embryo she purported to have conceived. But what did it matter anymore?

Whether there was a child or not, he would still have Amma. She would never leave, and she was all he had left. Before his mother could reach out to his other hand, Arul dropped the knife. There was no blood left in his eyes, nor sweat on his head. He stared blankly at Amma, and sank into her.

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Volume 48, Number 11

ART BY JAMES SWINEHART PAGE DESIGN BY KAYDANCE RICE

An Amateur Review of Dune 2 A Nass contributor on Dune 2, phantasmagorical beauty, and mediocrity.

By ARNAV VYAS

Without much compunction for the offense this may cause science-fiction fans and (actual) cinephiles alike, I heartily declare that Dune 2 is, put bluntly, an okay movie. Not a film, such a title would vest it with a certain unwarranted sophistication, but a movie, existing within the class of blockbusters that provide entertainment value but do not constitute artworks of generational significance.

Such utterances have exposed me to the wrath of the Dune 2 apostles. The dorm room to which I immediately returned after watching it at the Garden Theater – the group chat with high school friends, the lunch I had with a film student – all became sites of heretic-hunting. “It is the greatest movie of all time,” went the most grandiose of the claims I heard; even the comparatively milder assertions shared the same reverential outlook. I, therefore, having blasphemed the movie’s brilliance, patiently endured a litany of accusations concerning my philistine and dilettantish nature. And though I am likely to prompt a resurgence of such hostilities by spilling digital ink on the subject, I remain convinced that my stance is reasonable and worthy of defense.

Dune 2 was released in March of this year and has since been heralded as an epic science fiction movie for the ages.

Adapted from a highly acclaimed book series, directed by the esteemed Denis

Villueneve, and starring Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya, it truly possesses all the trappings of a generational film. Over the course of the story, which centers on the conflict between the Fremen, led by hero Paul Atreides, played by Chalamet, and the tyrannical House Harkonnen, there is much to admire: for instance, Han Zimmer’s harrowing, otherworldly soundtrack.

The movie has an array of minor issues, such as cheesy dialogue – consider the line delivered by the killer of the Harkonnen antagonist Glossu Rabban: “For my Duke… and my friends” – which are frustrating, yet can be easily overlooked. My principal objection and the chief source of my distaste pertains instead to its visual appearance, the very element for which Dune 2 is perhaps most commonly acclaimed.

Let’s just say that I think ‘gorgeous,’ as used to describe the movie in the link above, is a strong word. Dune 2’s visual effects are, admittedly, breathtaking in their quality, imbuing extraordinary, phantasmagorical scenes with a potent realism that is conceivably akin to what one would encounter upon physically stepping into the world of the book.

Take a battle scene, like that between the Fremen and a bewildering four legged machine, and it will be qualitatively superior to any prior, analogous scene produced by Hollywood. In general, the edges of the characters pop and the outlines of the backdrop cut through the screen, making each shot crisp and defined, while the picture overall remains smooth, unblemished as it is vivid. By the genius of digital manipulation, the movie takes what once

was sequestered in the realm of the The movie’s congenital insipidimagination, and liberates it into the ness is tremendously aggravated by–if realm of the tangible. not predicated upon–its lauded color And yet, it is precisely such com- scheme. Awash in a shallow, neon orputerized perfection that hinders it. ange, the primary setting of the movie Instead of further drawing me into the is seemingly composed of numerous story and enlivening my viewing experi- color filters that were slapped onto the ence, it served as a contrived spectacle original footage, obscuring the natuthat, without stirring my imagination, rally rich color of the Jordanian desert, enfeebled the movie’s ability to affect where shooting took place, underneath. me. That is, the great sandworm scene The black-and-white stadium scene, in in which Paul Atreides adroitly wields which the Harkonnens stage gladiatoa recalcitrant beast belongs less to a rial fights, provides the paradigmatic work of art than to the graphics of a example of the movie’s aesthetic sin, video game or the virtual-reality ride since, being rather bland – which I present at a theme park–more a source understand was the sentiment intenof intrigue for the technological feat it tionally meant to be conveyed so as to represents than its emotional heft. The illuminate the Harkonnen’s nature – it close-ups of characters’ faces, which nonetheless felt so generic that it lost ought to express the complexities of all visual standing in my eyes. their individual personhood, appear In other words, the movie’s vapid sterile and clean–unhuman and, there- aesthetic eliminates the enchantment fore, uninteresting. The sharp defini- cinema should evoke. As Tarantino extion, paradoxically, felt pixelated, and plains, When you’re watching a movie, its smoothness came across at bottom a film print, you are watching an illuas a lack of complexity; flat and unidi- sion [because a film print is nothing mensional without much to say. but a series of still pictures], and that

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Volume 48, Number 11

they inhabit in their regular lives – that story has been debased and become another iteration of the AI generated clips that circulate online and the graphics on electronic billboards, representations of a reality that is hyper defined on the edges and distinctly colorized, but functionally nugatory without that earthiness which warms the heart.

—I went to an old-fashioned movie theater near my house this past summer. Its facade carried a large white billboard that protruded out over the sidewalk and exhibited physical black block letters that spelt out Alfred Hitchcock Film Festival. The attendant in the cylindrical hub centered in the foyer sold me a ticket, and I walked into the theater. The show I was attending was Rope, a murder mystery released in 1944. The projector started to whir, the lights dimmed, and a grainy, black and white picture appeared on the screen. I sat bewitched.

illusion to me is connected to the magic of movies. The faults of Dune 2 are thus perhaps symptomatic of the faults of contemporary cinema and its regrettable eschewal of film in favor of the digital camera, which subverts the magical illusion present in film print. In any case, Tarantino’s point, at the risk of being facetious, is clear: Apparently, the whole world is okay with television in public [i.e. digital film, like Dune 2, is equivalent to mass-produced entertainment like television, rather than a product of expert craftsmanship].

To best illustrate my point, I implore you to watch or re-watch a film like David Lean’s 1962 film Lawrence of Arabia; the book off which it is based was in fact a source of inspiration for Dune author Frank Herbert. The desert in such a film is not a backdrop, but an active character that, alive in its vitality, deepens the entire film by imparting it with a soul. Pause at random and the ensuing still frame could stand alone in a museum; by contrast, the cold, uniform orange frames of Dune 2’s desert

will seem exceedingly banal. It does not escape me that I am committing a category error in imposing the standards for a historical film onto a science-fiction movie that aims to represent an alien, mythological world. In view of the original Star Wars and 2001: A Space Odyssey, however, I refuse to concede that Dune 2 was incapable of realizing an improved aesthetic that would have remained just as faithful to the story.

In the spirit of honesty, I sheepishly confess that I have not watched the first Dune movie or read the books–conditions, if satisfied, would presumably have improved my movie-watching experience. But, assuming that form and P.S. Stephen Spielbierg’s Thoughts: content are not wholly interdependent, Dune 2 “is one of the most brilliant sciI think my principal reservation sub- ence fiction films I have ever seen.” sists notwithstanding the sum total of my knowledge of Dune lore. For there is something missing at the heart of the movie from which my dissatisfaction arises, and that void is a story without the magical quality that can charm viewers and transport them to a reality other than the laptop-dominated ones

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Volume 48, Number 11

It was the fall We’ll never know what it was or how it came to be. She never showed the signs on her stomach and the signs she wore long on her face were those of the boy hands always drawing on her. Move miles away, we told her, across the rivers and mountains, we told her, until one day she did. And maybe this was his pledge to keep following her. And maybe, she really never knew. She never showed the signs on her stomach but then it threatened eruption with aching pains at a frat party, and bass drums were shaking shrinking doors, and she was limping, in the stall she was crouching, fetal for her life she was willing ringing ears to go still. Still after it dropped, sunk down in the porcelain bowl.

Her mind that red face frozen before it could drown. She prayed and she prayed but I was no God. Gentle songs I sung to coax her asleep.

of our

fresh man year

and she

called me.

by ISABELLE CLAYTON