Volume 40 - Issue 2

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Publisher

Lauren Harrison Editor-in-Chief •

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Jontry Dach Managing Editors

Nicole Allan, Nick Handler •

Designer

Rachel Engler Senior Editors

Emi!J Koh, Sophia Lear •

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910 whatley awnue lwml 06SIS •

103.389.3369

Production Manager

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06510 203~776.YARN

Jordan Jacks

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Associate Editors

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Tess Dearing, Aditi Ramakrishnan, Mitchell Reich On-line Editors

Ben Lasman, Ali Seitz •

receive a 5% discount with this ad

Copy Editor Laura Bennett Research Director Laura Zax

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Staff Amy Fish, Pat Hayden, Daniel Jordan, Matthew Lee, Brooks Swett

Members and Directors Joshua Civin, Peter B. Cooper, Tom Griggs, Brooks Kelley, Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, Kathrin Lassila, Jennifer Pitts, Henry Schwab, Elizabeth Sledge, Jim Sleeper, David Slifka, Fred Strebeigh, Thomas Strong, John Swansburg

Advisors Richard Bradley, Jay Carney, Richard Conniff, Ruth Conniff, Elisha Cooper, Julia Preston, Lauren Rabin, Steven Weisman, Daniel Yergin

Friends Michael Addison, Austin Family Fund, Steve Ballou,]. Neela Banerjee, Margaret Bauer, Emily Bazelon, Anson M. Beard, Jr. Blaire Bennett, Richard Bradley, Martha Brant, Susan Braudy, Daniel Brook, Hilary Callahan, Jay Carney, Daphne Chu, Josh Civin, Jonathan M. Clark, Constance Clement, Andy Court, Masi Denison, Albert J. Fox, Mrs. Howard Fox, David Freeman, Geoffrey Fried, Sherwin Goldman, David Greenberg, Stephen Hellman, Laura Heymann, Gerald Hwang, Walter Jacob, Jane Kamensky, Tina Kelley, Roger Kirwood, Lewis E. Lehrman,Jim Lowe, E. Nobles Lowe, Daniel Murphy, Martha E. Neil, Peter Neil, Howard H. Newman, Sean O'Brien, Laura Pappano, Julie Peters, Lewis and Joan Platt, Josh Plaut, Julia Preston, Lauren Rabin, Fairfax C. Randal, Robert Randolph; Stuart Rohrer Arleen and Arthur Sager, Richard Shields, W Hampton Sides, Lisa Silverman, Scott Simpson, .Adina Proposco and David Sulsman, • Thomas Strong, Margarita Whiteleather, Blake Wtlson, Daniel Yerg1D and Angela Stent Yergin

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'IHE NEW JOURNAL

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Volume 40, Number 2 October 2007

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The magaz1ne about Yale and New Haven .

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OFF THE

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Yale returns to homegrown dining services. ~

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Nicole Allan

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BRIDGING THE GULF

Yale students discover Cuba. ~Ali

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GASTRONAUTS

Elis explore an alternative meal plan. ~Laura

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Zax

INTERNET lillLED THE VIDEO S TORE

Renting locally in a digital age. ~

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Sophia Lear GNONE

Yale students educate Connecticut's felons .

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~Alexis

Fitts •

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CLEANING HousE

Fraternity brothers hire homeless help. ~

Pat Ht!Jden

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The Pro@e Toy Story l?J Laura Yao

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Shots in the Dark

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The Critical An le

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The Personal Essay

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Endnote

Points of Departure

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Out of Africa by Breanna Jedrzgewski The Measure of a

an

ry Alexandra Schwartz

Digging It by Dave Thzer Virus Sean

l?J Matthew Lee

The New Journal is publis'!ed five times during the academic year by The New Journal at Yale, Inc., P.O. Box 203432 Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06520. Office address: 305 Crown Street. All contents Copyright 2006 by The New Journal at Yale, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction either in whole or in part without written permission of the publisher and editor in chief is prohibited. While this magazine is published

by Yale College students, Yale University is not responsible for its contents. Seventy-five hundred copies of each issue are distributed free to members of the Yale and New Haven community. Subscriptions are available to those outside the area. Rates: One year, $18. Two years, $32. The New Journal is printed by Turley Publications, Palmer, MA; bookkeeping and billing services are provided by Colman Bookkeeping of New Haven. The New Journal encourages letters to the editor and comments on Yale and New Haven issues. Write to Editorials, 203432 Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06520. All letters for publication must include address and signature. We reserve the right to edit all letters for publication.

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-UISine THE

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colored cardstock, advised us to gather in the Calhoun Common Room no later than 4:45. By 4:50, four undergraduate Eliza Doolittles in need of cutlery skills had waridered in: a strapping lad in jeans and a white polo shirt, two gentlemen in slacks and white button-down shirts, and a young lady sporting undersized cotton athletic .shorts and high-heeled flipflops. By five o'clock, the flock had filled out. A door swung open, and we were herded into a small room adjacent to the .

- dining hall by a venerable representative of Undergraduate Career Services' Employer-in-Residence program. Dining Etiquette 101, or "Tine-Counting for I-Bankers," was about to begin. No one commented on the irony inherent in attempting to teach proper dining etiquette next to an actual dining hall.

I settled into a chair and surveyed the scene: three tables covered in white cloth, crowded with 25 place-settingseach with a knife, a spoon, two forks, and three glasses, all more or less clean and in working condition. I perused the two-page handout on "Eating Etiquette" (Rule One: ''Dress for the occasion") and eyed the high-heeled flip-flopper with contempt. But before I could read further, I was assaulted by a wave of sickly sweet cologne. A genial fellow with long, bushy, blond hair, flushed cheeks, and loud, checked capri pants was hovering over my right shoulder. Eager to impress me with his homegrown (and, as I later learned, Hungarian) manners, he bowed

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low and asked if he "might" sit. I opened my notebook, noted his untraceable accent, and nodded politely.

While seats were filling, he giggled excitedly over the etiquette guidelines.

At first it was all fun and games (Rules Four, Nine, and Eleven boil down to the same sentiment: "Having a non-alcoholic beverage is a perfecdy.good option"). But then, disaster. Rule Five: "Be sure to leave one hand free. for shaking hands or eating.

You can do this by using all the fingers and palm of your other hand. Fold your napkin loosely around your litde finger.

Balance the hors d'oeuvre plate between your ring and middle fingers, and hold your glass or cup between your index finger and thumb." The laughter died on his lips: Tentatively poking the napkin protruding from the glass in front of him with his pinky finger, he turned to me, crestfallen. Not wanting to remove the napkin . mainly in the spirit of Rule Six: ''Wait to go in to dinner or sit down until either your host(s) say to sit or until they are seated." I mimed an explanation. ''Don't worry," I told him, pointing to the rule's last line, "It even says here, 'It takes a litde practice."'

The workshop proper began with some preliminary remarks from the selfappointed Henry Higgins of flatware (in reality, Catherine Stebinger), who frequently interrupted herself to correct our already objectionable manners. Two would-be hedge fund managers were sharply chastised for wearing baseball caps; they nodded contritely but kept their hats on. Tongue-lashing over, we were asked to file into the dining hall proper so that we could swipe our ID cards. Only then did I realize that our faux business dinner, served by an embarrassingly obsequious dining hall employee-cumwaiter, would be served with a side of signature Calhoun Caribbean Blend vegetables. They were, as usual, soggy.

During the salad course, the first of several governing metaphors revealed itself: business dinner as obstacle course.

We .d idn't so much use what was on the table as navigate around it. Passing the bread basket proved to be the equivalent of successfully crossing a thirty-foot

balance log during the fifth week of boot camp. That danger overcome, a thirsty girl nervously raised her hand: "I have a question. How _do we drink our water?"

Answer: you just do. "How do you mix your salad nicely?" asked another clueless diner. Answer: you don't. I looked down at my own plate and realized that the couscous atop my lettuce violated Rule Eight ("If you are ordering from a restaurant menu, avoid food that w]U drip or slip"). I ate around it. After all, I didn't want to look, in Ms. Stebinger's words, "dirty."

The "waiter" came around to pour the "red wine" (Kool-Aid). The Hungarian was enthusiastic about Rule Ten (''Whoever orders the wine will have a small amount poured into the glass to taste. Smell it delicately, sip it, rolling it around on your tongue, then swallow. Unless it tastes like vinegar, nod your head and say something like, 'Excellent!' or 'Very Good."'), He sipped, swirled, and swallowed. It tasted more .like flavored sugar water than vinegar.

He excitedly proclaimed it "Excellent!"

He had harkened to a casual warning of Ms. Stebinger's, one that struck me as an appropriate mantra for the workshop, for a postgraduate future in the business world: ''You want to accept a lot of what's happening unless it's actually going to be harmful." Around the table, the future employees of G6ldrnan-Sachs were drinking the Kool-Aid. The main course established a second fundamental principle: eat, as Scarlett O'Hara would say, like a bird. We were told, first verbally and then through an energetic demonstration, to butter our bread and cut our meat one bite at a time: with fork in left hand, and knife in right hand, cut one piece; set knife down at four o'cl~ck; switch fork to .right hand; spear bite; eat; repeat. Above all, mouthfuls were to be kept small. A thin girl asked what a diner should do if she wasn't particularly hungry. Considering the pace of the cutting-switching-biting routine, I was more preoccupied with • .what an interviewee should do if she were hungry. By this point, we had been sitting primly for over thirty minutes and had

'!HE NEW JOURNAL

hardly eaten anything. The Hungarian raised his hand to ask about maintaining correct posture. "What if you get tired?"

Answer: tough it out.

By the end of the meal, I had learned some valuable practical lessons. First of all, there are crucial differences between American and European dining etiquette: if you put both hands on your lap in France, for example, you might as well announce to the table that you're fondling your neighbor. And ladies, when you're heading to the bathroom, make sure to fold your napkin and place it on the back of the chair. But above all, I learned that when selling out, sucking up, boot-licking, or brown-nosing whatever you want to call it you can never start too early or be too thorough.

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1e THE GUIDELINES WERE SIMPLE: "CAKE BASE may be made of Styrofoam and measure not more than 12" high. Decorate cake depicting patriotism theme and include a name card listing your entry." The rules read, the task clear, the ingredients purchased, amateur bakers from around the state revved up their KitchenAid mixers and set their sights on the fairgrounds in Durham, Connecticut.

There are over 45 fairs in the state of Connecticut, but the Association of Connecticut Fairs considers Durham's to be one of the year's greatest.

Complete with livestock and agricultural competitions, ~arnival rides, and concession stands b · · g with fried, sugar-coated artery-assailants, this year's event reported a total of 12,844 registered

exhibits. In certain divisions, · baking included, a blue ribbon at the Durham fair is your ticket to compete at the state contest in November. Envisioning the daunting pool of diehard competitors, I steered clear of the prestigious apple· pie contest. The whimsical Patriotic Cake division seemed more at my level.

A few days later, the apartment glittered with red sugar, an edible pixie dust that settled on everything within a ten-foot radius of the kitchen. My favorite t-shirt was spangled with blue food coloring as I dispensed Crest-colored frosting to form an All-American bustier on a Barbie doll's plastic chest. A small crowd of onlookers was dusted in flour and sprinkles. "The last time I thought about edible clothing," " one commented, "it wasn't in . such a wholesome context.'' · Events more wholesome and less nutritious than the baking contest at the Durham Fair are hard to come by. In keeping with the "Patriotic" theme of the decorated cake division, Barbie was to be the star of my "Miss America" masterpiece. So while my friends sat across from me at the kitchen table, one editing his Rhodes application and the other grappling with a physics problem set, I played culinary Barbie doll dress-up.

Considering all of the feminist articles and polls that seem determined to expose latent domestic wannabes among undergrads, I was surprised that no one worried I was neglecting more serious work.

Yet the creative process of cake design was more challenging than I had anticipated. With self-righteous scorn at the notion of a Styrotoam base, I had immediately ruled out anything but 100 percent made-from-scratch cake. But my creative impulses exhausted themselves shortly after I settled on a general red, white and blue color scheme, and I sought inspiration from friends. ''You should make a cake in the shape of an SUV," one suggested. An informal survey of Yale students involving free association of the words "patriotism" and "cake" resulted in predictably political replies: Bush's head as a pound cake, red and blue states on a beet cake map, a mosaic of brand name commodities. At the suggestion of "something to do with obesity," however, I rea1ized that activism

October 2007 •

would not be the right ingredient when winning a baking contest was at stake.

When I was growing up, the annual Independence Day picnic in North Haven, . Maine featured a bring-yourown-dessert table where tasty treats were exchanged for free watermelon, hot dogs and other American standards. The one rule of the dessert table was that no one could dig in until12:30 on the dot. A sunbonneted older wom::tn guarded a kitchen timer that ticked off the minutes. At the sound of the bell, we converged upon the coveted goodies like vultures. Ding!

Inspiration hit at the recollection of my seventh birthday doll cake Barbie donned a fashionably frosted "red velvet" dress. Reincarnated as "Miss America," a similar cake could be a lighthearted take on the patriotic theme, and perhaps just technically challenging enough to catch the eye of the judges.

The Durham Fair's criteria for judging a decorated cake are based on a hundredpoint scale. Creative Theme, fifty; Color Blending, 25; Decorating Technique, 25.

Taste and texture didn't count, which was lucky, since I had forgotten to add vanilla to my batter. No one ever clarified what "color blending" involved. I can only speculate that I got away with raspberrycolored (rather than true red) trim on the three-tiered dress because frosting is inevitably tinted pink when forming a Barbie's outfit. I had also aspired to either a bright ultramarine or regal Yale blue, but discovered that adding drop after drop of blue dye only increased its dn1lness. Eventually, I had to settle for a faded denim color.

Among the eleven entries in the Patriotic Decorated Cake category, five featured American flags, two supported the military, one sported sculpted miniatures of hot dogs, baseballs and apple pie, and another imitated a ballot box, implore us to ''VO'IE!" Mine wasn't the only cake donning a doll. One of my competitors dressed ''Betsy Ross" in fondant icing so smooth it looked like porcelain. A handwritten note rested near Bets 's apron, ''In honor of those who do what they can at home."

A simple, perfectly-executed three:..layer cake sprouting stars like tinsel won Best of Show. · First-place ribbons went to cakes with 5

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a cause, second to those that celebrated a at all. According to the group's website, it's specific aspect of American culture, and a "non-profit, collectively run space for third to the remainder. If my cake had a the exchange of ideas as they pertain to cause, I'm not sure exactly what it was. the interests of our community." In other Though I had briefly agonized over the words, it's an organization that provides ethnicity and hair color of my Barbie, I a place for people to talk, hosts a weekly book club, and operates a modest lending ultimately bought a safely blonde-andblue-eyed gal with the least excessive library. amount of painted makeup. If only to The lending library, which consists of one bookcase, stands · in Neverendappease a faint tug of collegiate rebellion, I pulled together a mild political statement ing Books' dark, dusty front room. The space is crammed with· shelves and shelves by constructing a candy crinoline of Dum.Dum lollipops around the base of the of used books, s9me alphabetized, some cake. Barbie scintillated in a homemade · just stacked on top of each other. The sash and a makeshift crown of jeweled Infoshop's sirigle bookcase is filled with bobby-pins; I came away with a secondunalphabetized radical .a nd anarchist literaplace ribbon. ture of all kinds, ranging from Anarcho.ryndicalism: Theory and Practice to Nietzsche to more conventional fare like The Philosopf?y of Punk and Naomi Wol£ A sign informs visitors that these books, unlike many of the others in Neverending Books, are not free and are meant to be borrowed.

In the next room, about ten people have settled into .chairs, perched on stools, or claimed spots on the floor, chatting with each other as they wait for the Infoshop's weekly book club meeting to begin. Although the Infoshop is not affiliated with Yale, most of those in attendance are students of one kind or another. They sport ON THURSDAY EVENINGS AND FRIDAY the badges of non-conformity: mostly unafternoons, a second sign hangs at 810 shaven, often pierced. Unusual hairstyles State Street underneath the faded, peeling and square-framed glasses abound. wooden plaque that reads "Neverending I pass up the red swivel chairs and sit Books." This one is bigger and newer and down; Someone says I look like I'm about brighter. In hot pink capital letters, it deto read them a story. Instead, I ask a basic clares "Elm City Infoshop." Though the question that's been intt iguing me: What lettering is bold, the words themselves is anarchism? A long pause follows. ''It's are unilluminating. The group's unofficial complicated," someone finally ventures.

Perhaps the hesitation is not surprisnickname, "the anarchist bookstore," helps ing, given that uninformative "an-" at the a little, but it can create misconceptions of beginning of the word. Anarchists agree its own one Yalie was sure the group was on what they reject government, or, in somehow a "front" for the Party of the the case of the Elm City Infoshop, any Right.

The first person I see when I arrive at kind of hierarchy at all but their views vary widely on everything else. ''There's a the Elm City Infoshop is Jim Hoffecker, a lot of room for discussion and disagreequiet man with a beard and long ponytail. ment," member Mike Ketch explains.

He is setting up the sign to announce the Today, though, there isn't much conInfoshop's takeover of the space for the evening. When I ask him about the Infostention on display. The group would hop, he tells me, ''I'm the leader." Then he rather talk about their anarchist actions laughs. "Just kidding." than quibble over definitions. Ketch tells Of course, the Infoshop's ideology me about the Infoshop members' involvewon't allow for any kind of leadership. ment with the group Food Not Bombs, While the "anarchistic bookstore" is indeed an organization that provides food to the . anarchistic in practice, it isn't a bookstore homeless. ''Instead of writing to our con'

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gressman and saying, 'There are hungry people in New Haven,' it's a leaderless way to tackle the problem."

Other members mention one anarchist group that fights sexual assault without involving to the police, and another that provides free mental health care. "All you need to be an anarchist," Ketch tells me, "is to say, 'I don't want a boss, or a tyrant, or a president. I just want to work things out with my neighbor without calling the police."'

All this sounds innocent enough. Yet, according to Ketch, "Yale is certainly hostile to anarchists." Other members provide several examples of the University's antagonism, including the decision not to renew former Yale professor David Graeber's contract with the Anthropology Departtnent in 2005, allegedly because of his anarchist beliefs.

Indeed, several . members, including Ketch, .are wary of being tied in print to an anarchist group. Even Ketch uses an assumed name with the group. He recalls a time when he and a friend, who was facing critnit;lal charges, were forbidden to associate because of Ketch's ties to radical groups. On a more pedestrian level, members fear prospective employers being put off after a Google search.

Asked to imagine an anarchist society, the group again draws a blank and, they counter, that's not the point. ''I have no idea," says Camille Seaberry, "and if I sit around all day thinking about what it might look like, I'll never get anything done." Anyway, she says, anarchy already exists, exemplified by groups like the Elm City Infoshop. '~ decisions are made as a collective," she says, "and that's anarchy."

A few minutes later, the book club begins to discuss the fifteenth issue of the 'zine Doris, subtitled "D. I. Y Antidepression Guide." Having picked out the week's reading, Kanga Dee is responsible for leading the discussion. 'Ibis makes her nervous. ''I dGn't think I've ever really facilitated anything before," she says, and after tentatively calling on the first few people to speak, she gives up, letting the conversation unfold spontaneously. The talk doesn't really need a leader, anyway. '

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'IHE NEW JOURNAL

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I RECEN'ILY SPOTIED A YOUNG WOMAN 0 York Street sporting a shirt emblazoned: "New Haven: I hear some smart people live their." I read right; in addition to Urban Outfitters' one-liner tees, Yale students and New Haveners are now sporting a new line of ironic clothing.

On campus and around town, sloganbearing shirts, some raunchy and others ridiculous, are asserting a fierce but selfamused pride in the Elm City, in much the same vein as Cornell's popular "Ithaca is Gorges" t-shirt line. While alumni and students have long enjoyed a tradition of Yale gear, only a limited selection of New Haven memorabilia existed until recently. As Jennifer Lahert, manager of the tourist center Info New Haven, describes, groups are finally playing to the long untapped market for New Haven memorabilia.

Since Town Green Special Services District, a group that promotes developrnent in downtown New Haven, opened Info New Haven ten years ago, the production of Elm City souvenirs has taken off. Walgreens now sells a variety of homespun shirts provocative ones read, "New Haven: Friendly with Benefits"; others cheer in avuncular pastel font, '~ew Haven My Kind of Town!"

At Info New Haven, more historicallyinclined tourists and natives can choose from shirts designed by the Town Green directors and Info ew Haven staff, including '~ew Haven: More Jjke Old Haven" and the especially popular fitted tees, available in baby blue and light pink, "New Haven: Jaywallcing since 1638."

Others opt for a subtler motto, presented

in stark black and white, "New Haven: It's better than your town." The so-called "Smart Tee," sported by.. the woman on York Street, is also a favorite. K .atie Rowe, . the employee at Info New Haven who conceived of this slogan, first tells me that it was just an attempt to make a Yale shirt while avoiding copyright issues but then · laughs and assur~s me that she's joking.

Like her design, the new tees are aimed at "various aspects of New Haven."

While the iconic "I 0 New York" shirts capture many tourists' pure excitement from a trip to the Big Apple, the New Haven slogans reflect the more ambivalent relationship that exists between the city and its residents or • visitors. Many feel a familial connection to the city; they may whine about her or tease her like an annoying little sister, but deep down there is some affection, some loyalty. Jayna Whitcher, a J.E. junior who appreciates the new line's humor, bought the "New Haven: My Kind of Town" sweatshirt. Acknowledging that most people do not find the city "their kind of town," she recalls Harvard fans' taunts at the Game about having to return to New Haven and disparaging comments about the city's crime rate and poverty level from people back home. With an optimism that matches her shirt's cheer, Whitcher says, '~ew Haven is an intrinsic part of a Yalie's experience, for good ~'ind for bad. But," she adds, "I like to think, mostly for good."

Students will soon have the chance to express their feelings for ew Haven not only by wearing but also by coining these catchphrases. Info ew Haven hopes to expand its t-shirt offerings and would welcome student submissions for slogans. One can only imagine the ideas Yalies would come up with; perhaps: "The Have a Must Have!" or "New Haven is for Muggers"?

However, submitl ing slogans does not guarantee glory. John, a dedicated Info ew Haven employee, suggested a design with labeled drawings of East and West Rocks framing the simple, classic: '' ew Haven Rocks." His pitch was never printed, but he still hopes it may someday hit the streets.

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The far Books AboutYa.le and Books

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World

A Distinctive Selection ofYale Apparel, Gifts and

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A ccoRDING TO L EE and Tracy Jackson, a lot. Just before classes began, the duo, owners of Koffee Too?, announced a contest to rename their store. The prize: free coffee for a year. The person who.se name is selected could save $1529.35, or the price of one cup of coffee 365 times over.

The smali York Street coffee shop's current name stems from former ties with Koffee on Audubon. When the Jacksons relinquished ownership of I<offee in 2002, however, Koffee Too? remained connected in name. As General Manager Benjamin Wilkinson explains with a smile, ''We're really about seven years overdue for a name change." Much of the impetus for the current rechristening comes from a growing desire to distance their store from their competitors at Koffee on Audubon and its sister shop, Koffee on Orange, which was known as Moka until this September. ''We want people to know the difference between the two," says Wilkinson. Scott Crawl, a K2 barista, agrees; he claims the new name will "differentiate our brand from the other Koffees." Crawl also notes that the current name connotes a sense of inferiority. ''We're Koffee Too. The 'too' is altnost diminutive like we're the little brother or sister," he says.

The new name should also reflect the store's changing identity. Koffee Too?'s ambiance is a bit like a European · cafe's; it attracts the man in a beret sipping his coffee while reading three newspapers, the rnusic major furiously scribbling notes on a taff, and students like Kyle WHAT's IN A

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Wilmoth, who returns to K2 because the "coffee's good and it's close to where I work." However, as the contest fliers Too? now wants to be suggest, I<offee . . known as a shop that serves "Koffee With a Konscience." As the shop has long been an environmental pioneer (they're one of few stores that use biodegradable cold cups), envit;onmentally-centered submissions like "Just · Grounds" or "Green Bean" are particularly apropos.

"We have a new roaster, Dillanos in Seattle," says Wilkinson, "All of our coffee is traded fairly and certified organic." A . name that reflects this commitment to the environment and · issues of justice . might also link K2, at least in spirit, to the sustainability initiatives within Yale and the greater New Haven area.

A few clever submissions, however, may lead I<offee Too? to change course.

Instead of boasting environmental prowess, the new name would link the shop closer to Yale. For instance, Skull and Beans, one graduate student's submission, establishes a connection between the store and the masses of over:-caffeinated, occasionally studious Yalies that fill it (even if they're just there · for the free Wi-Fi and comfy chairs).

Tying the name into Yale could have a tremendous impact on the business side as well. "Many people come to New Haven to see Yale," Crawl explains. "It might be possible to tap into that." Crawl also cites ·the "merchandizing potential" of a Yale-infused name. ''We could play into the iconography," he says. But there are some dissenters. "I really don't like when people or the local businesses conform to Yale," comments Tess Dearing, a Berkeley junior and K2 regular, and also an editor of this magazine. "I find the Yaleness overwhelming, unnatural, stilted." Another daily K2 consumer puts it more bluntly: "That will just be selling out." No matter the winning submission, Yale will be intrinsically connected to the new name. After all, the University has to approve it. While the staff of Koffee Too? voted for their favorites last week, Yale owns the building and has veto rights over the name.

Luckily, there were many submissions to choose from. And the impulse to submit often stemmed from more than just the free coffee. Davenport senior and .

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prolific submitter Mary Daniel explains, "It would be cool to walk by everyday and see the name I submitted. Especially as a senior, it would be nice to have part of me remain in New Haven." And, in a competitive atmosphere like Yale, there was a desire to improve upon those submissions already in the box. Daniel first decided to submit because she peeked at the other entries and thought "I could do better." While a few diehards decided looking at submissions would stifle their creativity, Daniel and many others leafed through the box, searching for names to improve upon and laughing at a few submissions that were "not so good."

Good, bad for many current customers, the actual name is unimportant.

While there is the occasional zealot, most patrons are, like Kyle Wilmoth, "not really concerned." As long the coffee stays good, it doesn't matter whether it comes from Koffee Too?, Tracy's Place, or Ground Central.

It may be that the act of change itself reflects K2's identity more than any new name will. Crawl explains that Koffee Too? "has a tradition of revitalization; updating image; staying fresh." At one point, for instance, the walls of the shop were mauve or tan, "but we came back from winter break one year and they were suddenly blue. And now they're orange with murals."

But innovation breeds resistance.

Littered among the novel suggestions in the box by the cash register were pleas that the name be unchanged. Many proposals, like "e=_k2," "Kup of Koffee," and "Kafenation," paid homage to the current name. Some were more direct.

As one submission put it, "New name: 'Koffee Too?' Reason: 'I like this name."'

-Sarah

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orne years ago, in late December, a little boy of four confided in his mother that he knew where his Christmas present had come from. "It came from Santa Claus," he said. His mother was amused. ''And how do you know that?" she asked. The boy answered, "I saw it in his shop."

Richard Stack laughs a great, hiccupping sound as he tells the story in his mild English accent. Though the toy store owner's physique his windswept white hair, his lively laugh, his Clausian girth certainly invites the comparison, he doesn't encourage it.

He's never worn a red suit for the holidays, and he flatly refuses to carry seasonal toys in his store because, in his own, delicate words, ''You go to the drugstqre for that shit."

The Toystore on Audubon, known to regular customers as "Richard's Place," is crammed floor-to-ceiling with neon plush and plastics. Stack's desk, which also serves as a checkout counter, is shoved into a corner and buried under an old PC and tumbling piles of paper. The disheveled man with an uncensored sense of humor seems incongruous among the frilly dolls and brightly colored building blocks. He's constantly knocking things over as he lumbers through the aisles, but he remains nonplussed. "Do you know how often that happens in this store?" he asks no one in particular, as a stand of hand puppets crashes to the floor behind him. The jungle of toys gives the place a certain flair, but Stack insists that the chaos is not by design. "I am, I confess, no businessman at all," he says. "Business is a pain in the ass."

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A brightly-colored mural of children at play greets visitors to the Toystore on •

A mere ten years ago, Stack was anything but a businessman. He had just quit his job as a literature professor at SUNY, where he had been one of the college's founding members. "I had a sense that if I stayed there, I was going to go on doing exactly the same thing for the rest of my life, and I said, 'Oh, fuck that."' The bibliophile moved his family to New Haven because he loved the Elm City's library, and, for a time, he kept himself busy with scholarly work. When he became a grandfather, he suddenly realized that the city so wellequipped for the ivory tower was lacking in plastic castles. New Haven didn't have a single toy store. "The idea that the only place people could go to get toys was to the •

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We're outside smoking cigarettes as he remembers all the people he has been.

In his going-on-seventy years, he has leapt between homes and identities as effortlessly as his favorite toy, the flexible wooden Voila doll, might be made to leap across imaginary stages. A toy store owner and a .teacher were the last two things he expected to be. "I thought I would be a chemist," he muses. "Or an actor."

Born in Switzerland and raised in Montreal, Stack went to college in London to study chemistry at the University. He worked part-time in a research lab, a job for which he remains grateful. ''As a kid, I thought I was a chemist. When I went

a J '' 00 tac. sa s wou n 't e. ect o a s • ntazn c iente e is un mass market was really repulsive," Stack says. "I found myself running screaming out of those places. So I thought, 'What the fuck?"' And Toystore on Audubon was 10

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to work for this big corporation called Glaxo," he snorts, ''I rapidly discovered that I was not a chemist."

It was also in London that he

discovered the theater, his next great love.

"I had the mad idea that any cultivated person would've seen everything that's on, so I saw everything that was on. Of course, my chemistry studies suffered somewhat." The theater followed him to Trinity College, where he studied literature and directed the first productions of Eugene Ionesco and Jean Genet seen in Dublin. Remembering the city in the late fifties, he laughs. "It was a piss."

Dublin was where he fell in love two more times: with James Joyce's Ufysses and with his first wife. Though he's no longer married to the latter, he still maintains that Joyce is the greatest writer and most remarkable person to ever live. At the time, U fysses was banned, and therefore coveted. ''Ah, it's a wicked, horrible, dirty book," Stack says with a relish you wouldn't expect of a shop-owner whose main clientele is under the age of ten. ''You bought it under the table, or in Paris, or whatever.

It was a blast."

As for the wife, he flew to New York to marry her at the age of 22, and when he got off the plane he had the uncanny feeling that he .was coming home. ''I had been abroad all my life," he says, "and in ew York, everyone is abroad." They moved to Stanford for graduate school, THE NEW JOURNAL

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One of Richard Stacks' favorite toys is the cat •a •pult, which, perfectly placed, will launch a series but eventually made their way back to the City, where he married his · second wife.

"She was a student of mine," he says.

"I mean, no hanky-panky, but when she heard my marriage had disintegrated in the '70s as most marriages did she looked me up, and we got along."

These days, Stack still dabbles in scholarly work. He runs an on-line course on U!Jsses, and he did a recording of the novel for a local TV station .. He will catechize about the book to anyone who's interested. "It's the only book you can study down to the last detail, and it repays; it's so rich, so difficult, so completely responsible and funny, terribly funny!" he says. He acts out a scene for me (it's a hot day; Bloom is reaching covertly for a card stuck in his hat; "Calypso") and his laugh is an uproarious staccato that echoes in the quiet street. "U!Jsses," he says, "is a wonderful toy."

He also helps international students with their dissertations; the papers on his desk inside the store belong to Wang Ao, a Chinese graduate student writing _a bout late Tang poetry. We talk about China for a bit. Though I hold the advantage of having been born there, he has a knowledge of Chinese history much vaster than m y own. He reads history

voraciously, even more so than fiction or poetry. He has created a program to address female illiteracy in developing countries, which he regards as a wildly underappreciated issue . at the heart of the AIDS crisis, underdevelopment, and unrest in the Muslim world. He asks me my major; when I tell him it's Economics and Math, he quizzes me about the GDP, the national debt, and the growth of Yale's endowment.

I remark that he seems to know a lot about eve · g, Stacks thinks for a while. "Yes, I suppose I do," he agrees.

Ironically, it's children and business that he claims to know the least about. In fact, he seems to run Toystore on Audobon based on literary principles. When the phone rings and a woman asks whether the store carries porcelain dolls, he recommends what he says is a figure out of Henry James: a doll who looks like "a rather hopeful young lady just selling out for Paris looking for a husband, with her wardrobe and a little music bo.x to keep her amused on her journey."

The intellectual toy store owner could easily play the part of a Yale professor, but he's suspicious of his New Haven neighbor. A crusader for the authentic and the unconventional,

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he finds the collegiate setting unnaturally restrictive. "The competitiveness of the undergraduate world has resulted in an unfortunate situation where all the smarty-pants are in one place," says this man, whose willingness to change course, to live Without a plan, might seem foreign to many Yale students. "I think that's not healthy." Stacks is also critical of what he calls "a particular kind of smarty-pants... people who are very good at getting good grades and SATs and that sort of thing."

To him, these students, consumers in an emerging mass market of education, represent a sort of commodification of learning. I can't imagine anything could be more repugnant to Stack, who reminds me that his store is not about learning to be a consumer but is about learning to play. In this statement, the pieces of this human puzzle come together. Finally, Stack stacks up. Like U!Jsses' protagonist Stephen Dedalus, Stack is, in the words of his favorite author, "not born to be a teacher." Like the character from whom he continues to learn, he is "a learner rather." .

Laura Y ao is a junior in Jonathan Edwards College.

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decade sUnce l:ale bUred to .run its dining halls, the American love affair with corporate efficiency has turned sour. En.ron and Martha Stewart have poisoned our infatuation with Sam's Club and Big Macs as documentary after documentary has made us squirm in ou.r .

Gap cotton. But luckily for its executives, corporate America has found the ticket to .redemption. Now, for every celebrity "going green," a massive corporation has announced its own sustainability · • 1rut1at1ve.

In 2005, General Electric launched its "EcomagUnation" program promoting economically advantageous greenhouse gas .reduction. In February, Wal-Ma.rt unveiled its "Sustainability 360" project, which will prioritize sustainable products, .renewable energy, and waste .reduction.

And on September 27m, Duke announced its new Corporate Sustainability Initiative, a research program co-operated by the University's business and environmental schools. l:ale University, which employed 11,7 50 people and earned a 28 percent return on its $22.5 billion endowment Un the last fiscal year, is keeping up with the (Dow) Joneses. In June, l:ale decided to terminate its ten year relationship with Corporation, the world's tbUrd-la.rgest food service provider, in order to return to a self-operated Dining Services that will focus heavily on integrating the v:alues of the l:ale Sustainable Food Project into students' dining experience. This decision is one of many leading l:ale down the increasingly fashionable path of sustainability and ethical busUness leadership.

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tudent FUnancial and Administrative . . . . Services assumed joint control of l:ale University Dining Services when the University hired in 1997, and Ernst Huff, associate vice president of SFAS, has closely collaboration with the corporation ever sUnce. He says that Yale, hoping to reverse Dining Services' tendency to run a negative budget, was originally attracted to "bottom-line"-management style.

This methodology had its business benefits. In Huff's unsmiling, professional 's two greatest op1n1on, •

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accomplishments during its time at Yale were greater oversight of the cooking process, which was "not an exact science prior to " and improved inventory management in individual dining halls. All 17 of them.

Yale's residential college systern, which is pitched as a distinctive strength to prospective . students, also makes it difficult for the University to feed its flocks once they enroll. In addition to Commons, five graduate school dining rooms, and four separate retail facilities, l:ale must staff eleven residential college dining halls. (One is off-line each year as the colleges are renovated). This feat requires 350 full-time-equivalent employees, not to mention managers and administrators. SUnce l:ale employees are unionized under Local35, the University does not have the option of cutting labor costs.

"There are very few variables that you can manipulate within Dining Services," Huff explains. "Employee salaries are

successful partnership with Yale University," wrote 's Director of Communications Karen Cutler Un a statement about the Yale-A partnership. "Since 1997, A . . has developed, implemented and continuously enhanced l:ale's residential, retail and catering programs, resulting in increased customer satisfaction, revenue growth and operational improvements."

Though dining administrators and workers both praised RK's effect on l:ale's finances, long-term Yale managers and employees underwent a rocky transition to A 's bottomline policy, which resulted in frequent complaints of food shortages. "In some cases there were challenges," Huff admits, referring to accusations of shortordering. It took time for A RK management to become familiar with Yale's consumption patterns. Hired to reduce Yale's food budget, they often took the "less is more" approach when ordering food.

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e ore came) we • more vane J we never ran out o • • J • JJ a t e n zt wasn t c • n rea n zns set by the bargaining agreement. We have very little flexibility there ... the only real flexibility there is with food and management labor." brought corporate efficiency to l:ale's food inventory system. With an empire managing food services at over four hundred colleges, universities, and preparatory schools, the company immediately instituted thorough and regular inventories of Yale's dining halls. Ordering policies shifted in a way that many long-term l:ale employees had never seen before, and managers were forced to plan ahead. Under the selfoperated Dining Services, if a college ran out of lettuce or milk, it' could often be delivered that day from a nearby Yale commissary at Long Wharf. eliminated this expensive warehouse, however, and required managers to order in advance. is proud of lts •

And when the food arrived, not everyone was happy with its quality. The biannual customer satisfaction surveys that instituted on arrival garnered consistently low ratings during the corporation's first four years at Yale.

"Before came, we had more variety," remembers Andrea Rankins, a ten-year Saybrook employee. ''We never ran out of food. And it wasn't chicken all the time."

Other dining ha11 workers equate the years with a string of indistinguishable managers. filled most managerial positions with its own staff, shifting them from college to college and tightening control over employees. 0' eal Galloway, a grill worker who has been a member of Calhoun College's team for 16 years, remembers only a single manager in the college dining hall during his six years before arrived. Since then, 13

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Though Huff could not provide upto-date numbers of original Yale managers versus managers · hired by last year he told the Yale Daify News that about half of Dining Services' employees were . Since Local 35 fills all non-management positions, these non-union A employees have a near-monopoly on Yales dining management jobs. · At the Saybrook dining hall, Rankins and Linda Felder, who have worked for Dining Services since 1985, could together name only two Yale managers who'd been around before A . "This dining hall hasn't been run well since Marie," Rankins confides, referring to the Yale manager moved to a different dining hall during its transition years.

Felder agrees. "The Yale managers were better," she asserts. "Some of these, they don't know what they're doing."

Calhoun's Galloway also - harbors fondness for the original Yale managers.

"The Yale management," he reminisces, 'ur'hey seem like they have more compassion, because they used to work like us." When manager after

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manager strode through · follow < somewhere else, and, Calhoun's doors, Galloway felt this though many have not yet decided which familiarity disappear. "They just seem like path to pursue, both Galloway and Barnes roqots," he says. Lowering his voice and have noticed a positive change in dining moving his arms like an automaton, he hall management this year. They say that imitates his perception of the original Yale managers, as well as some mentality: "Like, 'We're gonna turn this A ones, have already begun to thing around."' The new managers, scale back employee duties. charged to increase efficiency, assigned Huff admits that managerial turnover more work in the same number of hours, was a problem during 's affecting employees in every dining hall. transition to Yale. Two years after the Yolanda Barnes, a friendly fixture company arrived, Huff explains, many at the Calhoun desk since well before Yale managers who'd been needing "a RK arrived, uses the same word nudge" left Yale and were replaced by to describe A managers: "It employees. This turnover seems like when RK came, they was echoed at the highest administrative operated more like a machine, like a robot. level as Dining Services cycled through That humanness was missing." three executive directors in ten years.

Yale administrators, Yale announced its decision to however, were not .... . To increase split from in June, but unhappy with the company will not officially leave efficiency and save money, employees until February; Yale's contract with must work harder. Products must be prohibits the University from regulated more closely. These are golden offering jobs to managers rules in the bottom-line business, as Sam until three to six months after contract Walton and Richard Levin well know. Yale termination notice, and is hired to cut costs, and it did. helping to ease Yale through the initial In 2005, earned a $20,000 transition period. managers incentive fee, written into its contract with wil1 be given ~e option to stay at Yale or Yale, for completing a fiscal year below ..._..'U. ........ .LL

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budget. ale wasn't the only institution turning to < to cut costs in the past decade. Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush hired the company to reduce the prison payroll during the 2001 privatization of the state prison system.

Within a year, the state was levying RK with $110,000 in fines backed by accusations of food p·o isoning, sanitation violations, and drops in food quality and quantity.

A also a leader in uniforms, facilities management, hospitality services, and concessions, has achieved much of its success through international expansion.

Like many other corporations and Yale itself it is now setting its sights on China and other developing countries. was recently chosen by a Chinese company to provide food services for the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, and this year, CEO Joseph Neubauer took the company private for the hefty sum of $8.3 million. · At Yale, cutthroat corporate success has been a constant, nagging reminder of the company's raison d'etre: its own profit. Though few l..J..•.LL

October 2007

care to speak of it openly, several Yale sources referenced exclusive purchasing agreements with food purveyors that benefited <. rather than guaranteeing Yale the best products at the lowest prices. Huff says he has not heard of any such arrangements.

Trumbull Manager Edd Ley, who began working at Yale in 1970, oversaw Dining Services' purchases at the Long Wharf Commissary before eliminated the storehouse and reassigned him to Trumbull. Ley, who loves dining and loves Yale, was happy to be back in the trenches. "Doing business under the realm of the contractor was different," he says, "but it was still about serving." When pressed to speak about the difference between a self-operated Dining er vices and an -operated Dining Services, Ley raises his e ebrows and asks, "Do you want somebod else to raise your children?" o matter how well and Yale worked together and according to Ley, it was pretty well was till a third party. With the new turnover in management, Ley hope "it'll be Yale taking care of Yale." He remembers

Yale's previous self-operated Dining Services with pride. ''When we operated as an independent, we always wanted the • best product at the best price, and that was always reflected in the invoice." n

the past four years, Yale has reconsidered its definition of the "best product." Before 2001, when the University founded the Yale Sustainable Food Project with the help of world-renowned chef Alice Waters, the best apple might have been from a large, Oregonian mass production farm in California. Now, the best apple is local and sustainable, grown on a family-run orchard 26 miles from Yale.

By the time Y FP inaugurated its local, seasonable, and sustainable menu at the Berkeley "test kitchen" in 2003, Dining ervices had already begun to prioritize higher quality food, Huff says.

"The existing objective was now coupled . . . . ,, w1tn an IDtngw.t:)g proJect.

Since then, Yale Dining Services, and the Sustainable Food Project have worked together to bring high quality, economical food to the Yale campus. 1dina Shannon-DiPietro, YSFP ~

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items and taught cooks to taste food while preparing it "it's actUally really important to taste food before you serve it," ShannonDiPietro says with a laugh.

YSFP's raw energy and momentum, which has remained in step with a national trend toward organic and sustainable restaurants, grocery stores, and farms, gave Yale's Dining Services a much-needed jolt. Even before YSFP arrived, Huff says, Dining Services had realized that it needed to step up its focus on food quality, . but its partnership with . ARAMARI<. did not provide many · opportunities for mnovatl.on. ''When ·YSFP ·came along," Huff says, "I felt the support and creativity for that, and the energy behind that, was not ARAMARK." Despite initial challenges, YSFP's values quickly infiltrated Dining Services. Prior to the 2006-2007 school year, Dining Services rewrote its entire menu, including non-YSFP items. ''We thought, 'Why focus only on quality as defined by YSFP?"' Huff remembers.

Eventually, Dining Services felt that, due both to · A RK's financial management and YSFP's culinary leadership, it was time to return to a selfoperated system. "Dining Services had gotten to a certain level," Huff explains. " RK. had contributed greatly to •

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Andrea Rankins has worked in the Saybrook dining hall for ten· years. co-d.i.rector, is all smiles and as she talks about celebrity chef Jacques Pepin training Yale chefs in 2004 or about YSFP's lofty goals of community and "incredibly good food." But when asked about introducing these goals to an <.-run Dining Services, she speaks slowly, carefully. '~nytime you shift a vision, it's going to be . challenging~" Shannon-DiPietro says. '~d A .

RI<. central was not reinforcing the values we were trying to institute at Yale."

As Yale has been at the vanguard · of sustainable institutional dining for the past six years, it is no surprise that took a while to catch up.

For a corporation at the forefront of the outsourcing movement, the idea of prioritizing sustainable farming practices over bottom-line prices must have seemed a bit counterintuitive.

As YSFP's influence spread beyond the Berkeley dining hall to every kitchen at Yale, both the University and staff were forced to adapt to new perspectives on purchasing and cooking food. YSFP traveled to Philadelphia for annual Dining Services staff training sessions at the headquarters.

ShannonDiPietro says and YSFP split up training duties according to their respective strengths, with taking a larger role in management training and YSFP in food preparation. YSFP gave instructions on how to prepare seasonable

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will be YSFP recipes." In September of this year, the number of these items was expanded to stock four meals per week, but transition-related budget concerns brought this trial to a temporary halt. In anticipation of a new, self-operated Dining Services, Huff told the Yale Dai!J News, he and his colleagues must be prudent in balancing cost and quality. ale's reincarnated dining system is still waiting for its leader. Yale has hired OPUS International, a Philadelphia headhunting firm, to conduct a national search for a new executive director of Dining Services. Six ·candidates visited campus at the beginning of October, Huff reports, and the search committee hopes to make a final decision by Thanksgiving.

Until this decision is made, it is hard to predict the precise direction a self-operated Dining Services will take.

'When I think of what Dining Services needs right now," Shannon-DiPietro says, ''I think of a really dynamic Dining Services leader."

Both she and Huff stress the importance of an executive director who balances effective, efficient management with good food. Now that Yale University Dining Services, like thousands of national corporations, is shifting its •

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this level, but I wasn't convinced they were going to take us much further than we already we:re."

Huff is determined to maintain an independen~ high-quality Dining Services that will work in conjunction with YSFP to bring aspects of the local and sustainable food movement to the Yale campus.

YSFP has made impressive strides in the past years, introducing organic honey and yogurt and fair trade coffee, bananas, and chocolate, as well as one all-YSFP meal per week, in all of Yale's residential colleges, and Huff sees this expansion as an ongoing Dining Services /YSFP effort.

Huff says he can see where the Food Project is going. 'We're going to agree on some percent of the menu items that

priorities from cost-culling to ethical and sustainable business practices, experience with sustainability and food preparation is invaluable in a leader. Huff wants someone who is not only a manager but also a foodlover. He and Shannon-DiPietro, both heavily involved in the search process, have been extremely pleased with the candidates so far. Once Yale appoints a new head of Dining Services and officially departs, Yale dining will have to decide just how financially sustainable sustainable food can be. ..

As Shannon-DiPietro and her codirector, Josh Viertel, are well aware, • sustainability is increasingly trendy, and Yale, never an institution to be left in the dust, has taken note. In 2004, the THE NEW JOURNAL

University appointed its first susta1nability director. One year later, it created the Office of Sustainability recently moved to an environmentally-conscious space equipped with "daylight tubes," motionsensor lights, and reclaimed wood floors,to coordinate the University's efforts in renewable energy, waste reduction, and environmentally responsible renovation and construction. In 2005, Yale's Greenhouse Gas Reduction Committee declared a goal of reducing Yale's emissions by 10 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 or roughly 43 percent below a business-as-usual, base-case scenario.

So far, the University has made progress toward this goal through greener renovations, motion-sensor lighting in college common spaces, and the appointment of a director of sustainable transportation systems. Students have shown support in well-established groups like the Student Taskforce for Environmental Partnership and the Yale Student Environmental Coalition.

Sustainably Thinking, a new student organization, will provide big-picture advice to the other groups on campus.

As more and more consumers demand to know where their food comes from, the voice of the Yale Sustainable Food Project is no longer a sage in the wilderness ..

Now, Yale University Dining Service's rejection of the corporate machine for community-based management will be reflected in its kitchens, as cooks forgo sacks of dehydrated potato powder for fresh Yukon Golds, mashed by hand and flavored with extra virgin olive oil, garlic, and whole peppercorns. In this sense, the new, self-operated Dining Services appears to be no more than an attempt to follow corporate America's latest sustainability trend. But we started it.

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ow would you like your steak cooked?" asks an employee at Gasttonomique, and though it's a question you'd expect to hear pronounced in a French accent at a fancy bistro! du coin, the woman taking the order is communicating with her customer over the telephone. "Come by in about 15 minutes," she adds before returning the receiver to its cradle. When the customer arrives to pick up his steak frites, the epicurean entree awaits him on the small countertop that comprises most of Gasttonomique's surface area. It's packaged in a styrofoam box, and, like every order here, it's to go.

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In front of a sizzling stove in a hole-inthe-wall shop on the corner of High and Crown, a man dressed in a white undershirt flips a succulent patty. His solid build and dark coloring make him look more mob boss than head chef, yet this could-be cousin of Tony Soprano is sweating at the fires of a double burner, not a double arson. Mark Woll, Gasttonomique's founder and chef, is in the middle of a job.

And right now, his concerns are culinary, not convivial. ''A lot of customers expect me to smile and be nice to them," Woll says, mopping his brow. ''But a surgeon wouldn't talk

while operating." Despite the unseasonably warm weather, it's about ten degrees hotter inside Gastronomique than outside.

Though the restaurant has only two chairs, it's two too many for the space. The seats, like the tastefutblack and white photos of the Eiffel tower that hang on the walls, are really just for ambiance. Gastronomique is take-out, gourmet take-out. Walk-ins are welcome, and slightly more experienced customers know to call ahead. But the Gastro add!cts the regulars, many of whom are off-campus Yalies, none of whom can exhaust the shop's exhaustive menu are on the meal plan.

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Gastronomique's meal plan costs fifty dollars per week for five meals, each defined as ·either one entree or three smaller dishes, such as soups, salads, and sides. For a single, crisp Ulysses S. Grant, enjoy five Crispy Salmon Steaks over creamy risotto. Any menu item is game, except for the 17-dollar, twelve ounce steak frites. A customer who ordered the Sesame Crusted Tuna, the menu's second most expensive item, for each of his five meals could save $32.50 about forty percent over the course of the week.

Though the deal doesn't compare to a Happy Meal (and the wait is substantially longer than under the Golden Arch), a Big Mac has nothing on Gastro's popular Crusty Burger. "The Crusty Burger is one of the best burgers in town," said Paul Schneider, a senior in Trumbull, who lives off-campus and is on the Gastro meal plan.

Plus, the ten-dollar-per-meal deal easily trumps the rate of Yale University Dining Service, which charges $13.25 for dinner.

"Compared to the Yale meal plan, it's a lot cheaper," said Schneider, who insists that his connection to Gastronomique "makes the neighborhood feel more cohesive."

While all of the nearly thirty people on the Gastronomique meal plan this fall are Yalies and the service is even billed as a "student meal plan" on the restaurant's quaintly illustrated take-out menu Woll emphasizes that the program is not exclusively for students; nor is it extended only to those affiliated with and employed

by Yale; nor even only to those employed at all. "I once had a homeless person on the plan," explained Woll, who would cash the man's government checks weekly in exchange for five gourmet meals. "I'd feed him steak." When the loyal customer was released seven months after ending up in jail mid-week, Woll prepared the meals the man had paid for but not eaten.

"I relate to underdogs," said Woll, obliquely alluding to past struggles of his own. Yet the laminated newspaper clippings that decorate one of the bistro's few inches of unused surface area belie the notion that Woll has ever been an underdog himsel£ In one he is pictured, debonair, seated at a table with New Haven's most celebrated restaurateurs, owners of the swank eats Zinc, Ibiza, and Scoozzi.

Gastronomique is the first restaurant that Woll himself has owned, though his knack for nosh goes all the way back to his childhood kitchentable. "My mother would overcook the vegetables, overcook the meat," he said. "I would tell her 'You're burning out all of the nutrients!"

community members have elite taste buds but too much on their plate to dine out or cook in. From chicken cordon bfeu to steak frites, Gastronomique offers an extensive menu of sophisticated dishes, all of them prepared in a space no larger than a Jonathan Edwards single.

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In his teens, Woll attended a trade school and specialized in culinary arts. He then studied at the Culinary Institute of America before doing an externship in Europe and working under esteemed French chefs in New York City. Midcareer, in the summer of 2001, a tragic motorcycle accident left Woll in a coma for three months. Woll slept through both planes hitting, both towers falling. When he finally woke up, a lot had changed. "I decided I didn't want to work for anyone else anymore," Woll explained. And so began Gastronomique.

Woll's blueprint for the restaurant was very different from his final product.

His initial vision was a modest one: to be a juice vendor on a well-trafficked Elm City street corner. "I got turned on by an industrial juicer," Woll says, waxing poetic even borderline pornographicas he describes falling in love with the machine. ''The concept of extracting a sweet liquid from a hard solid touched me." The notion of being at the mercy of New England's formidable climate, however, was less appealing. So, Woll scoped out downtown real estate and indulged his tendency toward ambition and innovation.

The very concept of Gastronomique, whose epithet "Gourmet take-out'' is a seeming oxymoron, is a novel one. It's high-quality output with a minimum of input, like acing a test without making flash cards or looking good in sweatpants and a t -shirt. The concept is ingenious for a university town, where many ~

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e arson.

"Restaurateurs come in here and say 'Oh my God. This guy puts out a huge menu, and he's in a closet,"' Woll says with a proud smile. And it's true. Out of what Woll optimistically calls a "smallrent" and what others might label an aromatic shoebox, Gastro serves light and hearty salads, nearly ten kinds of sandwiches, make-your-own b11rgers, eight different entrees, a slew · of side dishes, and a handful of desserts. Not to mention a page worth of fruit juice and energy shake offerings, the daily specials, and a chalkboard of crepes both savory and sweet. Oh, and brunch.

A culinary trendsetter in many ways, Woll is not, however, the only restaurant owner in the area to offer breaks aimed at students. Many of New Haven's eateries cater to college-aged clientele trying to live cheaply. Both Au Bon Pain and Atticus give free handouts of their leftover baked goods when the stores close shop at the end of the business day, and students enjoy ten percent discounts at a handful of downtown restaurants if they can endure the shame of having their waiters examine the universally unattractive close-up headshots on Yale IDs. Yet Woll's motives are perhaps the most humanistic: ''I like people," he says. ''I feel obligated to feed them."

T aura Zax, a sophomore in Silliman College, is

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Renting local in a digital age.

est Video?" Daniel's silver name tag Daniel Ortiz, Shift Manager catches the fluorescent lighting as he watches a customer shuffle out of Blockbuster into a drizzly October night, Blood Diamond in hand. ''Yeah, I know Best Video. It's up in Hamden." . .

Ortiz, who finished high school and then started at Blockbuster "I like movies" is 22, with a fuzz of black beard, patchy in places, and the pale skin of a horror film devotee. (All-time favorites: Audition, The Exorcist, Fridqy the 1J'h.) ''Anytime someone comes in here asking for tapes, I send 'em there." He nods towards the seven thousand tape-free titles that fill·Blockbuster's aisles. "They're like the last bastion of VHS. They're still holdin' on." .

Best Video holds on in a quiet Hamden neighborhood tucked between downtown New Haven and strip-mall sprawl. Victorian-

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idealism of many small businesses. style houses with trim lawns sandwich the "So ... " I finally vepture, "Do you store, and the closest other businesses are think some people have stopped coming Walgreens ~nd Dairy Queen. Other than to Best Video because of N etflix?" His the name's claim, etched in red letters on warm face tightens for a moment. "Oh. a white sign, and the small, perpetuallyYeah. Definitely." I don't ask how many. packed parking lot, nothing seen from the road intimates what lies within.

Far from Blockbuster's light-up sign, ike, a big guy with a gray, scraggly on the same October night, a smattering ud and a puppy-dog smile, has of customers wanders through the aisles worked at Best Video since he "put the of Best Video's thirty thousand films. first barcodes" on the first video boxes.

Section headings are a movie lover's In his spare time, Mike writes "The Black dream. They range from the seriousMaria," a blog named after Thomas by director (Visconti, Bill Forsyth, Mel Edison's first film studio. "They would Brooks), by country (Argentinean, turn the whole thing around to catch Balkan, ¡ Cuban) to the normative the sun," he explains of the studio, still amazed. "The entire thing was all covered (Best Comedy, Best Low Budget, Best Oscar Losers) to the whimsical (Weird in tar paper, and the ceiling would open '60s, Fantasy Adventure, Sexploitation, to let in the light." Like Mike, most Best Godzilla).

Video staffers know the minutiae of film history, or at least their favorite strains of Hank Paper, the founder and owner of Best Video whose sharp, vaguely it, inside and out.

But Best Video itself is part of a mischievous face appears sketched on different historical narrative: the short the orange "Hank's Pick" stickers that but ever-evolving story of how America dot hundreds of DVD cases recalls a consumes movies. When Hank Paper favorite anecdote: ''A group of Russians that came here once said there were more opened Best Video in 1984, VHS tapes, Russian films in the Russian section than and the stores that rented them, were in all of Moscow." (There are 144.) novelties. "I hear there are these places called video stores cropping up," Hank's Since Hank opened Best Video with five hundred movies in 1984 ("it wasn't father told him as his screenwriting career large in quantity," he says, "but deep in in Hollywood lost steam. "Why don't you check it out?" interest"), New Haven area residents have had two options for renting "The transition from Hollywood to movies: Blockbuster and Best Video. private consumption was revolutionary," But cookie-cutter operations have never explains Richard, Best Video's nothreatened Hank's local gem. Leaving the nonsense business manager. "25, 26, 27 wildly knowledgeable staff, astounding years ago, if you missed Casablanca in the selection, and quirky personality of Best movie theaters that was it." In the early '80s, major movie studios tried to ban Video for a sterile wall of New Releases VCRs by claiming~ copyright violation, is like descending from cinephile Heaven incensed at a development that would, to some big-budget purgatory.

In the last few years, however, a bull without doubt, permanently alter the role has wandered into this small-town china of the cinema in American life. They failed, and Best Video opened. "Young shop. "This place has the atmosphere of an old New York bookstore," another people take it for granted," Richard continues. "They watch DVDs on their employee named Hank H., the "other" computers and think nothing of it."

Hank, tells me one afternoon. "It's a throwback." I nod, and feel the need to etflix is a boon for discriminating assure him my family has always been a Best Video member. ''It's important for movie lovers in the sticks. "The subscription has revolutionized our lives," people to realize," he conrinues, "'~at you can't get a sense of community without Bill T. Jones, choreographer and director, volunteered recently to the New York community ga~ering places." True. But this invocation of community space is a Times Magazine about his TV-watching newer, subtler justification of Best Video's habits. ''We've been having a kind of existence than the classic, underdog French-film festival around here lately.

October 2007

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We've also been looking ·at documentaries . " .. on Ju dat.sm.

Best Video, always in tune with its customers' needs, · has been running a similar mail-order service for years. In 1994, four years before the birth of N etflix, Best Video shipped hundreds of titles a month to countries across the .world. Its service, however, can hardly compete with <;me of the ten largest users of first-class •

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we struggle to shed. In an age when r.e plication signals business success, Hank firmly insists there can only be one Best Video, and it can only be here. · "People from Hollywood, L.A., Washington, D.C., New York are always asking us to move or open another place," Hank admits as he stands behind the counter, leaning over a large paperback I assume is a movie encyclopedia, and later •

avzn est z eo orasterz ewa • • • e eases zs z escen u eaven to some mail in America.

Despite the company's brilliant capitalization on this at-your-doorstep concept, Netflix marks another step in our society's steady march toward perfect customization in perfect isolation. Cinema has become yet another area of modern life that we have divested of place, as if physical location were an archaic notion

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notice is the Old Testament. ''But we co uld never replicate what we have here. For o ne thing, I'm here." Even if the selectio n could be duplicated (which it couldn't), there's no carbon or electronic copy of Hank.

And in a sentiment echoed by other Best Video staff members, Hank believes the particular character of the local

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community has allowed his store to thrive in a way it might not elsewhere. From the die-hard skateboarder looking for the latest cult hit to the academic couple on a Czech film kick, from the graduate student researching silent films to the huddle of gel-haired boys who just want to see Traniformers, Best Video and local residents hit it off a long time ago and have maintained a real friendship ever since.

Of course, as a native of New Haven and longtime Best Video member, I am inevitably recognized. Joseph LaPalombara, a retired Yale professor in political science, interrupts my browsing to ask my last name. Moments earlier he had instructed a staff member to "F8" him, referring to the button that brings up a customer's rental history, because he's " a little punchy" at this time of day and can't remember whether he's already seen The Lives of Others. He found Best Video the "day or week" it opened and has been renting about four films a week ever since.

«You're Jonathan Lear's daughter?" he asks, looking at me again. ''I met you when

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you were this tall," he says, lowering his hand to about three feet off the ground.

A few minutes later, Stewart, another longr itne Best Video patron, wrests from me that I am a senior English major with an uncertain future, and · then tells me he knows the exact film I have to see. Stewart, for his part, rents whatever movies his wife tells him to "she's from Harvard" although, in general, the couple favors a foreign sensibility.

Standing under the Best Video awning, Stewart assumes the staff's proudest duty: recommending the perfect film you've never heard o£ 'When people walk in here," Hank explains, "we don't say 'Oh, have you seen Knocked Up? It's great!' It did get good reviews. But we implicitly try to gauge your mood, your interests, and show you something you'd never find otherwise."

Stewart looks at me, and smiles wryly.

"It's called I Know Where I'm Going," he says. "See how especially for you ... ?" I do. It's a film, he tells me, about a young English woman in Post-War Europe •

October 2007

who takes off for the Scottish Hebrides, because all the men have been killed, and, accompanied by a great Scottish tune, discovers a new life. "The word for it is sweet/' Stewart concludes. "It's a girl movie." I rent it, and Hank gives it to me free of charge. t Blockbuster, half an hour later, I ask Ortiz if he ever recommends movies. "Oh, yeah," he grins, '~ the time. I just ask people what they're in the mood for." A thought occurs to me. "I was wondering if you could recommend something for me. I'm looking for something sweet. A girl movie." I try not to elaborate. Ortiz's face drops for a split second, then lights up again. "How about The Holidtry?" Regrettably, I've seen it.

"Oh, wait! Have you seen Knocked Up?, I tell him that sounds perfect.

As I walk out, Ortiz is trying to assuage a customer on the phone. "I know, people come into the store yelling, 'Where's my on-line coupons!' and we've got no answer!" he sympathizes, twirling his ~

fingers in the black telephone cord. "I'm sorry man, I'm as confused as you are."

N etflix is clearly causing Blockbuster a headache all it's own.

When I get home, I open N etflix and slowly type in "I Know Where I'm Going." Stewart told me at the height of his excitement that "no one else in the world has it," but slight hyperbole was certainly part of his charm. I hit return, and, of course, it's there. ''Joan Webster (Wendy Hiller) is a headstrong young woman who travels to the bleak and moody Scottish Hebrides to marry a rich lord ... " I stare at the page for a moment, disappointed to have found it. But, really, who cares. Would an algorithm charting my preferences ever have led me to the film that's going to change my life?

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TN Sophia LeaTj a senior in E:{!a Stiles College, is a Senior Editor q[TNJ. 23

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Gerald McElroy visits the family of a Yale professor. Such connections are integral to the success of students' trips . .

or over an . hour, · Michael Fernandez '07 tries to describe why he won't go to Cuba. "It's like going to South Africa in the high part of Apartheid," he finally- says, finding the words to describe his conviction. "I would be contributing to sustaining a tyrannical _government. I wouldn't travel there."

Fernandez's great-grandfather was stripped of eve · g he owned by Castro's regime. His grandmother fled Cuba for the United States thirty years ago. Fernandez refuses to forgive a government that continues to restrict the press, ban most private enterprise, and throw dissidents in jail. He echoes generations of Cuban exiles who have argued that any and all travel to Cuba .

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bolsters the authoritarian regime.

"Everything you spend contributes to the oppression of the people," Fernandez explains. "The money ends up in the hands of the state."

This argument goes far in the United States. The economic embargo against Cuba has remained intact for nearly fifty years. President Clinton loosened restrictions on travel to Cuba for students and academics, artists, members of the clergy, and Cuban-Americans with family on the island. In 2004, however, Bush issued controversial guidelines restricting Cuban-Americans' family visits from once a year to once every three years.

Less politicized but equally stringent were the President's restrictions on academic travel. Under the current •

guidelines, undergraduates may visit Cuba only as independent researchers conducting work for a course, and must stay for a minimum of ten weeks. Class trips are banned. In 2001, sixty thousand undergraduates traveled to Cuba. That number has dwindled to well below one hundred. Yale is one of the few institutions that continues to send its students to th~. socialist state.

1chael Bustamante traveled to Cuba · 2005, during the summer before his senior year. The things he carried were largely determined by necessity. Among the necessities or near necessities were a few thousand Canadian dollars in cash, an entire suitcase of antibiotics, cough syrup, toilet paper, and Pep to-Bismol, . .

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Cubans stroll around a monument to the sunken Maine during the celebrations that allowed Bustamante to visit his family. a letter signed by his Yale advisor, and a copy of Yale's Treasury Department license permitting academic travel to Cuba. He carried Canadian cash because U.S. dollars are subject to a ten percent penalty when exchanged for the Cuban convertible peso. He carried an extra suitcase stuffed with toiletries because he knew he would have to share the wealth.

He carried the letter from his advisor and the copy of Yale's license to demonstrate that his travel to Cuba was legal.

Bustamante's letter verified his enrolhnent in an undergraduate degree program at Yale University. It confirmed the dates during which he would conduct research for a structured Yale course, and stated that he was traveling to Cuba under U.S. Treasury Department License No. •

CT-9259. The license, obtained by Yale Associate General Counsel Harold Rose, invests the Universi!_:y with the authority to approve research projects, and allows Yale students who meet the regulations to make travel-related transactions in Cuba.

Lillian Guerra, an assistant professor of history who specializes in the Caribbean and advises the vast majority of undergraduates conducting research in Cuba, speculates that under twenty institutions now hold the academic license. The license must be renewed every year, and can easily be withheld by the Department of the Treasury. For example, in 2005, Harvard lost its license for 18 months.

The Cuban government also erects barriers. Before students jet off to the .

October 2007

island, they must obtain a Cuban research visa, which grants access to any Cuban academic institution and legalizes study in a country that often equates research with espionage. "If you don't have a research visa," Guerra warns, "it is criminal, and you can get deported."

Students must meet rigorous regulations and obtain independent funding to receive Yale's endorsement.

One such student, junior Gerald McElroy, studied the Cuban media's portrayals of the United States as a crime-ridden, marijuana-smokingcesspoolcharacterized by extreme racism and cold-hearted, capitalist murder. McElroy understood the need for tact when dealing with sooalist regimes. On his application for a Cuban research visa, McElroy proposed a 27

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project titled "elpensamiento anti-imperialista del pueblo Cubano" (the anti-imperialist thought of the Cuban people). "They never would've accepted my project if I'd said 'how ·el Partido manipulated the image of the United States,"' he says.

Although Yale's authorization eases the Treasury Department limits on a student's travel, restrictions are inevitable. Students are only allowed to spend a certain amount of money in Cuba per day, and are required to keep all their receipts for potential inspection.

Though the scarcity of paper, thrivirig black market, and evasion of official price controls eliminate almost all possibility of documenting transactions, Bustamante says students must try their .best to stay in line. "To this day, I have a file of the receipts that I did collect." For American students, traveling to Cuba is a careful balance of satisfying the home government, the host government, and one's daily needs. '

identification card. He walked a few feet away with it, and then read the friend's full name into his walkie-talkie to a central authority, presumably to confirm . that he was a "jinetero," a tourist tricker.

McElroy was angry. He approached the policeman, told him that he wasn't some turista estupido at the mercy of any wily con-man on the street, that this man was his good friend and must be left alone.

"I was fighting with him, and really they can't do anything ·to tourists." He was surprised and outraged at the officer's racism, but he came to understand that, in Cuba, discrimination is the norm.

"This would define my experience," he explained; .

Combining daily experiences with his research on the Cuban press, McElroy soon began to understand the irony of the government's depictions of the United States as a bastion of racism. Other ironies stood out as well. In the much-touted Cuban health-care system, foreigners are '

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ou revo ution azme tourism · or t e eo • t at 0 a McElroy had grown dissatisfied with the capitalist system in the U.S., and . traveled to Cuba with stirrings of sympathy for the revolution's ideals of equality in health care, education, earnings, and race relations. His initial interactions with other Cubans reinforced this view, but after the honeymoon period, his politics changed quickly. "None of my [Cuban] friends were telling me the truth at that point," he explains, "but what I came to realize was how much complexity there was in the situation."

One night toward the beginning of his ten weeks, McElroy was walking through a tourist hangout with a friend. McElroy is very fair; his friend dark-skinned. While they waited for two others to arrive, a policeman circled suspiciously. He eventually approached the two, greeted McElroy with a courteous "Buenas noches," and asked him a few questions to determine that he wasn't Cuban.

Then, he asked McElroy's friend for his

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given preferential treatment and doctors are shipped off to other countries to maintain the image of the revolution.

Though the revolution aimed to harness tourism for the Cuban people, McElroy says that many foreigners now consider Cuba "the brothel of the world." Though many Cubans listen to the anti-U.S. sensationalist media, just as many distrust the government enough to assume the opposite of anything propagated by the national media. Revolutionary leaders touted Soviet-style communism, but the people never entirely bought it.

"Soviet culture was really mocked as having no relevance to Cuba," McElroy explains. The Cuban media scorns capitalism, he says, and then "you go around Cuba and I've never seen so much fucking Puma in my life!" At one point, McElroy spotted a man getting the Puma logo shaved into his head.

Michael Fernandez insists that the opportunity to speak to Cuban exiles in the '

U.S. renders travel to Cuba unnecessary.

"There are a lot of Cuban exiles, Cuban dissidents, who were in jail for 25 years," he says. "Go talk with anyone and they'll tell you it's not a paradise."

The debate over travel to Cuba pits academic freedom against concern for the freedom of the Cuban people.

McElroy believes that speaking only to exiles would have limited his scope, and that his research project necessitated speaking with Cubans living in Cuba to determine the effects of a sensationalist national media.

Fernandez argues that nothing short of a family member in a critical situation, like a dying grandfather, merits regimesupporting travel to the island.

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1chael Bustamante was raised in a ban exile family. His paternal grandparents left the island with three children in 1962 and never went back.

Iri. Cuba, his research focused on 1920s bourgeois intellectuals who took divergent paths in the years leading up to Castro's dictatorship. Some became die-hard supporters, others outspoken enemies of the regime. Their chief outlet was the publication of essays and visual art in highbrow magazines and journals. Bustamante was also able to read much of their correspondence at the National Archives in Havana. While his research wouldn't have been nearly as comprehensive without a visit to Cuba, the transformative part of his travel lies in his rediscovery of family ties.

"No one in my family had been back in forty-plus years," he explains.

His grandfather told him about some remaining family on the island and suggested that Bustamante consider visiting them if he had the time.

Beginning on July 26th, when almost all Cuban institutions shut down for celebrations, he set out to visit his cousins in Santiago. ;r'echnically, Bustamante's academic visa did not permit such travel, but his research became impossible when the archives closed. Bustamante didn't realize how important the visit was until . he was in Santiago. "My grandfather, he absolutely felt that it was necessary to do that, but he 'didn't necessarily want to put the burden on me."

In Santiago, he spoke to the woman '

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from Yale in 2006, traveled to Cuba with living in his grandmother's childhood Bustamante during the summer of 2005. home. She remembered his grandmother She had gone once before with the Yale as a little girl. He discovered that his Chaplain's Office on a ·religious visa, and grandparents must have had some communication with their relatives went once more on the same permit after because his cousins had photographs of her ten-week summer trip. Jordan studied Bustamante from when he was· twelvethe interactions · between Protestant years old. churches and the socialist, atheist state.

Since returning to the U.S., Bustamante · She says these experience gave her "a has continued to communicate with a more nuanced take on Cuba" and allowed number of his cousins. Although an her "to see the gray areas." extremely small portion of the Cuban Both Bustamante and Jordan continue population has access to the Internet, one to use the knowledge they gained in Cuba, of his cousins can go online because she Bustamante at the Council on Foreign is a doctor. "They're kind of like five years Relations and Jordan at Human Rights behind in Internet culture," he adds, citing First. Jordan is often forced to correct the assumption that she stands firmly the chain e-mails that she always sends.

Now, with the lines of communication on one side of the debate. Once, while speaking to a Cuban exile, Jordan says, opened, he can transcribe letters from "I made an offhand comment that I had his grandparents and send them to the traveled to Cuba." The woman assumed Gmail account his cousins share. "These human-to-human ties that are not cooked Jordan must be a sympathizing leftist. "I had to convince her that I wasn't ardently up in some resort hotel is what needs to Castro." Another time, she was speaking happen," he insists. For Bustamante, the most important part of traveling to Cuba with a fellow activist who worked for an environmental N GO. "She asked, 'What was realizing, "This is a person. She is related to you." do you think about Cuba?" and she thought that I would just say, 'Castro's ustamante went to Cuba to explore great, go Che!' ... She was surprised that I the murky realities underlying the had so much to say." simplistic, polarized Cuba debate in the Travel to Cuba gives college students U.S. He went to find answers, to figure a unique view of the island and the will out which faction of U.S. advocates had it to change the U.S. policy debate. Barack right, or to find some different solution.

Obama thinks that travel to Cuba is also Instead, his human ties have given him an bound to change the political landscape intimate understanding of the exact same of the island. In an op-ed published in "complexity" that McElroy experienced. the Miami Herald in late August, Obama When pushed to make even the mildest argued that removing restrictions on of judgrnents, Bustamante stumbles over Cuban-Americans' family visits to the his words. "No one likes the government. island can only help foster dissidence and There, no one wait I take that back. a grass-roots movement for democracy.

If Americans travel to Cuba, Obama Some do, but everyone is frustrated ... believes, information w i11 travel with Part of the problem with the debate is them. that people are forced to try to make McElroy concurs. ''People are so these generalizations."

Both Bustamante and McElroy willing and anxious to talk to you," he says, noting that the Cuban media leads articulate the paradoxes the ironies in Cubans toward extreme opinions of the the health care system, the tourism, the U.S. He was asked, ''Geraldo, can you racism, the plight of individual freedom walk outside in the United States at night in a socialist society. They reject the without the police temng you to go home polarized debate between Che-shirtbecause you'll be shot at?'' And once, he wearing revolutionary liberals and the says, ''I met a Cuban who was trying to hard line, primera-ola, Cuban elite in South Florida. Suspicious of a quick fix, the defend the war in Iraq to me." students are in search of ways to bridge Ideas from the U.S. manage to the divide. infiltrate the Cuban psyche despite Elizabeth Jordan, who graduated the country's controlled media and '

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restricted travel. Undergraduates, Guerra argues, are in a unique position to aid the exchange. "These students are like vehicles of information," she asserts.

"Undergraduates, because of their age, their curiosity, their in fact:__ openness. . . they are possessed of a number of skills and talents that older people just don't have."

Both Jordan and Bustamante call Guerra the "sole · reason" that Yale undergraduates are able to travel to Cuba, both because of her tireless advocacy of student trips in the face of so many obstacles and the support she provides students in Cuba about everything from contacts and housing to what to wear to avoid looking too yuma, or American.

Ras Raudel, a Cuban friend of McElroy, is a member of LA Comision Depuradora, a group that works to break the silence surrounding racism against Afro-Cubanos in Cuba through rap and hip-hop at underground concerts. One day, McElroy asked him, "How can you keep fighting?" Raudel answered, '~s much oppression as there was in the United States, at least they could express themselves." Then he began to cry.

The naivete of American students travelingtoCubamakes them approachable and allows even older Cubans, the ones who have been in the trinchera, or trench, with Castro for decades, to ask them questions and expect honest responses.

In May of 2002, Guerra and three of her students were riding a bus. The driver was dark-skinned. He regarded her three students, who were dark-skinned as well, with curiosity, and eventually sidled up to one of them.

"So are you really in college?" he asked. ''Yeah," the student replied.

The driver thought for a moment.

He was about fifty years old, grateful to the revolution for his education. He assumed that he wouldn't have gotten that education in Cuba without Castro, or in the U.S. He said to the student, "I didn't know that black people could go to college in the U.S." '

TN Ali S ei~ a junior in Trumbull College, is an On-line Editor of TN]. . 31

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Yale students educate Connecticut's felons. '

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n Friday afternoon, while some of her classmates sleep through their labs, Kate Hawkins teaches multiplication, pounding her arm against the table to the rhythm of her speech~ . .

"Four times thre.e ?" Pound, . pound, pound . .Her pupil, Jason Cartman, flicks his eyes towards . the ceiling, deep in thought. "Twelve?" he replies. His answer receives a punctuated ''Yes!" and another pound, this time in jubilation. .

Earlier in the session, Hawkins explains, Carunan was having trouble with the concept of multiplication, calculating equations by hand with little check marks that took ages to count up.

Now he's running through the tables with minimal trouble. "He's really getting it," she says proudly. · This scene could be from any elementary school tutoring program, except that Cartn1an is well over six feet tall and in prison.

Every Friday, Hawkins and a handful of other Yale students spend two hours in Cheshire, Connecticut preparing inmates of the Cheshire prison for the GED. They settle in the prison's classrooms, ready to answer questions about the math, language arts, and social studies sections of the exam. Every Friday, the same inmates filter in, clutching their math books, ready to ask questions about fractions and conjunctions. All of them are serving time. All of them are trying to graduate high schooL . .

The Cheshire pri~on's program is by no means unique. Its Prison School lies under the jurisdiction of Unified School District 1, a depar-unent that provides educational programming in 18 Connecticut prisons for over twelve thousand inmates. Last year, 682 inmates earned their GED in U.S. District · 1.

Thirty-seven were students at Cheshire.

Cheshire's GED program isn't the prison's only educational offering.

Students who are not ready for the exam can take basic reading and math classes.

Those who have alre~dy received a high school diploma can enroll in one college class each semester. Occasionally~ Yale volunteers offer fun, informal classes like creative writing and art history. The prison also provides its inmates with vocational seminars, by far the most popular courses, which teach skills such as woodworking October 2007

during New Haven's Festival of Arts and Ideas last year. Aside from a lack of school supplies (the prison restricts the use of markers, pencils, and other writing.utensils for safety reasons), there is almost nothing that differentiates these facilities from those of a well-equipped grade school.

Yet, the elaborate bureaucracy and regulatory system controlling the flow of people into and out of the prison remains daunting. Visitor rules are posted around the waiting room in English and Spanish: If you are late to visiting hours, you forfeit your right to visit; if you are unregistered

and computer or automotive repair.

Even against the array of alternative classes, the GED program stands out.

"If it's not the only program, it sometimes seems like the most important," . says Pria Anand, a Berkeley sophomore who runs the tutoring program this year. "It's someone's high school graduation that's such a big goal."

Dorthula Green, Cheshire Prison School's principal, cites her favorite quote from the '70s TV show Baretta: · "Do the time, don't let the time do you."

For inmates, she explains, the GED often represents a chance to finish something

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This is why Green has gone to such lengths to incorporate Yale students into her program, despite serious hurdles.

"My philosophy is that we need to make sure to do eve · g we can to make the time as productive and empowering as possible," she says.

This philosophy allowed Jessica Jiang, the former head of the program and a current tutor, to start the Cheshire program in the fall of her junior year, inspired by similar work she had done in the New Haven Correctional Facility. It's this same commitment that has allowed the Cheshire effort to thrive while the New Haven program, though housed in a non-federal facility, is temporarily halted due to administrative problems. ducation is the mostpoweiful weaponyou __. can use to change the world."

This Nelson Mandela quote, carved into a wooden plaque on a long wall above a security desk, greets visitors entering the Cheshire Prison School The rooms are large and bright and filled with dozens of new computers. The walls brandish posters of the "Great Books" and To Kill a Mockingbird, commemorating Cheshire's participation in 'The Big Read' ---4

in advance, you forfeit your right to visit; if . you wear an article of clothing that might set off the metal detectors (such as an underwire bra) and try to remove it in public, you forfeit your right to visit.

Many of the same strictures apply to tutors. They must fill out pages of paperwork to gain clearance. A prison staff member must escort them at all times. Nothing can be brought into the prison: no cell phones, no purses. Only a photo I.D. may be taken into the waiting room, and even that must be left at the front desk upon arrival. Often, there are glitches. Last week, a tutor's shoes set off the metal detector. Another time, one of the prison-issued panic beepers went off repeatedly during the two hours of tutoring. Anand remembers a recent ·setback when a new guard wouldn't let the tutors into the facility. "He just kept saying, 'I don't know your faces, I'm not sure."' The tutors were left in the waiting room for over an hour.

Oftentimes, tutors must overcome difficulties far beyond logistics.

The Cheshire prison population is predominately African-American and Hispanic; Yale tutors are usuaiJy white or Asian-American. Cheshire is an allmale facility, while all the current Yale •

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that is really unique and glamorous, and instances a flirtatious note sent from when you get there it can be a little more a prisoner to a tutor, an odd comment like a slap in the face." now and then both tutors and inmates · But for Amodeo, who's been tutoring are conscientious. "Everyone walks on at Cheshire for almost a year, adjusting eggshells," Anand explains. "The inmates, to the new setting was much easier than the warden, the students. It's sort of a she expected. "I went in the first week novel thing for everyone." thinking, 'This is a federal prison, I've For tutor Samantha Amodeo, gotta be sort of tough,' but now I think the Prison School students are more it's a more relaxed· learning environment uncomfortable with · the gender than at Yale. It's often the best part of my discrepancy than the tutors. "Some .of week," she says. the inmates have said, 'Why is it all girls · Green believes the program is mostly corDing, don't any guys want to do this?"' self-selecting.. Tutors . who don't take the program seriously, ·or who come for the Sometimes, Amodeo thinks, the inmates might be more at ease learning from male wrong reasons, usually end up dropping •

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Even the academic material can feel out of place at times.

It's uncomfortable, . . for example, when a teaching aide uses an example about car mileage with a student who no longer possesses a driver's license.

A few weeks ago, Anand was prepping a section of the exam .that required students to state whether a · phrase consisted of fact or opinion. One of the · statements read, ''All U.S. citizens have the right to vote." "Obviously they meant it to be 'fact,"' she says, "but for someone who's incarcerated, it's not fact."

Most Yale students would not trade tutoring .kindergarteners at elementary schools ten minutes from campus for a fifty-minute drive to Cheshire and two hours with convicted criminals.

The tutoring program attracts more seniors than freshmen, and participants generally learn about the program via word of mouth rather than on-campus advertising. There is a fairly high initial drop-out rate among the tutors, explains Beth Reisfeld, who runs the New Haven Correctional Center's program. ''Prison tutoring seems like the kind of activity .

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out in the first semester. "I always tell the tutors you can't come because of excessive benevolence or some sense of rich white guilt," Green says. "People pick up on that and you become less than . " authentre. · If the point of a GED is to aid in finding employment, then why would the Cheshire inmates who are serving anywhere from five to 99 years need the diploma? Green has asked this question herself. But the first time she awarded .a GED, she realized the degree meant much more than gaining access to a job. "When these guys earn their diploma, that's the first step towards thinking they can accomplish stuff. At Yale, you don't necessarily choose a major because it leads to a particular job. It's the same here; there's an intrinsic value to education." Although Connecticut law requires inmates under the age of 21 to participate in educational programming, most of the Cheshire students are older.

They choose to participate anyway.

They consider the Prison School such a privilege, .in fact, that prison authorities often punish inmates by forbidding them to attend.

Anand remembers a group of GED candidates who continued to participate in tutoring sessions while waiting for their GED results. "They still came to tutoring anyway, even though they'd already taken the test," she recalls . ."One guy started asking me questions about trig, just because, 'why not,' he was interested." When the inmates received their GED scores, all of them passing, the first people they told were. their tutors.

"They just came in with these huge smiles waving their certificates around," explains Anand.

Jiang, her predecessor, chimes in.

"That was just the best day."

Experiences like this make the tutoring program especially rewarding for its Yale participants. Amodeo says that h~r students often ask whether she's being paid. "When they find out that we're here just because we want to be, they just really care."

For Jiang, the students' dedication makes the travel time and security meas·u res worthwhile. "Just seeing these people who want to learn so much," she says, "I realize I have this great opportunity at Yale." essica, Jessica," a voice calls out. Jiang swivels in her seat. Jermaine Davidson, inmate who has been in tutoring classes for a little over six months, pops his head through the classroom door.

"I couldn't come today, 'cause I got in trouble. But I'll be here next Friday. I need real help."

Randall Jennings, another student, swings his palm in a semi-circle against his forehead. "I'm nothing but cobwebs up here, nothing but cobwebs," he says, stretching a smile across his face. With the help of Jiang, Anand, and their fellow tutors, those webs have begun to trap ideas.

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TN Alexis Fitts is a senior in Branford College.

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basis. Schwartzman maintains that he has n his first few days as a summer • "no knowledge of Bob's involvement with subletter at Sigma Phi Epsilon ("SigEp"), Nick Coman awoke to homeless people." Esposito, however, a harsh banging at the fraternity's back readily admits to his employment of the door. "I' want your cans," a voice called. homeless community. Although SigEp's '~nd your house looks like shit." The national headquarters commissioned voice belonged to Kenny Jackson, a him to keep the property safe, Esposito homeless man and fixture of the High explains, "Yeah, I hire them. Kenny's Street community. Lanky and emaciated done cleaning. for us .when garbage was after years of cocaine abuse, Jackson slimed everywhere and no one wanted to . had grown accustomed to cleaning up touch it, Kenny would grab a trashcan fraternity houses for cash. Coman opened and do it. I'd give him ten or twenty dollars, no problem." · the door and launched into a two-month Esposito's implicit claim is a common relationship with the homeless of High one: if these are jobs no one wants, and the Street. homeless ne~d the money and are willing, "Kenny must have been used to is it wrong? Judging from the actions of being there and having some sort of other fraternities, the answer seems to be relationship," Coman reasoned, after no. SigEp's practices are not unique. Next being stunned . by Jackson's smooth door, at Sigma Alpha Epsilon, Jackson approach. This arrangement had, in fact, and a group of his friends, also homeless, existed since SigEp bought its new home at 31 High Street in 2006. The fraternity's spent the night of July 19th raving in the leaders lauded the .purchase, with former basement, taking swigs from half-empty Vice-President of Member Development beer cans and assuring the brothers, Michael Rucker claiming in February "If you leave your beer cans empty, I'll 'of 2006, '~house is important because break the legs of anyone you want with a we want to maintain an image that is baseball bat." · not a crazy-party fraternity but is still a . .

SAE President Stephen Sherrill bit more gentlemanly." A house may be flatly denies these stories and rests firm important, but cleaning it is . still more on his conviction that, ''We just haven't s~d, evidently, gentlemen don't had an issue with it. We keep our doors clean. SigEp's former president began locked like anyone else." In response to hiring the homeless just months after the allegations that SAE is insta11ing a new · house~warming. door because of homeless vandalism, Current SigEp President Michael Sherrill had no comment.

Schwartzman downplays the relationship To the homeless of New Haven, and insists that "it's never been much of cleaning up fraternities is nothing an issue." According to SigEp House new. Joe Comfort, a 55-year-old street legend who assumes an air of authority Manager Larry Wise, the real problem when speaking about eve · g from .stems from the house's property manager, •

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crack habits to vaults of stolen goods, dismisses Jackson's involvement with

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SigEp as amateur employment and shares his personal story of fraternity servitude.

According to Comfort, he began cleaning Sigma Nu about four years ago in exchange for a few dollars every now and then. Although current Sigma Nu President Josh Lederman asserts that he has heard nothing of the fraternity's history of homeless hiring, Comfort says that he eventually moved into the ·house for several months as a full-time servant to the brothers. "I cooked whatever they wanted. I fixed their doors, dishwasher, windows, and everything." Though he enjoyed the incessant parties, Comfort found himself performing menial tasks for ungrateful brothers. "I cleaned up when they fucked up," he sighs. "They'd be playing beer pong and they'd puke in the drains, and I'd have to clean that shit up and wouldn't get a fucking quarter."

Comfort says his stint at Sigma Nu fell apart during one Parents' Weekend.

Pleased with himself after building a wall to hide the brothers' kegs from their parents, Comfort stumbled in front of "a bunch of rich white daddies." According to Comfort, one father turned to his son and asked, "Hey boys, who's this nigger?"

After the brothers explained that Comfort helped out and was not a member of the Yale community, the father turned away from Comfort and told his son, "Get this nigger out of here." The current SigNu president declined comment.

Back at SigEp, brothers and subletters watched as Jackson grew more attached to the building: According to Coman, Kenny soon became "the running joke of the house." In fact, in weekly e-mails rehasing the hazy details of the weekend's parties, Jackson was a favorite topic of conversation. Following a particularly stunning performance on July 21 •t, Coman · wrote that "Least Valuable Player goes to Kenneth 'Kenny' Jackson for completing multiple drug deals in the backyard during the party ineluding selling 'purple haze' to people for forty dollars per bag. Here's to you Kenny, way to be that guy."

Jackson was ready to help and inched his way closer to SigEp this past summer.

He lingered in the home, and the brothers did not complain. On July 20th, Coman ra11ied his fellow subletters to host another party, exp1aining, "I'm not even hung over, and Kenny offered to clean up •

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the party this morning."

Jackson cleaned and the parties continued, but a series of strange incidents in August severed his bond to the house. After the laptops of two subletters went missing, Jackson wandered over and explained that he could return the computers for fifty dollars, with which he would buy drugs.

"I thought about it," Coman explains. "I figured, two thousand dollar computer versus fifty dollars in weed. It wasn't a hard decision." Jackson returned hours later, empty-handed and heavily beaten after trying to retrieve the computers. As Jackson roamed around, bloodied and blubbering apologies, Coman was at a birthday party in Manhattan.

Fraternity leaders profess to be taking a hard line against outside help, but the h omeless presence persists. Jackson was last seen at SAE in September, dangling out of a tree and yelling to Coman, "I love you, man, I'm sorry, man. I'd do fifteen for you, I'd kill for you." Coman returned to the inside of the house while

SAE brothers forced Kenny away.

Hoping to avoid a ·similar scene, Comfort has kept his . distance. But he knows that homeless labor is always. welcome. "I could go back whenever I want," he explains. "But my name isn't 'nigger.' It's Mr. Comfort."

Like Sigma Nu, SAE, and the majority of other Yale fraternities, SigEp hopes to restore its "gentlemanly image." Larry Wise resents the rumors of homeless help and explains, ''As house manager, I'm opposed to having people around whom I don't know." Principles aside, the seasoned members of the New Haven homeless community are well aware of Yale's Greek life and their roles as its custodians. Indeed, as a July invitation to a party at SigEp suggested, "If you need directions to SigEp, just ask any homeless person."

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A new take on the old boys' club .

By lexandra Schwartz

Yale professor stands at the front of a lecture hall, chatting with a group of students who have hung around after class. ''You know, it's hard enough to keep yourself intact psychologically as it is, even in the 20th century," he tells them with a note of urgency in his voice. ''Imagitie how it was back there, when everything around you was your enemy, when you were surrounded by disease and ignorance. It was a hell of a situation to be a man in

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those days. It's still pretty rough to be a man."

Thus begins To Be a Man, a film made by Yale student Murray Lerner in 1966 with the purpose of exploring and promoting the University experience as it was then: intense, insular, and decisively male. The smug assertiveness of the title, coupled with the self-righteousness of its opening moments, marks the film as an easy target for a 21st century audience. All those earnest white boys in jackets and .

ties, smoking their pipes at the seminar table, slicking their hair over to one side as if coeducation were not a short three years away, as if Bobby Seale and the Black Panthers would never descend on New Haven and take a battle ax to the ivory tower as the city had always known . it nothing could better typify the stodgy and repressive Ivy League attitude that we, the Yalies of today, look back on with cheerful derision. For women, to show anything but contempt for pre-1969 Yale .

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would be to negate our very sense of selfworth as integral parts of this institution.

To Be a Man might be valuable in certain ways namely, to elicit some laughs and confirm our assumptions about what went on inside that old boys' club of yesteryear. But as a serious meditation on academics and identity, it seems to have little enduring value.

And yet, once the film fails to make good on its latentpromise of misogyny and gentlemen's agreement-style racism, on_c e it becomes clear that its idea of manhood has little to do with the exclusion of other groups, To Be a Man is no longer so easy to dismiss. "This is ahout that journey of the mind we call education," a voiceover states at the beginning of the movie.

"The doubts, debates, and discoveries of college students today." While some of the fashions and characters featured in the film seem quaint, this quest to

understand what college and learning is all about certainly does not. One has to wonder: what, exactly, did it mean to be a man at Yale in 1966? And, more surprisingly, might we, at heart, be good, old-fashioned Yale men ourselves?

Yale of the mid-1960s was on the cusp of a great change in American education and youth culture. What is less clear now is that the University had already begun a quieter, internal revolution well before the era of campus protests. In the 1950s, Yale was a decisively elitist institution, even more so than Harvard and Princeton. As Jerome Karabel notes in his book, The Chosen: The Hidde11 History u'"'

if Admission and Exclusion at Harvarti Yale, and Princeton, "the foundation of Yale's

distinctive culture was its close relationship with the private boarding schools." The Yale admissions board was convinced

October 2007

that boarding schools were molding the kind of boys they wanted: boys who were not simply academically gifted, but who also demonstrated the elusive quality of "personal promise." "In assessing the latter," K.arabel writes, "the admissions office would look for evidence of a boy's 'industry,' 'persistence,' 'self-discipline,' 'sense of responsibility' and ... 'ability to participate in group activities.' " While Princeton and Harvard were making the transition to a standard of admission based more on academic merit than on abstract personal qualities, Yale stood by its character-based policy. A Yale education was never intended only to produce cholars, or to turn its students into brilliant stars of their fields. It was meant to create well-rounded, capable, and outgoing men. Academically gifted students were routinely rejected in favor of those who seemed to better represent •

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walking through Old Campus, the boys the face of a student as he listens to his peer make a comment. draping their arms over the girls' shoulders Of course, the Yale Man had not or lounging underneath trees, playing vanished from campus. In one particularly guitar and talking. Yet an unconscious memorable scene, a freshman who is nostalgia pervades the film. Lerner seems spending the afternoon beating the to have understood instinctively that he dust out of his rug on the Old Campus was documenting a campus that might explains that Yale "is not a coed college. look decidedly different in a few years .

It's a men's college." . He complains When the camera leaves the classroom about his roommates who "hibernate and dorms, it chases after images of Yale in some room, and sit and read a book landmarks like Connecticut Hall and all day long." But far more typical is his Harkness Tower, pointing straight up to classmate, who declares, · "I want to be exaggerate the buildings' monumental status, as if in fear that they might put in over .my head by the courses I'm suddenly disappear. The background taking, and by other people. And even though I inight be ·.destroyed in the music alternates between the traditional harmonies of the Whiffenpoofs and a process, if I come through it, I'll be much contemporary jazzy melody. Even the better for it." This kind of deep desire for students themselves seem pulled between knowledge doesn't sound too remote; in fact, this freshman couid fit in just fine at the Yale of the past and the Yale of the future. ,.' Before I came, I used to listen the Yale we know today. to all the old records," one boy says. ''We Here lies the film's real twist and its most strangely satisfying revelation: sang, and got together in our tuxedos, These students, with their excitement for and we sang 'For God, for country, learning and, ·at times, disproportionate and for Yale,' and seven alumni in the seriousness . of purpose, are really not too audience got up and started waving their . different from us. Yes, the mandatory handkerchiefs, and I'll be damned if I suits and ties have disappeared, and the didn't feel good about it." His friends campus is now far more diverse in every . heckle him for his sentimentality, and sense of the word. Nevertheless, listening we might be inclined to join in too. But there is a comfort and a pride in the • customs of an institution that cannot be a~ easily denied. "Brewster talks about your • becoming part of an expanding tradition," • the singer's roommate offers, as if to reconcile the ideas of past and the future, • "something that you're not yourself fully able to change." Expanding tradition: it's a wonderful tightrope of a phrase, a kind of slogan for the seemingly impossible.

You are the hinge between the Yale of tomorrow and the Yale of yesterday, it assures anxious students. And the two will be exacdy the same, only different. in on the conversations and personal ·era, but an attempt to grapple with a testimonies of the students in To Be a previous era's lasting imprint. As more Man feels bewildering in its familiarity, and more students in the film speak about almost as if one had recognized oneself the challenges and rewards of studying at Yale, it becomes clear that even in 1966 the in an old, beautiful photograph of a prototypical Yale Man was fast becoming stranger. a thing of the past. The film does show brief clips of the track and the crew boat, id the students featured in To Be a traditional haunts of Yalies from the Man realize that Yale as they knew 1930s, '40s and '50s. But these images are it was coming to an end? No one talks of overwhelmingly outnumbered by long social revolution, the escalating conflict segments of lectures and seminars, the in Vietnam, or the specter of female. Alexandra Scbwartz is a junior in Saybrook camera following a professor as he strides students. They could not have imagined College. students with wild hair and bell-bottoms up and down the podium or resting on

the University's rigorous standards of "manliness." In one case that appears in Karabel's book, Chajrman of the Board of Admissions Arthur Howe, Jr. favored one academically questionable candidate over others because "we just thought he was more of a guy."

By the time the students of To Be a Man· were admitted in the early '60s, times had begun to change. This was mosdy due to faculty pressure on the admissions committee, anc:I the drafting of the Doob Report in April 1962. 'CVale is no longer an 18th century academy or a 19~ century college," the report stated.

"It is a university of the 20th century in one of the great nations." If Yale wanted to rernajn a competitive and important . institution in the modern world, the report implied, it would have to rethink its policies and make itself more appealjng to the best and the brightest. The report asserted academic meritocracy as the · essential criterion for admission:, and even recommended that the college begin enrollirig women. Finally, Yale was getting its priorities straight.

In this context, the idea and even the tide of To Be a Man no longer seem like chauvinistic glorifications of a. bygone '

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's a saying in Arabic: "That 1s not my apncot; my apncot 1s some other apricot." It became a favorite of mine and five other interns this summer as we worked on the Yale Farm. When we were confronted with a challenge, the saying made the situation clear. It's not that I don't have an apricot:I do it's just that that's not it.

The perennial bed was our apricot.

TheYale Farm is located on a one-acre plot on Edwards Street, off of Prospect, just past the last outcrops of Science Hill. It's composed of flat beds and terraces for annl!al plantings, separated by steep drops. These areas, which we called berms, are not suited to intensive annual culti arion. They can, however, be October 2007 •

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used for perennial plantings fruit trees, herbs, flowers; plants 'that survive from year to year and by all rights shouldn't need much work or attention. The largest of these areas, on the farm as well as in my mind, is aptly termed the perennial bed our apricot. It is there that I want to be buried. When I die, I want it to know that it won. first heard of the perennial bed when Josh Viertel, co-director of .the Yale Sustainable Food Project and chief farm manager, gave us interns our first tour of the Farm. The six of us were preparing to spend the entire summer on an acre of green in grey ... ew Haven but it had recently been laid to waste by

the installation of new, frost-free water pipes. The usual early spring desolation looked more akin to a construction site than to the verdant paradise we had been promised. Josh casually gestured with the left side of his body to the area above the stone wall and said, "This is the perennial bed. We plant. .. perennials ... in here."

It would be a while before this barely sprouting brown lump began to bloom.

It would be a while before it became the overwhelming presence that circled around every morning meeting and every lunch break like an albatross. It would be a while before I got a sinking feeling as I looked at the limp geranium perched on the broad blade of a pickaxe I had grabbed after pulling so hard on a lump

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Wy. Our job in the perennial bed was not all that different from our responsibilities elsewhere on the Farm, nor was it all that . much harder. We planted things, we weeded, we mulched. It was a simple war of attrition to establish the plants we wanted over the ones we didn't. Those we would kill, and then we would choke their children with a thick bed of leaves.

Though it's a straightforward task, the perennial bed had a way of swallowing work. We could spend a full eight hours hunched over a patch of galansoga only to look up and see an area identical to the one we had entered eight hours before.

The weeds grew in big stands that looked just like normal plantings. There's a unique feeling of terror you get with your hand wrapped around the stem of a plant, trying to decide whether or not to

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pull it. 'It's so big and healthy,' you might think, 'surely, this, this is supposed to be here.' I remember a fellow intern waving out from amidst the thicket, calling another to investigate, and then another, and then me. And then the four of us gathered, peering and poking at what turned out to be sorrel. Josh wandered over, yanked it out, gave us a little smile, and sauntered off. The next day, a plant of equal ferocity had taken its place, the mulch having been magically moved by some mischievous sprite during the night.

green tufts from various green patches, most of which appeared native to some undiscovered continent. The uneven

defining characteristics of a perennial planting are also its most painful. Perennial berms follow natural curves rather than the straight lines that make annual plantings easy to manage. Left without that visual cue, · our task became distinguishing various

terrain made mulch slip off at the slightest provocation, exposing more bare soil to house more weeds. A farmer once ·told us how we would know we were winning: ''You feel that sickening feeling in your stomach? That's how you know you're doing it right."

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Emily Casaretto and Doug Endrizzi, two of Dave Thier's fellow interns, hunt for bean beades on the Yale Farm.

This is not to denigrate the perennial bed it's a lovely spot. I hear that blood, sweat, and tears make fine fertilizer. Early in the summer, the sage on either side of the stairs flowered, and the small purple blossoms cupped tiny shots of sugar in their bases. Josh suggested that we use them as a garnish for root beer Boats, but that seemed somehow untoward. We also had big drifts of oregano, chives, and mint. We harvested them and mixed them with ricotta every day for lunch. There were a lot of stinging nettles, as well.

I talked to an intern from the previous summer who asked about the Farm's drainage system. He e:xp1ained how he and the rest had dug ditches snaking through the acre, installed pipes and rocks, and then _covered them back up with earth on which the grass once again began to grow. It must have taken them weeks. Now, all that you can see of their October 2007

project is a lighter strip of less healthy grass that cuts across the center of the Farm. Soon the grass will grow thick over that spot too. Their pipe runs underneath the turf, quiedy doing its job. I didn't give

It is there that I want to be bun¡ed hen I ie) I want it to know that it won. a second thought to drainage all summer.

Not my apricot.

On the last week of the sumrner, we put a whole new batch of transplants into the ground. By that time, the maintenance and mulching had decreased the weed pressure, and noticeable patterns had begun to emerge &om the small hm.

With luck, the plants we put in this year will survive through winter and come to dominate the space next summer. Perhaps next year, the interns won't have to put so much of themselves into it, because what we put in will still be there. Perhaps the lily I fell on will still be stunted, a reminder of the rage we all poured into that earth. But that small sign will fade with time, and as the next summer's workers struggle to build a bench, or a chicken coop, or finally kill the goddamned hornets, or grapple with whate:ver apricot they will find themselves with, they will have beneath them the pieces of myself and hundreds of others still left in the soil.

TN

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Dave Thier is ajunior in Davenport College.

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y Sunday morning began as it usually does: I woke up with a spliu ing headache, a strange rash, and not . the faintest idea of how I might have gotten to be that way. I failed to improve even after several cups -or coffee and a cold shower, and a lack of incritninating Facebook photos suggested that the previous evening was not responsible for my condition. For once, I was sick in more than just the vague, existential sense.

Rather than make the lortgwalk to University Health Services (there was little chance I was pregnant), I sought help from WebMD's on-line Symptom Checker. The idea is simple: select your symptoms from a checklist, and WebMD will identify the matching ailments that could have produced them. With several days' worth of reading on all sorts of exotic diseases, the website is a valuable tool for isolating hypochondriacs from the general population. It's also an important part of Mitt Romney's health plan.

In my case, the news was bad: my symptoms were consistent with West Nile virus. It was also possible I was suffering from "exercise or physical activity," but I guard against that risk fairly zealously.

My looming battle with West Nile was al.!eady taking its emotional toll, and I began to feel depressed. Fearing that UHS might consign me to the psychiatric ward, I decided to see if WebMD could help me here, ·too. The Symptom Checker associates eleven medical conditions with a "depressed mood." I'm wellacquainted with the first ten: schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and so on. The eleventh, unfortunately for me, is mad cow disease. One imagines this makes for some awkward conversations at the doctor's office: "Well, Ms. Amos, we could try giving you a prescription for Zoloft... or we might have to kill you to protect the rest of the herd."

Struggling to cope with the prospect of dying for British beef, I tried to find a cure for mad cow disease in the bottom of a glass. Here, finally, WebMD had some good news. According to the SytPptom Checker, "craving alcohol" is a symptom of just one medical condition: cocaine abuse. At long last, I had a disease I could get excited about.

A short titne later (after looking up the medical conditions associated with nosebleeds), I realized that for whatever reason I was starring to feel much better. In fact, I felt so good that I decided to get an early start on my night on the town to make up for my disappointing Saturday. And so my Monday morning began as it usually does. . .

Matthew Lee) a senior in Jonathan Edwards College) is a stciff writerfor 1NJ. 46

THE NEW JOURNAL

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October 2007

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