YDN Magazine

VOL XXXVI t ISSUE 3 t JANUARY 2009

Catholic Worker Movement Public School Art Crisis Ethical Investing?

INSIDE 20

COVER STORY

A House With a Door Always Open

BY KANGLEI WANG

In New Haven’s Hill neighborhood, Mark and Luz Colville, the six children they raise, and up to seven people who need a place to stay try to turn moral principles into lived reality. Meet the Elm City’s Catholic Workers.

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Daniel Fromson

MANAGING EDITORS

Ben Brody, Jesse Maiman

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ASSOCIATE EDITORS

Caroline Berson, Anthony Lydgate, Vivian Nereim Naina Saligram, Kanglei Wang, Victor Zapana

PHOTO ESSAY

Artistic Beauty Salon

BY DANIEL CARVALHO

At this salon on Chapel Street, “artistic” means a lot more than just well-coiffed hair.

PRODUCTION MANAGER

Adrienne Wong

DESIGN & PHOTO EDITORS

Ginger Jiang, Jared Shenson, La Wang

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FICTION EDITOR

FEATURE

Art For Whose Sake?

BY NICOLE VILLENEUVE

Angelica Baker

Like all municipal construction efforts in New Haven since 1981, the Christopher Columbus Family Academy had one percent of the cost of its renovation go toward site-specific public art. But that doesn’t mean anyone’s seen it.

POETRY EDITOR

Rebecca Dinerstein

STAFF WRITERS

Rachel Caplan, Rebecca Distler, Jacque Feldman, Nicole Levy, Frances Sawyer, Eileen Shim, Jonathan Yeh

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ILLUSTRATORS

Maria Haras, Sin Jin

FICTION

The Laundress

BY ALICE BAUMGARTNER

“You ever been close to death?” seems to be the question that runs throughout this tale of America’s frontier.

The Yale Daily News Magazine invites letters to the editor.

Please send your comments to the editor-in-chief of the Magazine at daniel.fromson@yale.edu.

The views and opinions represented in the Magazine’s articles and advertisements do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff. We reserve the right to refuse any ad for any reason and to delete or change any copy we consider objectionable, false, or in poor taste.

FICTION ILLUSTRATIONS BY SIN JIN “TOO CLOSE FOR COMFORT” ILLUSTRATION BY MARIA HARAS

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FEATURE

Cracking the Golden Egg

BY ADRIENNE WONG

The members of Yale’s Responsible Endowment Project want to ensure that the school’s investments are ethical and transparent, but time doesn’t seem to be on their side.

The Yale Daily News Magazine January 2009

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STUDIO SPACE

Preserving Madness

BY NICOLE LEVY

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AROUND ELM CITY

Plan B

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MY YALE

The Subterraneans

BY ZARA KESSLER

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GINGER JIANG

BY JACQUE FELDMAN

UP THE HILL

At the Amistad Catholic Worker house, Mark and Luz Colville feed the poor just as they believe Jesus would have done. Learn more about the Catholic Worker movement on page 20.

Good Vibrations

BY SYDNEY LEVINE

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PROFILE

A Split Existence

BY FRANCES SAWYER

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POEM

Sugaring

BY LAURA MARRIS

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TOO CLOSE FOR COMFORT

Book Burning

BY ERIC WARD

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POEM

Infidelity

BY MIRANDA POPKEY

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POEM

Carcass

BY CARINA DEL VALLE SCHORSKE

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BACKPAGE

Bummer

BY REESE FAUST

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

T

he transformation that occurs during winter break is magical. Having fled Yale’s lecture halls and scrambled away to see friends in L.A., do community service in Ecuador, or explore distant places like Morocco or Vietnam, we return refreshed and ready to live in New Haven. After striving to be as far from exams and classes as possible, we come back excited to be here.

There is nothing quite like the ecstatic buzz of a new semester to remind people why they like New Haven, and it is with this kind of excitement in mind that the contributors to this issue of the Yale Daily News Magazine have delved into the Elm City and emerged with a tremendous crop of stories. Our cover story, by Kanglei Wang, portrays the pious devotion and charity of Mark and Luz Colville, who welcome the needy at their Amistad Catholic Worker home. Meanwhile, Nicole Villeneuve takes a critical look at the impact of New Haven’s Percent For Art program on the city’s schools, and Adrienne Wong examines the efforts of the undergraduate Responsible Endowment Project. The other pieces in this issue explore everything from scientific theories about perfect pitch to the beauty and authenticity of spoken word poetry.

And those are just a few components of an issue that also contains several great poems, a minimalist cartoon, and a short story reminiscent (amazingly) of both Cormac McCarthy and Toni Morrison.

As always, we thank you for taking the time to pick up a copy of the YDN Magazine. We hope you enjoy this issue, and welcome back to Yale.

Best wishes, —Daniel Fromson

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January 2009 The Yale Daily News Magazine

STUDIO SPACE PRESERVING MADNESS by Nicole Levy The members of Yale’s slam poetry ensemble, WORD, learn a pivotal lesson from the father of spoken word. To foster a connection between author and audience, they speak with pulse and conviction — not literary snobbiness.

… it’s War amongs’ the rebels Madness, madness, war He says “war” like “wahr,” enunciating the word with righteous disdain and the Jamaican patois in which he writes all his poetry. He pauses to enjoy the word’s resonance before beginning a new verse in the reggae rhythm that defines his delivery, manipulating the volume and pace of his earthy voice. The audience is visibly swayed.

Johnson reads his poetry with conviction, as if the words he utters have become engraved in his throat.

“In my early days, I called myself a reggae poet, because I was inspired by reggae,” Johnson says. “Nowadays, I am happy just to be called a poet.” Johnson, who released his first album in 1978, articulates the experience of a second generation of black British immigrants he describes as the “rebellious” generation. The first wave came from the Caribbean after World War II, often believing they’d eventually return home. The second generation, their children, grew up in the 1970s, knowing their presence was permanent.

“It brought us in conflict with British society,” says Johnson, who was born in Chapelton, Jamaica but grew up in London’s Brixton section. He was one of many black activitsts who resisted British prejudice, but Yale English Professor and acclaimed poet Caryl Phillips, Johnson’s longtime friend, credits him as being among the first to express the challenge artistically.

In evoking the violent struggle of social protest, Johnson aims to elicit an immediate, instinctual response. Even when Johnson’s tempo quickens, his words blurring and his accent obscuring their meaning, one is still drawn to the shifting pulse of his poetry.

After the reading, Johnson steps outside to smoke a cigarette, and my tapping feet follow him. In a pause between drags, Johnson tells me that written poetry can be excessively cerebral. He stresses that poetry is meant to be a communal experience, that poetry should be oral, not written but performed: spoken word.

The next evening, there are again echoes of “madness, madness, wahr,” as the poets of WORD mimic Johnson’s delivery in approving jest. WORD, Yale’s first performance poetry ensemble, was founded four years ago, after a poetry slam at a Cultural Connections freshman preorientation. On this Wednesday night, the ensemble prepares to edit their work. The week before, members worked in groups of three to revise their seed poems, but now, as the performance element of their work begins to take As a member of WORD, freshman Luke Bradford shape, they will read them before delivers his work with righteous disdain. the entire group.

There is an endearing vulnerability to the poetic refrain — “I’ve suffered from no poets as they arise to read their poems. Alex suffrage” — advances what she stresses is Benz ’12 nervously shifts his weight from a “desexualized” defense of women’s right foot to foot as he retells the tale of Romu- to vote. Rodney Reynolds ’10, on the other lus and Remus, but his voice is steady, and hand, addresses “Mr. Policeman” and his he is attentive to the musicality of his words. racist aggression. Rodney evokes the same His poem is perhaps too complicated to be Civil Rights Movement that inspired Johnunderstood when read aloud, and someone son but updates it, concluding, “I could be jokes that Alex should present a PowerPoint president. You could be wrong.” presentation on the fall of Rome as he reads The members of WORD shy away from it. But Jessica Abrego ’10 insists that the the literal and the wordy because, like Johnphysicality of his final performance will com- son, they look to elicit a visceral response. municate his intent.

There is no quest for heady poetry, no literThe ensemble’s efforts are a logical exten- ary snobbery. When two members begin to sion of Johnson’s innovative genre. Where question the premise of Alexandra’s poem, Johnson’s words sustained a political agenda Jessica interrupts. She doesn’t think it should as Britain’s black community made strides in be devalued in that way. Literary rebels canits quest for equality, WORD looks to use not persuade the masses if they are unconspoken forms to cultivate a diverse variety of vinced by their own creed: they profess an perspectives. artistic autonomy and claim the instinctual Amongst the work that is recited tonight, emotion of spoken word. The ensemble is there is no one political agenda or theme. relieved to know that Johnson’s “madness, Alexandra Rodney ’12 is a feminist whose madness, war” has been preserved.

DANIEL CARVALHO/YDN

adness, madness, wahr” erupts tonight in Yale’s AfroAmerican Cultural Center.

Linton Kwesi Johnson, a father to poetic spoken word, is performing “Five Nights of Bleeding” at the podium.

He comes to the refrain:

The Yale Daily News Magazine January 2009

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AROUND ELM CITY PLAN B by Jacque Feldman When the current economic crisis forced New Haven to ration its budget and shut down two public schools, city officials had to respond quickly and creatively to ensure that financial failure wouldn’t lead to failure in the classroom. you,” says Robert Canelli, supervisor of New Haven’s magnet schools. Getting excited, he describes the multinational flags and clocks displaying different time zones that enliven the hallways of John Daniels, a school themed toward international studies. In the classrooms, teachers must expose their students to the school’s theme for at least ten hours every week. This requirement, Canelli tells me, attracts new teachers by providing opportunities for more creative teaching.

Vincent E. Mauro’s and Sheridan’s shared focus on science and technology makes this merger a natural transition for students and teachers alike.

The project, says William Clark, Chief Operating Officer of New Haven’s Board of Education, has been blessed with many such strokes of luck. For example, the Troup School is only a few blocks from Dwight, making for another smooth transition.

“We’re not forcing anything in,” Clark maintains. “We’re not shoehorning anything. It makes sense.” These changes were not part of the original plan, but they have come together so neatly they seem almost inevitable. In fact, both

Canelli and Clark point out a number of ways this transition will help the children of Dwight and Vincent E. Mauro.

“They get to jump the line,” Clark says of the students of Vincent E. Mauro, which had been awaiting renovation in several years. Now, he says, the brand-new facilities of Sheridan, including updated science and technology labs, will boost morale. Canelli explains that former students at Dwight, which had been a lowperforming school, will benefit similarly from their move to Troup.

Canelli says the move from Dwight was preceded by a kickoff celebration, and indeed, the city’s administrators feel they have much to celebrate. “We had the top kid in the state last year,” Canelli brags, referring proudly to a high scorer on the standardized Connecticut Mastery Test. Canelli has seen a rise in the number of graduating students continuing on to higher education, and New Haven’s magnet schools have attracted an influx of out-of-district, suburban students as well as a shock of national attention.

Still, New Haven’s public schools are far from perfect, Clark clarifies. “We need to keep working hard on this every day.”

DANIEL CARVALHO/YDN

hese are going to be difficult years,” Mayor John DeStefano Jr. told New Haven on October 22. As the New Haven economy suffers with the rest of the country, city administrators have moved quickly to cut costs. Few of them, however, have navigated the crisis as nimbly as those overseeing the education of New Haven’s children. This difficult year has forced the city to close two schools, Vincent E. Mauro Magnet School and Dwight Elementary School, but the closings have been part of a larger, surprisingly successful plan.

Dwight closed this fall, and its students now study at the Troup School, just down the street. Vincent E. Mauro will close in the fall of 2009 when its students can transfer to the newly renovated Mauro-Sheridan Magnet School, which New Haven Director of Communications Jessica Mayorga calls an “exciting building” to house them. At this time, Mayorga tells me, the city does not anticipate reopening either school. Vincent E. Mauro, however, may be used as a swing space for students of schools slated for renovation.

This transition is just one adjustment in a longer period of dramatic change. In 1995, DeStefano launched the Citywide School Construction Project, and since then, the city has been systematically renovating each of its schools, a undertaking considered a national model due to its scope and ambition. Mayorga says administrators plan to maintain this reputation despite the recent change in plans.

New Haven’s magnet schools are central to its School Choice Program, a program fostering environments that improve learning. Students can apply to any of 33 magnet schools, each with an educational specialty and corresponding idiosyncrasies. The lobby of sciencegeared Vincent E. Mauro, for example, is home to a miniature museum of animals ranging from fish to tarantulas.

Walking into this zoo of a lobby, “the theme of the school screams right at

New Haven has received praise for the creativity of its School Choice Program. But can the schools continue to perform at this level in light of the current economic crisis?

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January 2009 The Yale Daily News Magazine

MY YALE THE SUBTERRANEANS by Zara Kessler From the gothic spires of Harkness to the imposing brick and brownstone of Kline Biology Tower, Yale tends toward dramatic, skyline-altering edifices. And yet, as Zara Kessler discovers, the real work gets done underground. write two pages.” Collages of open Web sites and documents grace laptop screens. Cell phones chime and hum. Cups, backpacks, and books carpet the floor. Two friends stop me for a quick “hello” before rushing off to their subterranean destinations.

Throughout history, countless peoples have sprung up, and a scattered few have ventured underground. Cappadocia, Greece, holds remnants of hundreds of ancient underground villages, a network of passages and communal spaces. Southern Vietnam boasts the remains of the Cu Chi Tunnels, a three-level city including mess halls and a theater that housed hundreds of Viet Cong soldiers. Beneath the bustle of New York City, thousands of “Mole People” find shelter in underground abandoned subway, railroad, and sewage tunnels and live in highly ordered communities. And in New Haven, Connecticut, the underground Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Library, a two-level network

with a café, study rooms, couches, and bookshelves, serves as the late-night living quarters for many Yale University students, including me.

During the day, Bass returns to its traditional role as library. Its nighttime inhabitants are elsewhere, blinking in the sunlight.

In these hours of daylight, Bass is the place for layovers between flights to aboveground locales. The café hosts tutoring sessions and meetings with Teach for America recruiters. The security gates that divide the café and the inner library remain open. Tourists, businessmen, and prospective students pour in to delight at the bookshelves and examine the studying individuals. Silent students, concentrating on worksheets and computer screens, dot the long wooden tables and brown leather couches of the reading rooms.

A thick quiet hangs in the air. Flip-flops and clattering heels provide the only chorus in a hymn of silence.

JONATHAN JIMENEZ/YDN

am an underground creature.

Late on this Monday evening in September, Yale University’s campus is a skeleton. Quadrangles, benches, and cobblestone pathways provide the framework for a thriving college campus and yet lie empty of the students that give them daily life. The air hangs in silence. Only I venture through the void. After traversing Cross Campus, I descend a flight of stairs and passed through a glass door.

There, I find the skeleton’s missing flesh: students swarmed around granite tables and leather armchairs. “Are you guys ending up having a party?” “You’re not invited.” “3.1, 3.2, exercise 3.2.” People move in and out of the catacombs beyond. Students seeking a buzz coil into a line in front of a café counter. The smell of espresso wafts through the air, colliding with the scent of chocolate-chip cookies. “Each data has one tenth of concentration.” “I have to read 250 pages and

Though Bass is busy during the day, its subterranean denizens begin to arrive in droves after the sun has already gone down.

Individual study rooms, nicknamed “weenie bins,” line the underground corridors, ready for work-related emergencies. In the hours before assignments are due, students banish themselves to solitary confinement. Others self-prescribe weenie bins to rid themselves of the dark bags under their eyes. Once, while seeking a daytime weenie bin, I put my hand on the doorknob of a dark and seemingly vacant cell, only to catch sight of a man, balled into the fetal position, sleeping on the floor. In kindergarten, we had mats for nap time. In college, we have the carpeted floors of weenie bins.

When the patter of feet across Cross Campus’s pathways ceases, the civilization under the sod awakens. The setting of the weekday sun cues the backpack-sporting hordes to begin their descent. The café buzzes, the main avenue of underground social life. Clusters of students discuss everything from pre-gaming to “margins of error I can’t tolerate” and “F times one over G.” One night, a group of girls — one with an orange bean bag taped to her abdomen, another dressed in a garbage bag, a third wrapped in duct tape, and about five others dressed just as eccentrically — bursts into Bass. The girls scatter throughout the café and library, snapping digital photographs, demanding plastic bags, and yelling, “This isn’t the spot!” They continue franti-

Whether studying scripts or cramming for exams, the students that inhabit Bass Library know that the place takes on a completely different character after dark. varying levels of back support and changing views.

For me, the relocations typically depend on my subject of study: constitutional law calls for an armchair, while ancient Latin lends itself to a table. Other moves take place when I spot a friend. A quick trip over to a companion offers relief from the case law. Muffled conversations revolve around the cute boy who just entered a weenie bin. Lengthy depictions begin with the old “Did I tell you what happened last Saturday night?” Gossip shoots across the reading rooms before you can turn the page. Weenie bin doors are sometimes propped open for guests. Computers flash online chats, connections to the aboveground world.

Someone slips on the stairs while returning from the bathroom. Muffled giggles pop up around the room, and a flushed student returns to his seat.

As nighttime bleeds into early morning, Yale’s other major library prepares for its 11:45 p.m. closing, and new streams of students wander through the underground tunnel connecting the two houses of study.

As most of New Haven crawls into bed, the library becomes even busier.

At this hour, I need a new diversion, so I stroll through the hidden parts of Bass. Group study rooms are filled with friends scattered about chairs and couches.

As I pass, the inhabitants shoot me guilty

In these nighttime hours, the inner network of Bass becomes a gated city. cally until they finally scramble back above.

It is the evening’s production on Bass’s Broadway.

In these nighttime hours, the inner network of Bass becomes a gated city, shut off from the public eye. Each inhabitant must scan a Yale ID card to enter. The daytime tourists will never know Bass’s nighttime persona. The leather chairs and tables in the main reading rooms — and the corridors and computer clusters that branch out from them — hum with whispers and tapping computer keys. Students play musical chairs among study locales, hopping from wooden tables to leather couches to study booths.

One explains his reason for such migrations:

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JOSE MEZA/YDN

The Yale Daily News Magazine January 2009

looks, indicating that their words, muted by the glass windows, likely have little to do with group study. I stumble upon four or five friends. On Bass’s lower level, one friend shows me his online chat with his ex-girlfriend, which he is struggling to complete. His neighbor is struggling to finish her biology homework. They giggle together, each trying to escape the task at hand. As I venture back to my reading room spot, I look at the books gripped in students’ hands around me, which range from Seinfeld Scripts: The First and Second Seasons to A History of Islamic Studies. Some books lie abandoned on sleeping laps. No one wakes the snoring masses: many rely on Bass’s leather chairs for the majority of their rest. Once, one girl allegedly fell asleep and woke up the following morning to discover a blanket covering her.

My eyes continue to scan textbook pages, but at some point my eyelids feel so leaden that I know my time has come to crawl out from underground life. Others have already made the ascent. Many will stay underground until the security guards lock the doors at 1:45 a.m. As I leave the main floor reading room, the café, while no longer serving food, still has signs of problems sets and party-planning. I push through the glass door and mount the stairs. The loneliness of the immobile air returns. The empty benches watch over me as I trudge to my room. The cobblestones welcome my feet.

Little do these skeletons know that deep beneath the soot, their flesh resides. Deep in Bass, the heart of Yale University continues to beat.

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January 2009 The Yale Daily News Magazine

UP THE HILL GOOD VIBRATIONS by Sydney Levine The ability to identify musical pitches is not the extra-terrestrial superpower some suspect it to be. Dr. David Ross reveals the phenomenon of “perfect pitch” as influenced by both innate capacity and early musical training. fter six years of oboe lessons, I still sounded like a drowning duck.

My high school band director insisted that if I only practiced more diligently, I’d eventually be like my stand partner, an all-state oboist who did not sound in the least like suffocating water fowl. In some ways, the differences between our abilities were differences of degree: if I practiced more and tried harder, my fingers might move quickly enough to play allegro triplets, too. But our differences were also differences in kind: she could tell when I was sharp or flat intuitively, without any reference pitch. She seemed to have some kind of extra-terrestrial superpower. I couldn’t imagine how anyone could do that.

Dr. David Ross ’99 GRD ’04 MED ’05, a fourth-year psychiatry resident in the School of Medicine Department of Psychiatry, is currently investigating the phenomenon of absolute pitch perception. He aims to differentiate between the two competing theories of the origin of perfect pitch: the innate model and the early learning theory.

There seems to be strong evidence in favor of each. Stephen Mulligan ’10, pitch for the a cappella group The Yale Alley Cats, has had perfect pitch for as long as he can

she got older, however, she noticed that she could always remember and recreate the first pitch of her choral pieces. Now, she explains, it seems like different pitches have unique identities. “If your brain could feel things with its fingers, they’d all have a different texture to them.”

Ross suggests that the colloquial term “perfect pitch” is used to describe two very different phenomena. Some people with perfect pitch have an innate “ability to perceptually encode” (APE) pitch information in a way that is inaccessible to people without this trait. He calls this true absolute pitch.

Everyone else with perfect pitch just has a really good memory for pitches, a “heightened tonal memory” (HTM). Heightened tonal memory is largely based on early learning, but there’s an innate component to it too — which is why not everyone with early musical training develops a form of perfect pitch.

If this distinction is correct, then people with heightened tonal memory should express a perfect pitch that varies based on their initial musical training. For instance, they would be better at naming notes produced by their primary instrument. “We had one subject who could only name the notes that he could pretend to play on the French horn,” Ross explains.

On the other hand, people with true absolute pitch should be able to identify all kinds of pitches, independent of their musical training — even those outside the musical domain. “It can get distracting sometimes” says Fitz Gibbon. “I’ll be listening to a lecture and suddenly I’ll start thinking about how the professor speaks in Ds and Es. Everything has a pitch: footsteps, car alarms, sometimes the faucet. And it can get annoying when things are out of tune. A fluorescent light, for instance, might be just shy of a B flat. That’ll drive me nuts.”

Ross has developed a novel paradigm to better characterize the distinction between HTM and APE. Subjects in the experi-

A fluorescent light, for instance, might be just shy of a B flat. remember. He started playing violin at age five, tutored by his father, a violinist for the Baltimore Symphony. “My dad would turn on the metronome to the A440 pitch for me to tune the violin,” explained Stephen referring to the frequency of an A commonly used as a reference note. “He realized I had perfect pitch when I finally asked, ‘Why do I need that when I’m tuning?’”

But it doesn’t work that way for everyone. Lucy Fitz Gibbon ’10, a member of the Schola Cantorum chamber choir, also started playing violin at age five, but she needed to tune her violin to the metronome. As

ment — people with perfect pitch, people without, and those who are not sure — sit in front of a sign-wave generator, a machine that produces tones of varying frequency as you twist the dial. The subject hears a target tone and then a gap of variable length, which is either silent or contains a series of distracter tones. Finally, the subject is prompted to try to reproduce the target tone using the generator.

When I went to consult Ross, he sat me down in front of the generator and handed me a blindfold and a pair of Bose headphones. Fiddling with the laptop that generated the stimuli, he explained, “For people with true AP, this task is boring.

They’re like, ‘why are you bothering me with this?’ Their responses are incredibly accurate and incredibly precise. People with heightened tonal memory can do pretty well on the task, but they really struggle.

You see them sweating.” He scanned the pre-experiment questionnaire I’d filled out, which asks subjects whether they think they have perfect pitch. I didn’t. This was going to be nearly impossible. “Just let go of your type-A tendencies,” he suggested.

Currently, Ross is testing children on the pitch-matching experiment at an age when they have not yet had significant musical training. If he can identify kids that respond to the test in a way that is characteristic of true absolute pitch, he will find evidence to support the innate model.

Since he has begun testing kids, Ross has been consulted by a few parents who bring their children. The parents are worried that their children have autism because they spend so much time at the piano. The kids don’t have autism; they have true absolute pitch. So Ross tells the parents to think about it this way: “Imagine if you took 10,000 children and placed them in front of easels with paint and paint brushes. Now imagine that 9,999 of them are color blind.

Well, one of the kids would seem to be interested in a way that none of the others were. He would seem to be getting more out of the experience than the others. This is what the kids with absolute pitch look like with music.”

PHOTO ESSAY BY DANIEL CARVALHO

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January 2009 The Yale Daily News Magazine

PROFILE A SPLIT EXISTENCE by Frances Sawyer Academia and avant-garde cinema, India and America, Beckett and Bollywood, ordinary and extraordinary.

Award-winning filmmaker Ashish Avikunthak’s life and work is a series of dichotomies. that the two are not truly reconciled with each other. “They are two separate tracks,” he claims, and he does not plan on merging them in the future.

When Avikunthak went to work on his master’s degree in archaewology, his school was in Pune, the same city as the preeminent Film and Television Institute of India.

Though never a student there himself, all of his friends worked at the school. He would “study in the morning and in the evening go see films.” Avikunthak would hang out at the shoots, watch the production of his friends’ films, and immerse himself in the process of filming. He enthusiastically recalls his time shadowing the lives of film students.

But, he is quick to reiterate, he was not a student himself. When it comes to films, Avikunthak is “completely self-taught.”

While still in India, Avikunthak continued his work with the Warli tribes in West India, near Mumbai, and finished his second short film in 1999. He then moved to the United States to work on his doctorate in cultural anthropology at Stanford. He stayed in Palo Alto for seven years and has split his time between India and the U.S. ever since. Despite geographical separation from his inspirational landscape, however, Avikunthak continued work on his movies, which are set entirely in India.

COURTESY THE MAHINDRA INDO-AMERICAN ARTS COUNCIL

t is inevitable. The first thing you notice is the mustache — a black, glossy, wild shower of facial hair.

Situated inches above that dynamic mass is a simple pair of circular golden glasses. You remember the eyes behind these glasses. And, of course, the mustache.

This animated man is Ashish Avikunthak, known to his students by his legal name, Ashish Chadha. As a Yale professor, he teaches classes in the Anthropology department, such as “Science, State, and Technology in India,” but he also teaches a number of courses in Film Studies. Therein lies his duality: Avikunthak is both a Stanford-educated anthropologist and an active experimental filmmaker.

Both fields have been a part of Avikunthak’s life for as long as he can remember. Growing up in Kolkata, India, Avikunthak explains, young people do four things: they get into politics, fall in love, write poetry, and watch films. From these early memories, Avikunthak views his interest in cinema as sprouting out of the dynamic, diverse culture of his childhood.

Cinema, he believes, is an articulation of culture, and Avikunthak says he is so steeped in South Asian culture that filmmaking seems like a natural progression of his anthropological work. Still, he insists

Avikunthak takes questions at the Mahindra Indo-American Arts Council Film Festival in November. He took home the coveted Best Director award for his first feature.

It is as if he leads two different lives: one in India and one in the U.S. All of his films are filled with Indian imagery and references, yet the majority of his year is spent in exile from his cultural and geographic muse. Nevertheless, he has embraced this dual existence.

This perseverance has paid off in the years since he first came here: his first fulllength film, Shadows Formless, opened at Switzerland’s Locarno Film Festival, one of the top festivals in Europe. His short features — including Dancing Othello, Kalighat Fetish, and End Note — have been featured at festivals around the world.

His films delve into a very personal, post-colonial world. Like many middle-class Indian families, Avikunthak’s parents sent him to an English-speaking school where he learned to write in English even before he learned to write in his native Hindi. At his Catholic school, which “mirrored those in England,” the teachers would go so far as to fine students the equivalent of a dollar for speaking any language besides English.

“It was a split existence,” Avikunthak explains. Early on, he studied the Western canon, but Kolkata, the cultural hub of India, provided a parallel informal education as well. With awe, he watched dancers and singers who trained ten years or more in their respective fields, and this fascination has arisen in his work. For instance, his short Dancing Othello combines the city’s culture — the dancing, the tradition, and the vibrancy — with the Western story of Othello.

Separately, Kathakali dance and Shakespearian tragedy would seem like their own microcosms. However, when the two are combined, “it subverts both of these traditions,” Avikunthak says. “The film itself becomes a farce.”

Dancing Othello, however, is not Avikunthak’s favorite of his shorter works.

End Note is the work closest to his heart, and when he speaks of it, his eyes brighten.

They dart about as he grows excited, speaking of the film’s ties to his childhood, family, and literary inspirations. Based on a Samuel Beckett play — to Avikunthak, Beckett “is virtually a god” — this film takes its cues from the theater of the absurd. It features

three women who share an important childhood secret that is never disclosed to the audience. It is a film for his daughter, and it reveals part of his past as well.

End Note is “an intense, personal piece.”

Avikunthak’s emotional attachments to this film are many, but the physical space is most telling. Avikunthak filmed it in the house where he grew up, and the leading actresses are his mother, sister, and cousin — not professionals.

Avikunthak’s characteristic intensity reappears in Shadows Formless. In the opening minutes, eerie music welcomes the black and white frame of a girl whose hair is being brushed. The simple, daily act of brushing the girl’s hair becomes so mesmerizing that her dialogue — a heart-wrenching story of abuse — is almost muted by the seemingly ordinary act. “The banal is spectacular,” says Avikunthak. “It becomes the meat of my narrative.”

Avikunthak thus upends the audience’s preconceptions of both subject matter and form. He revels in demonstrating how everyday acts can acquire significance when highlighted by the camera. In a film industry wracked with overt violence and bloodshed, it still surprises him that such everyday acts can upset people so fully.

In Shadows Formless, there is a scene in which multiple chickens are slaughtered, and its presence in the film has caused uproar with audiences. It is a scene steeped in death, yet killing chickens is an ordinary task. Still, the violence in this scene caused the Indian government to censor the movie and prohibit its sale in India.

The censorship board requested the scene’s removal, but Avikunthak says that he will not follow their orders. To remove the scene, he thinks, would be to take away a vital part of the story’s artistic cohesion.

Chopping pervades the movie: bananas, coconuts, cucumbers, and other fruits and vegetables are cut without complaint. The chicken, he views, is a natural progression of everyday cutting. In context, the censorship “is without any logic.”

Avikunthak sadly concedes that because of the censorship, the film will only be

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The Yale Daily News Magazine January 2009

Mandira Banerjee and Sweta Tiwari star in Shadows Formless. Although a newcomer to independent cinema, Banerjee won the Best Actress award at the MIAAC Festival. available to a special audience. However, he makes a film “because it is necessary to be made,” and not because of its presumed appeal. His films, he says, are for people everywhere.

Differing from the commercial status quo, Avikunthak’s films offer a narrative structure, but “the emphasis is on the cine-

He revels in demonstrating how everyday acts can acquire significance when highlighted by the camera.

matic possibility instead of the narrative possibility.” Just as he has included images the Indian censorship board wanted removed, he feels that his films are successful if the images can tell their own story.

Avikunthak’s films must be set in India, but he will continue to teach at Yale. His films are direct products of his Indian roots, and cannot be separated from their place.

India has the turmoil and tension to catch Avikunthak’s animated eyes, while the U.S. offers stability and academic employment. If he is to continue achieving at his high standard, it seems Avikunthak must keep living two distinct lives.

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January 2009 The Yale Daily News Magazine

BY NICOLE VILLENEUVE

When New Haven renovates a school, one percent of the budget funds an art installation in the building. But do the students ever notice the art, or, more importantly, learn from it? t’s 2:30, the end of the school day at Christopher Columbus Family Academy, but no students are waiting or chatting outside. Columbus is officially the newest school in the New Haven public school system, undergoing a $35.8 million renovation just this year. Still, the school’s gleaming façade cannot hide its location in one of the city’s most perilous neighborhoods, and most students stay safely indoors after school. I ring the doorbell and try to look non-threatening for the cameras that monitor incoming visitors, and I hear the click of the opening lock as I am permitted into the building.

Inside Principal Abie Benitez’s office lies a seemingly different world. Parents shoot questions to the secretary in rapid-fire Spanish (the students are predominantly Latino).

Two fifth-graders rummage through the lost and found, wondering aloud if they left a sweatshirt in the gym or the cafeteria. On the side table next to me, even the fliers are loud, their fluorescent pinks and yellows screaming at me to enroll my child in free afterschool tutoring sessions in reading and math. But despite the frenzied surroundings, there’s a different kind of emptiness. The bulletin boards are devoid of student work.

A faded pale-orange poster announces that music classes are canceled, although it’s unclear how long it has hung there. Fliers advertising Arté, a community non-profit promoting Hispanic art, remain buried beneath sheaves of tutoring handouts. In fact, there’s no visible evidence of art anywhere in the office — strange for a school that has just been given $37,000 for it.

PHOTOGRAPHY BY LA WANG

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stablished in 1981, New Haven’s Percent for Art program is simple: it mandates that one percent of the city’s budget for each municipal construction project must be put toward the creation of a public artwork for that location. However, because the city funds only a fraction of most renovation costs, with the rest coming from state and federal funding, the true cost of each artwork is usually just one tenth of one percent of the cost of a given renovation. Recently, schools have been the overwhelming beneficiaries of this program due to New Haven’s Citywide School Construction Program, in which half of the city’s public schools have been renovated since 1995. Because these schools represent the biggest construction initiatives, 18 of Percent for Art’s 20 most recently commissioned works have been for schools. Columbus is the 27th school to be renovated, and with the “one percent” of its $35.8 million budget — a figure the city rounded to $37,000 — the school boasts the newest completed Percent for Art commission: a bronze statue by Providence-based artist José Buscaglia.

I first felt the presence of public art in New Haven three years ago as I was walking to a local restaurant and decided to take a shortcut through a seemingly deserted alleyway. There, among the weeds and pieces of abandoned chain link, I was confronted with an 18-foot wall of rusted metal tubes in various sizes, a sight only out of place among the other stray scrap metal in this setting due to its monumental size.

This, a nearby plaque informed me, was “Pamplona” by sculptor Dewitt Godfrey. Puzzled, I Googled the name a week later and discovered that “Pamplona” had been removed from its previous site in Cambridge, Massachusetts, after it was deemed an “ugly, rusty eyesore” by commenting onlookers. It then journeyed to New Haven, to remain, for several months, sandwiched between a crumbling brick wall and a Dunkin’ Donuts. After this introduction to this startling art world, I wanted to know more. What exactly was public art? And perhaps more importantly — who was paying for this stuff?

Percent for Art is the biggest commissioner of public art in the city; over the past five years, the Office of Cultural Affairs has spent nearly half a million dollars on artwork for New Haven’s schools alone. But where does the money go? Meanwhile, since the No Child Left Behind Act was signed in 2002, public schools nationwide have cut funding for their arts programs and lack the means to hire fulltime arts teachers. As these programs disappear, does Percent for Art make a difference? Does installing public artwork really fill the void?

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When Lamb asked me about the purpose of our interview, I explained that I was interested in how Percent for Art affects students in New Haven and contributes to the creative life of the school. She paused for a moment, then pointed out a part of the process that might interest me: once the finalists are chosen, the public has the opportunity to evaluate their proposals.

“Usually we put it on display in the school so that students and parents have an opportunity to comment on it,” Lamb said. “And we often put it on display in the library so that people at City Hall and the public have an opportunity to comment on it. After it’s been on display for anywhere from two to four weeks, we call the jury back together.”

The program’s latest project, a work of art for the Roberto Clemente School, is scheduled to be unveiled at the school’s opening in 2009. Lamb claimed that the Office of Cultural Affairs would display the proposals it received at the end of October 2008 at the New Haven Public Library.

“How many people come to see the proposals?” I asked.

“Well,” Lamb said, “I don’t think there’s a lot.”

“Do you have any examples of feedback you received from people in the community?”

“Not really, because we’re not out there, so we don’t really hear it directly,” she replied.

I was eager to see the proposals, although there was no set date for their public display at the time I first interviewed Lamb. When I contacted her again at the end of October, she explained that the proposals would be received in “three to four weeks,” and then put on display in the Wilson branch of the library. Seven weeks later, I tried again, and was informed that the proposals would be in that Friday, December 5, and that the person in charge of the display would get back to me. At the time of this writing, I have yet to hear from him.

Although Percent for Art claims that it supplies “monetary support, recognition, and pays tribute to Connecticut’s living artists by honoring and preserving their work on display,” when I asked Lamb about those artists, she was apologetic.

“We used to just have Connecticut artists in our database, and then we had a consultant…it was actually a Yale student,” Lamb said, eagerly drawing a parallel between this consultant’s background and my own — although the student, Marisa Angel Brown, studied at

“There’s one artist who — she’s been nominated several times, but she hasn’t actually won a commission — she does murals in which she actually engages the kids.”

olumbus School’s artwork was commissioned in 2006, when the architectural plan for the school’s renovation had been nearly finalized.

Barbara Lamb, director of the Office of Cultural Affairs, explained the lengthy process that, in the case of Columbus, took more than two years to complete. For each commission, Lamb’s office forms a committee that meets three times: once to confer about potential locations and specific mediums for the artwork in the building, once to discuss the 25 possible artists chosen from a file of contributors to the program and select three finalists, and once to choose an overall winner based on the proposals submitted by the three finalists.

in the School of Architecture and was several years my senior. “She revised our guidelines, and she looked at what other states and other cities do, and suggested that we were selling ourselves short by not including artists from New York and the surrounding states.”

Now the city has opened up the competition to artists from

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The Yale Daily News Magazine January 2009

Artworks established through the Percent for Art program can be found in New Haven’s schools. But how many children notice?

around the Northeast. Lamb, however, insists that local artists are still well represented.

“What we try to do is offer the jury a good mix of artists, so there’s a good number of artists from New Haven as well as artists from outside of New Haven, so they know what they’re selecting.”

Although these local artists may be represented in the prospective pool, lately they have never made it to winning actual commissions.

Of the 10 most recent works to be assigned, only one has been given to an artist from Connecticut. He is not from the New Haven area.

In the last minutes of the interview, I voiced to Lamb that I was interested in the idea of getting the students more involved in the creation of the program’s artwork. Was that ever something that the jury considered?

Lamb looked pensive. “There are some artists who, as part of their proposal, will put forth ways and ideas for how the children can be involved in the construction of the art. There are actually a number of artists who have proposed that kind of thing,” she said.

“And to be honest, I don’t know if there’s any who have actually won the commission as a result of this kind of thing.”

She paused, turning to consider the spreadsheet of past commissions on her office computer. “I don’t see one jumping out at me. Oh,” she said, turning back to me. “There’s one artist who — she’s been nominated several times, but she hasn’t actually won a commission — she does murals in which she actually engages the kids, so the kids actually help to paint the mural and to design the mural. There’ve been others who’ve worked in glass tile who showed how the kids could actually help to cut the glass and create this mosaic.”

“Yeah, I’ve done that before.”

“Yeah!” Lamb exclaimed, enthusiastic, then quickly regained her composure. “But … she didn’t win.” In the public art game, it’s winning the commission that matters. A good idea that fails to receive funding will never see the light of day.

P

rincipal Abie Benitez cried on October 24, the day Buscaglia’s statue was unveiled and dedicated. The sculpture, a bronze cast of a Spanish sailor on one of Columbus’s ships, represents a great deal for the school’s diverse ethnic community, according to Benitez, whose powerful voice and direct stare belie her diminutive stature.

“It makes it for all of us, kind of a common story. That it doesn’t matter who you are or where you come from, but doing the right thing, or doing your job, or doing what you’re assigned to do.”

When I questioned Benitez about the classes at Columbus, it became clear that what her students were “assigned to do” in class had little to do with art, despite the school’s expansive — and expensive — art room, newly added to the school during its renovation.

Benitez said that Buscaglia’s sculpture has been incorporated into the curriculum. “They need to look at the artwork, and they need to find features in the artwork. Draw it. Write about it. Talk about it,” she said. Yet this leaves precious little time for the creation of their own projects; students have art for half an hour once or twice a week, in accordance with the district’s standard curriculum for elementaryand middle-schoolers. The music program is even less developed.

“We have a part-time teacher,” Benitez said. “But it’s still really …” she trailed off, her eyes looking toward the open door. “It’s still in baby steps there.”

Percent for Art insists that its goal is not only to beautify, but also to educate. According to its website, it “has exposed city children to local artists while adding creative touches to schools and municipal buildings, adding a fun and imaginative aesthetic to these learning environments.” Benitez agreed. “One of the things that was very important for us was that [Buscaglia] understood that we’re trying to teach children the process of learning.”

“How exactly is this learning accomplished?” I inquired.

Benitez informed me that the artist “integrated that into his process in the sense of, um, there’s a plaque that explains the art

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January 2009 The Yale Daily News Magazine

own schools.

Splatter, an organization run through Yale’s Dwight Hall Center for Public Service, was founded in 1989. It has thrived in recent years, as public school teachers have been forced to look outside their schools for arts opportunities for their students. In response to the No Child Left Behind Act, public schools nationwide have been narrowing their curricula to focus on reading and math, the subjects whose scores determine whether or not a school is meeting its goals. In 2006, a Center on Education Policy survey determined that 71 percent of the 15,000 school districts in the country restricted the number of hours devoted to other subjects, including history and science; the arts were the hardest hit, often being completely eliminated. And in schools that have the furthest to go to meet the testing benchmarks set by the law, including many in the New Haven Unified School District, these cutbacks are the most dramatic. Splatter seeks to make up for these shortcomings.

“The teachers get really excited about it. I haven’t come across a teacher who is like, ‘No,’” said Andrew Saviano ’11, the co-coordinator of Splatter. “The limiting As public schools around the country have been cutting their arts programs, some agent here, as far as how many workshops might argue that New Haven’s City Hall is trying to fill the void through public art. we can do, isn’t the number of schools, but the number of volunteers. Every school we form and it also explains how the school envisions children learning.” try wants us to come to their school and do this for them.” Splatter That afternoon, I searched around the school grounds, but never holds workshops in schools around the city every week, as well as found the plaque. longer workshops on the weekends on the Yale campus for students who want a more involved experience.

45-minute walk away from Columbus, on the Yale University Andrew Ferguson, who teaches these fourth-graders at Beecher, campus, 14 fourth graders write furiously around a large shepherds his interested students to Splatter every month. Employed wooden table. They’ve been bused in by dedicated parents by Teach for America, Ferguson recognizes the need for a creative from New Haven’s Beecher School, on the northeastern outskirts outlet in his students’ lives — and the reality that they are not of the city. Divided into pairs, they’re all composing short dramatic exposed to it during the school day. scenes, to be performed at the end of this 90-minute class.

“They don’t have anything like this,” he said. “Obviously, as a Chrystal and Kristin, pink pencils moving in sync, pause to discuss teacher you try to incorporate it into the day, but since No Child stage directions intently from behind their magenta-painted nails. Left Behind, the school has cut every separate arts program. The One of the teachers approaches a student on another team. only reason they still have P.E. is because of the obesity crisis. There “How many characters do you guys have?” are no arts teachers. So you try to get it in other ways, like this.

“One, two, three, four, five, six, seven,” the student replies, That’s why this is so great.” launching a discussion about how to make the drama tighter.

When I mentioned Percent for Art to Ferguson, he said he had With six Yale mentors and 14 Beecher students, there is never heard of it, even though Beecher School was renovated in practically a one to two teacher-student ratio in the small seminar 2007 and has artwork commissioned through the program to the room in Linsley-Chittenden Hall, where Splatter, an arts magazine tune of $32,000. Yet, as Ferguson noted, Beecher has no full-time for New Haven students, convenes for its monthly workshop. Some arts teachers. Instead, a smattering of students comes to Splatter on of the scenes written this afternoon will end up in the magazine, a Saturdays. collection of students’ writing and artwork created over the course “Public school education in America is defective in a lot of ways, of the year. But to get this kind of attention, either students must but public school education in New Haven is not at the top of the trek to the university, which often requires concerted parental barrel, let’s put it that way,” Saviano said. “We can’t undo schooling effort, or devoted teachers must attract the organization to their that should have been different. So we’re trying to give them a little

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The Yale Daily News Magazine January 2009

taste of … kind of the other side of the coin.”

At the end of the workshop, many of the teams are eager to present their scenes, their hands waving in the air at Saviano. He chooses David and Briana, who relate the epic tale of Sacagawea and Lewis and Clark getting caught in a time warp and winding up in modern-day New York City. Their momentum is interrupted when Briana breaks character.

“We need someone to be a buffalo.”

And even among the giggling, self-conscious preteens, a willing artiste emerges from the group.

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fter speaking with Benitez, I explained sheepishly that I had yet to see the sailor sculpture. She eagerly pointed me toward the door where I entered the school. Although I invited her to join me, she politely excused herself. “I hope I have more time to sit out there and look at it,” she said, before hurrying

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back to her office for the afternoon.

I walked in the direction of her gesture, exiting the school and pausing on the deserted sidewalk in front. After walking back and forth across the length of the building, I had yet to spot the statue — or, for that matter, another student outside.

After 15 minutes of searching, I crossed the street to begin the long walk to my own school, when I looked back for one last glance.

From my spot in front of Porky’s Bail Bonds, I could make it out.

Perched on top of the roof, there was the bust of a sailor, his arm held aloft, reaching for his promised land. The piece, as Benitez had so insistently described, was inspiring. But, placed atop the school’s extended overhang, it was impossible for children at the school to learn from it, or even see it — unless they were visiting their neighborhood bail bondsman. As I turned away, I could still picture the sailor staring towards shore — and I wondered if I was one of the first people to stare back.

Sugaring In winter they place a bucket beneath the steel tap of a maple tree to draw the sugar from the center of the bole and boil it for syrup.

Soon it will be winter, soon the ice will coil in the mouths of gargoyles like some strange and silent language spoken only to stone — I, too, will be silent, standing in the snow, but I cannot sleep, as trees sleep — a wolf howls through the screen door and keeps me waking.

My father returns as an alchemist — devising the principles for fire and ore, and a symbol I cannot define sleep distorted in the shadows of the hearth.

Winter is coming.

The roots of the maples are covered in snow.

They are boiling the sap until it makes sugar, distilling it down and down until nothing is left but sweetness and steam — Now the wolf tastes it and becomes a man, and my father gives me away. Perhaps, in spring, I will taste it perhaps I will break into flower.

-Laura Marris

The Yale Daily News Magazine January 2009

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a house with a door always

OPEN

BY KANGLEI WANG

At the Amistad Catholic Worker House, Luz Colville cooks pancakes and home fries, while her husband, Mark, plans dieins and other protests. They hope to share a meal with you. his breakfast has been served without fail for the past 14 years, every Monday through Friday from eight to nine a.m. The homeless and those who are down on their luck begin assembling at seven, rubbing their hands in the pre-dawn chill, chatting with each other as their mouths expel fog. Though many of them have already eaten the cold breakfast provided at a local shelter, they come here for something heartier. They loiter on Luz’s front porch, anticipating the coming meal of warm pancakes, lightly charred home fries, and fresh coffee, which is served in any of a colorful maelstrom of mugs.

Vincent ambles in at 9:15, just as the last mint-green plastic plates, still sticky with syrup, are cleared away. He is apologetic. “I’m sorry, Miz Lucy,” he says, scratching his short, matted black hair, lowering his head. “I overslept.” “You know when breakfast is,” Luz says firmly, looking straight at him so that he will raise his sheepishly bowed head. All the same, she is rummaging in the overflowing cabinets and handing him a mug, a plate, a fork.

Vincent has been living with the Colvilles, Mark and Luz, for about a month now, at their Amistad Catholic Worker home in New Haven’s Hill neighborhood, a neighborhood historically associated with crime, poverty, and drugs. Vincent had been wandering along the cracked-cement streets for three weeks before the Colvilles gave him a place to stay. “We thought we weren’t going to take anyone else in,” says Luz. “There just wasn’t room.” But they hung a curtain in the third-floor hallway, making a little makeshift room for him there. Vincent now sleeps in a right triangle sort of space, beneath the hypotenuse formed by the inward-slanting roof. Though he sleeps with three comforters, his feet are always cold — Vincent has diabetes and high blood presPHOTOGRAPHY BY GINGER JIANG

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January 2009 The Yale Daily News Magazine

sure. He used to be a chef with formal training from Johnson and Wales but couldn’t stand on his feet long enough to work a job. “It’s because he doesn’t take care of himself,” says Luz. “He still eats the same greasy things, he doesn’t like to walk anywhere, he misses his doctor appointments. Now Rennie over here” — she points to a small, hunched old man in a black Veterans’ Administration cap, sorting through the stuff that he’s finally moving out of the Colvilles after living with them on and off for years — “has prostate cancer, had it for 10 years. Refused treatment. All the ones that got treatment, they’ve passed away. But he takes care of himself, you know. Changed his diet and everything. And he’s a walker!” Rennie is a healthy 85-year-old and Luz, a former nurse, is proud.

The Colvilles avow they are not a shelter or a church. What they have is a home. They welcome people unconditionally, without insisting that they change their lives. Beginning in 1994, ever since they started a branch of the Catholic Worker House in New Haven, Mark and Luz have been living here in voluntary poverty, taking care of the community while raising six children: four of their own — Keeley, Soledad, Justin, Isaiah — as well as a niece and nephew.

The Catholic Worker movement itself began in 1933, during the Great Depression, with a series of inspirational newsletters by the famous Catholic activist and anarchist Dorothy Day. Its adherents continue to feel they have the personal responsibility to change societal conditions, believing this responsibility to be the true mission and teaching of Christ. Catholic Workers support nonviolence, mercy, manual labor, and chosen poverty not as mere moral principles, but as lived-out realities. “My wife and I, we were startin’ to have kids, but we saw that all this materialism wasn’t an environment to raise them in,” Mark tells me. “We wanted the poor to be our neighbors. People drive by here and say, ‘how can people live like this?’ but they’re not seeing the community. As people of faith, we shouldn’t depend on the government or even the Church to do good. The faith says there should be houses of hospitality in every neighborhood.”

So they started one. A house where hot meals are served familystyle 11 times a week for anywhere from ten to 50 people, who pack the seats at the table and spill over onto unsteady benches, milling on the tiled floors where the Colvilles’ children play with their peaceable Rottweiler, Nina. A house where up to seven people with nowhere to go might stay for months, sometimes years, in one of the spare rooms — or, like Vincent, an unused hallway. A house where, if you’re willing to change, Mark and Luz will help you. A house with a door always open.

girl?” drawls a man with a missing front tooth and a purple beret from the dilapidated porch next door. “Jes’ go right in.” He points his chin to the doorknob. “Jes’ go.”

I push the door and walk into a dim hallway, and Mark is there to the left, in the small, cluttered living room by the stairs, fiddling with his glasses and contemplating his Macbook. He is somewhat tall, with the gaunt look of a hockey player gone to seed, white, bearded, with hair too smoothly streaked with grey and white to be considered peppered, and a straggling ponytail in back. He stands up when I come in. “Hi there, I’m Mark,” he says, extending a hand. “You want anything to eat?” I don’t, but as someone interested in social justice, I hunger to know why he runs this house, why he chooses to live this way, why he campaigns for peace despite all the political troubles I’ve heard he’s brought upon himself, and how he has kept himself inspired.

“Sit down,” he says. And he begins to talk. I imagine he must have told his kids at some point what he told me, using analogies like these: how sometimes the world is like cable TV, you turn on the channel and you’re glued to the screen; it sucks you in. “It’s like that ring,” he says, “in ... oh I can’t remember” — “you mean Lord of the Rings?”

— “yes! That ring that belonged to that evil man and when you look at it, you want it. It’s like that.” Mark didn’t want to be vortexed into contentment; he wanted to protest, to campaign locally, nation-

He stands up when I come in.

“Hi there, I’m Mark,” he says, extending a hand.

“You want anything to eat?”

T

he first time I arrive at their door, unannounced on a blustery Friday afternoon, I am hesitant. I had been afraid for days to call them, because I didn’t want to be just another reporter — and they’ve had many come to their doors — who floats into their lives briefly, washes a few dishes, maybe, talks to a few people, and gets to take the M bus home at the end of the day.

Nevertheless, I open the wire-fence gate that separates their chaotic front yard — strewn with things like baby carriages and plastic toy cars — from the sidewalk. I walk up the stairs to their porch and knock feebly on the glass door. No one answers. “Whatcha doin’,

ally, even internationally. “Sometimes you campaign,” he says, blue eyes staring into mine, “not to change the world or people, necessarily, but to keep the world from changing you.” His activism also gets him arrested and imprisoned, sometimes for as little as 30 days, once for almost a year. It takes him away from the local work he’s doing, away from his family.

Most recently, he stood trial for protesting against Blackwater Worldwide, a North Carolina-based company that hires mercenaries from poor countries at high salaries and contracts them to the government. These soldiers are not expected to comply with military law, so in September 2007, when a group of them opened fire on 17 Iraqi civilians stuck in a traffic jam — “out of sheer boredom,” Mark says — no court prosecuted them. Mark and six other activists entered the Blackwater compound a month after the event, riding in a car with fake bullet holes in it, dripping blood — “fake blood, you know, paint” — and left red-painted handprints on the company headquarters sign. They were arrested for trespassing and damage to property, but together, the “die-in” they were holding — a simulation of the Iraqi civilians killed — got attention for the Catholic Worker House and its cause. “People usually write about us when one of us gets arrested,” he said, chuckling.

Mark is not the first flippantly courageous activist I’ve met. Once, two years ago, I was on a hilltop in an almost-border town between

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New Hampshire and Vermont, them a check for $5000. It was at an old New England boarding unexpected, but, Luz says, “I’m school for four-day-long retreat sad to say that’s already been — a “shindig,” they called it — spent. We’re behind on bills.” for young people training to be Even if he wanted to, right now activists. I was hesitant then, at the Mark’s criminal record means he workshop for resistance, where can’t work a normal job, unless college students not so much a new ordinance by City Hall older than me told me how to act called “Ban the Box” succeeds in cases of civil disobedience. The and he doesn’t have to menpolice have to warn you three tion his past felonies and misdetimes before they go in, they said; meanors on his job application try to stall them as long as they (though prospective employcan. And if they arrest you, well ers could still inquire during an — they shrugged — it’s actually interview). Luz seems excited a good thing if you’re under 18. about this; Mark, perched on They suggested die-ins at places a bench in the kitchen, looks like Ford dealers, just going in blank and nods, “yeah, yeah.” with gas masks and fainting right Luz doesn’t regret giving up her on their property, drawing chalk job as a nurse in order to devote outlines of the dead on the paveall her time to being a Cathoment outside, to show how much lic Worker, but lately she’s been Big Oil is killing. They had us getting restless, a bit short-tempractice going limp on partners pered. “Our motto is, when you so police would find it harder to can’t see Christ anymore in every drag us away. Just under a hunperson that walks through that dred people were in that wooddoor” — she points outside — The Amistad Catholic Worker House. Up to seven men and paneled classic boarding school “it’s time to get a job.” women who need food and shelter sleep in empty rooms and classroom that day, linking arms, But she can’t get just any job. hallways for several months — sometimes several years. going limp, pretending to faint.

With the ministry, she should be I’ve still never had to use any of getting a job that helps people in those techniques; I don’t know if I would ever risk arrest. Why go some way, but it’s difficult with her hours. “It’s hard to do that and to prison if you are useless in it, if you can create more change out- have enough energy left to do this,” she says, gesturing towards the side of it? dishwasher as she adds some Oxyclean. I nod, feeling idle by her side.

There are others closer to Mark who also ask him these questions.

I follow her as she goes into the kitchen to marinate chicken for dinHe once responded to them in the local Christmas 1999 Catholic ner. Vincent comes down and tries to sit by her and talk, and Luz brisWorker House newsletter, which he wrote from jail; this was during tles. “When I’m cooking, that’s my space,” she says, and Vincent, in the holiday season, the busiest time for Catholic Worker House. He an effort to be tactful, leaves. had been arrested for refusing to leave Senator Joe Lieberman’s office, “Last time, I blew up at him,” she tells me later. “I was servin’ dinwhere Mark and four others had been ringing a bell every 12 minutes ner, and he just kept tryin’ to talk to me and talk to me. I said, ‘Vinto mark another Iraqi child’s U.S.-linked death. In the newsletter, cent, give me my space!’ It’s OK if he talks about his life and his probMark said that he was not indispensable. “One’s personal life circum- lems — but he never does anything about them! Anyway, he tried to stances,” he wrote, referencing his status as a father and husband, “do talk to me again just now, but he was in my space again. I tell him, not provide some kind of exemption from the Christian obligation to ‘why can’t he just find me when I’m not in my space?’” Luz continnon-cooperate with a death-dealing government.” Furthermore, he ues, “We’re a family, you know. You gotta respect your brothers and said, isn’t prison the place where many poor and hurting and others sisters. I tell him, ‘you don’t barge into your sister’s room and just deserving of mercy are? “Out there we’re the do-gooders, the help- start complainin’. Or, well, if you do, you know you’re gonna get ers, the heroes, with our good name and reputation intact. In here, back-slapped.’” we’re more like Jesus, and just like everybody else: guilty.”

It’s Vincent’s inaction that bothers Luz the most: the complaining But Luz still doesn’t approve of Mark putting himself in danger. about his health problems when he’s not exercising or on a proper “I’m the hands, the practical side of the family,” she says. “I’m like, diet. She doesn’t always want to have to tell him what to do. “Anywell, I’ve got to do this and this and this. And I do it. Mark sort of way. I’m gonna go up to talk to Vincent about it. Just get it straight.” floats around, writes. He has all these big ideas, but when he goes get She sighs and looks up at the stairs. arrested, I say, ‘now who’s going to do the driving? Who’s going to pick up all the food? I can’t do that by myself!’” arely two weeks later, Luz is laughing with Vincent again.

Both Mark and Luz are currently unemployed; they depend on “He’s really tryin’ to change,” she says, beaming. “The other donations to keep their home running, and nothing is dependable. A day, he was so happy. He found this drink in the store, for local church on which the Colvilles had given up hope recently wrote diabetics, you know. But I tell him, ‘you can’t have that — it’s 200

B

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January 2009 The Yale Daily News Magazine

if he were a giant tree standing against the wind. When the prayer ends with the sign of the cross, Dimitirus chants over the rustle of people waking from a moment of hope, “Bless this food. Bless this neighborhood. Just bless everythin’.”

Inside, I attempt to figure out the hot and cold settings on the Colvilles’ faucet to rinse the dishes. “The water comes on slow,” says Luz, and then, laughing, “what else you do expect from a Catholic Worker faucet?” Dimitrius laughs, too, and tells me his story, how he changed.

“You know, I met Mark when he first started this thing. He was standin’ out there with his coffee and his apples. I’m like, what’s a white guy doin’ down here?

I was with my crew then, you know. We were young, into makin’ quick money.

So I go up to him and then — I’ll never A sign outside the Catholic Worker House describes owners Mark and Luz Colville’s charitaforget — little Keeley who’s standin’ by ble philosophy: to give help to all those who are willing to receive it, all in the spirit of prayer. her dad’s side grabs onto my leg and hugs me. But I didn’t know the cops calories — and your dinner!’ and he was so disappointed. Weren’t were watchin’ then. And then I go down the street and they accuse you, Vincent?” He nods, and says, “Miz Lucy, I’m tryin’ to be me of sellin’ drugs to a white guy! I say, ‘I weren’t sellin’ no drugs.’ I good.” didn’t even have drugs on me. An’ Mark comes over and tries to help “Yea, boy, you try,” howls Dimitrius, another large black man me. But they still arrest me. They give me ninety days.” roughly the same age as Vincent. Today is Turkey Day, Luz’s self-proBy the time Dimitrius came out, he had no place to stay. The next claimed (and stressful) community holiday, the first day when people day, he went to the Columbus House homeless shelter, where he met of the community can start signing up for free turkeys — donated Mark, working behind the counter at the time. Mark told Dimitrius from local churches — that the Colvilles deliver to their doors. The to come to the Catholic Worker House; Dimitrius answered “yeah, sign-up list attracts people the Colvilles have never heard of before, yeah” but started hustling again, got caught and again went to jail — who have never once been to a Catholic Worker meal but want a free “for a few minutes,” he says, inmate lingo for anywhere from a couple bird. The crowd begins forming even earlier than the daily break- of weeks to months. This time, after coming out, he took Mark’s offer fast line.

That day is also Thursday, which means a free clinic — a no-strings-attached check-up for Vincent, Dimitrius, and others who show up at the Catholic Worker House — and the weekly Give and Take in the Colvilles’ front yard. Donations ranging from old clothing to chocolate cream cakes stream through the Colvilles’ hands into those of the community. Luz has first priority, taking the stuff she needs for the house first: loaves of bread, a bag of croissants, a couple of pies, fresh zucchini squash. I help fil- to stay at their house. “I’ve stayed for nine, 10 years … I’ve stayed in ter the rest into plastic bags for people to take home, trying to dis- every room in this house except the second floor. And I tell my crew, tribute evenly the bruised vegetables with white insides spilling out, you know, we aren’t gonna do this anymore. We’re not sellin’ drugs the slightly squished bread. The receivers are grateful but picky: they in this neighborhood. And they don’t … ’cause I was a real bad boy want this bag, no, that bag. Mark accommodates. back then.” “Yeahhh, boy, you was a tough guy back ‘den,” croons After everyone has had his due share, Mark asks someone to say one man nearby, who overhears and remembers. Dimitrius chuckles a prayer. A woman, holding her plastic bag of food tightly in the in thinking about his old street self. He still walks with a limp. just-strengthening drizzle, begins a quick prayer in Spanish. I can’t understand a word of it except maybe “Dios,” but I can understand ope is a common topic of conversation in the kitchen, the facial expressions around her: the people huddled together, eyes especially in the wake of Barack Obama’s victory. “You closed, clutching their vegetables and bread. Dimitrius has his twin think Obama is a good president?” asks Vincent, in that arms spread to the raining skies as if welcoming the raindrops, as painfully slow and deliberate way of his when saying anything seri-

“I’ve stayed for nine, 10 years,” Dimitrius says.

“I’ve stayed in every room in the house except the second floor.”

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The Yale Daily News Magazine January 2009

ous. “You have hope?” I nod, tentatively. “Well, I’m gon’ wait and see,” he says. “The government, they say, ‘bah, bah, bah’” — he opens and closes his fingers onto his palm like a snapping crocodile — “but when have they done anything for us? I’m gon’ wait.”

For people like Vincent, it’s not enough just to hear the words.

Obama’s “Yes we can” is hope, yes, but Vincent and others who visit the Catholic Worker House — and the Catholic Workers themselves — recognize that this doesn’t always become “Yes we will” or “Yes we did.” Elie Wiesel once famously wrote, “Words can sometimes, in moments of grace, attain the quality of deeds.” But what happens when words cannot feed, cannot by themselves allow others to believe? It’s the actions at the Catholic Worker House that matter to the people who go there for relief: the serving of meals, the doling of vegetables, the tireless work of Mark and Luz in the upkeep of the house. As much as Luz wants Mark’s presence at home, she never stops him from protesting: that is his further way of doing something, an extension of the active charity he gives at the Catholic Worker House.

Before dinner that night, Justin, the Colvilles’ third oldest, wants to go upstairs to eat. “No,” says Luz. “You eat downstairs, with everyone else.” With all the people who come through their doors. “I don’t trust other people running this place,” says Luz, before dinner that night. “The volunteers, they’re great, but they just serve meals and close down the house. All they do is the service part. That’s not how it’s supposed to be. It’s a community. You eat together. You’re open. When you’re here” — and she is perhaps unaware she is quoting the Olive Garden — “you’re family.”

The family is small tonight, with only 5 or 6 people trickling in,

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maybe because it’s still raining, maybe because it gets darker earlier now. This is my first dinner with the group, mostly because I’ve been afraid of taking the bus to this area of New Haven at night.

Justin mentions how he doesn’t like learning Spanish, and one lady at the table becomes animated. “Learn Spanish!” she exclaims adamantly. “I wish I learned, kept in school. You keep learnin’. It’ll be ben-e-ficial for your future. Your future is your money. Mm-hmm.

Believe dat. I say this ’cause when you wish you had sumthin’, you want others to have what you din’t have.”

She leans in. “What you want to be, Justin?”

“An actor,” he replies.

“A doctor?”

“An actor.”

“Oh, an actor! Well, an actor. That take a lotta work. You think it’s easy? Got all them actors ’round here … you need hard work and you need” — she points to her temple — “up here.”

“I know,” says Justin. Perhaps he is used to this advice, but he doesn’t say much else, and I’m the one feeling inspired instead.

Vincent is going to the store as I am about to leave. “You want me to walk you to the bus stop?” he says. “I’m okay,” I say, “thanks,” but I’m grateful because I know he means it, and because it means he’s walking places, changing his lifestyle with the little actions that end up meaning more. Because the Colville home is a place where actions are more than just physical movements; where people really do feed on hope, gentle chidings, and pancakes; where, despite everything, Mark kisses Luz’s forehead before he leaves the house; where a place of service really is a home, replete with its arguments, its contradictions, its nonverbal realities.

Visitors to the Amistad House, like this man, say they feel a sense of community there. Amistad, in Spanish, means “friendship.”

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January 2009 The Yale Daily News Magazine

TOO CLOSE FOR COMFORT

BOOK BURNING by Eric Ward

Politics can certainly be incendiary. When a young man’s return to Deep Springs College is interrupted by a sudden truck fire, the loss of his jacket, Leatherman, and a copy of Macbeth forces him to confront his roots. kira pushed the gas pedal even farther into the floor. More black smoke swirled up through the opened window: the engine wasn’t burning all its diesel fuel. He tapped the speedometer. The needle still quivered below 5 mph. Even though we had a halfton of green wood behind us in the trailer, we should be able to travel faster than this.

And the engine shouldn’t sound like a wind-up soldier at the end of its run.

Our destination was Deep Springs College, a 26-student, all-male, selfgoverning working ranch with a liberal arts curriculum. Akira and I — and twenty-four other nineteen-year-olds — spent two years there bucking hay, branding cattle, and taking classes in Psychoanalysis and Ancient Greek. Today, we’d driven to neighboring Fish Lake Valley to cut poplars from a wet hollow to dry for firewood. At noon, we’d put away the chainsaws; at three, we’d loaded up the green branches and started home. Now, by the sun, it was already five, and the underpowered truck hadn’t inched its load even halfway up Westgarde Pass.

We’d be lucky to make it back to the ranch before nightfall.

Through gaps in the smoke, the California desert spread out around us.

The clear air allowed the eye to travel vast distances. The hundred-acre alfalfa fields of the neighboring farms were little more than green stitches in a subtle brown patchwork.

The shimmering seam of Highway 165, along with its steady trickle of eighteenwheelers, cut diagonally across the expanse.

I started at a blurred reflection of my face. The rearview mirror was shuddering against the door; the engine’s excessive efforts must have worked the screws loose.

Something to do, I thought. I felt around on the floor for my jacket: a stiff, canvas shell stained by motor oil and pocked by barbed wire, with a big rectangular pocket on each quadrant of the torso. As it had countless times before, my hand worked its way into the bottom right pocket and found the industry standard for quick repairs: the Leatherman Tool.

Among those who work with their hands,

a Leatherman is as common as a fork. My father, a carpenter, keeps one on his tool belt, across the buckle from his tape measure. It’s amazing how much of the world requires needle-nose pliers — or scissors, or a knife, or a file. After I got to Deep Springs and started working with my hands every day, it didn’t take long before I could open the device with the same fluid wrist-flick I’d seen my father use. In a moment, the pliers were gripping the round-top nut, and in another, my reflection and I were sharing a steady gaze. “Nothing like a job well done,” I imagined my father saying, and watched my eyes roll in the rearview mirror — my usual response to that statement. When I was young, I just held the light. But since becoming responsible for my own work, I had been more and more inclined towards congratulating myself on little successes.

Fishing around in my jacket to return the Leatherman to the proper pocket, my hand fell on the spine of Macbeth. I had several books in the pockets, but I knew this one by feel: the cover was worn and soft. The other books — philosophy paperbacks I was reading for class — had smooth, characterless bindings. This copy of Macbeth was important. It had belonged to my grandfather. Opening to the creased page, I settled into the vinyl seat for the long ride back.

T

he night before I left for Deep Springs, I drifted in and out of the den of my parents’ house in New Jersey. They were watching The O’Reilly Factor. I was poaching books from the shelves around the TV during commercial breaks.

“Those were my father’s,” my dad said from his dent on the couch. “You better be careful with them.”

I had just taken down Macbeth and added it to one of the growing cairns on the Berber rug. The drab stacks of old spines — tawny reds, mottled browns, fading greens — were the same colors as the California desert I’d seen in pictures. On the shelves, the dusty rows looked toothless, as if I’d hit them in the mouth.

Although my father owned the books, he didn’t read them. In my mind, they still belonged to my grandfather, even though he had died before I was born. I admired him. He was a rebel and a scholar. His communist activities in college — attempting to organize unions for university employees — attracted the cold eye of the conservative administration. He was kicked out before his senior year. Working as a newscaster after his expulsion, he was blacklisted for sticking up for a fellow journalist. I always thought he had done something with his education.

I thought his books deserved to be read.

“The shelves look funny,” my mother said. “Do you have to take so many?”

I looked at the copy of Faust in my hands. It was in German. I didn’t even know German.

“Yes,” I said over my shoulder as The O’Reilly Factor came back on screen.

Carrying another stack of books, I stumped out of the den. For several years now it had been difficult for me to hide my disgust for their politics. The first book my father ever gave me was on my sixteenth Christmas: Bill O’Reilly: For Kids. Dizzy with anger, I had cast the book, along with its wrapping paper, into the fireplace.

A

kira slammed on the brakes, almost jerking Macbeth from my hands.

“Something’s wrong,” he said.

“The wheel’s warm.”

Leaving the engine running, we leapt out of the truck and jammed our fingers into the grille to find the latch. It was almost too hot to touch. As I poked around for the metal rod to prop open the hood, Akira let out a yelp.

“Fire!” he cried, leaping into the air while flinging his arms to his face. I saw the steering column above the engine block grow blurry, like a straw dropped too quickly into a glass of water. Then I saw one tongue of orange flame. Then two. Then a little blue aura.

“Do we have an extinguisher?” I shouted.

I shot around the door into the passenger side of the truck, tossing my jacket over the book on the seat to search the floor.

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MARIA HARAS

The Yale Daily News Magazine January 2009

“No, we have to run,” he said. I didn’t move — something was tugging at me to stay. There was a hiss and a small pop.

“Run!” A minute later, I stopped, panting, at the base of the hill. Now thick black smoke was pouring from the cab. I heard the distant throb of the engine — it was still running. I didn’t know if that was good or bad. Both doors hung open like wide, gasping gills.

I felt a strange momentary pride at the grandness of the smoking truck and its long trailer, as if we had landed a white, magical fish.

Then I remembered I had left my grandfather’s book in the cab.

My body responded with a lurching stride toward the burning truck. The truck emitted a hiss, and clear fluid spilled from its underbelly. Fuel. There was a pop as the back window cracked and the clear fluid on the road blushed into flame. Then I heard the roar.

In a second, the whole front end was a torch. Smoke spilled into the empty air like

ink in water, curling gently into the shape of a feather pen.

O

nly after the truck had turned more black than white did I hear a flock of sirens approaching from over the hill. Soon a fleet of gray trucks came into view, their sides emblazoned “Bishop Fire Department.” They were from the closest town, more than an hour away. But as a platoon of men in yellow jackets unfurled hoses beneath flashing lights, I heard an altogether different siren from the opposite direction.

Turning around, I saw a small red pickup struggle up the hill, emitting a tinny whine. As it approached, I noticed it had a wooden barrel on the back — it looked like a pickle drum turned on its side — covered in flaking orange-red paint. The truck pulled up broadside along our burning truck, as if to engage it in a naval battle.

The driver, a little beetle of a man with a full white beard, left the engine running as he scuttled around the pickup’s perimeter

to a two-stroke engine attached to a pump.

Yanking frantically on the pull-start to no avail, he produced an old fire extinguisher.

But before he could pull the safety ring, his truck gave a shudder and began releasing gasps of white smoke. Muttering curses, he tossed the fire extinguisher through the passenger seat window, trundled on bow legs back to the driver seat, and switched off the ignition. He then slipped the car out of gear and, fixing his eyes firmly in the rearview mirror, began to roll silently backwards down the hill.

After the odd couple retreated, a futuristic vehicle from the Bishop fire department approached the burning chassis and began to coat it with soapy gray foam.

If by any chance the book had survived the fire, it would never survive this dousing.

As the flames died, the damage was made clear. Every window was blown out. The melted steering wheel wept tears of its own material, like one of Dali’s clocks. Peeking out from a grayish mass of wet, charred vinyl, I spied a clump of bright metal melted

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January 2009 The Yale Daily News Magazine

to the frame. My hand went instinctively toward my right pocket, so I could grab my Leatherman and pry off the metal, but my fingers clasped a wet cotton t-shirt instead of a canvas jacket. I realized that the slag of metal was my Leatherman. I tried to pull it off with my fingers, but it was fused tight.

The book wasn’t in sight.

Only the tires continued to burn, dirty and slow.

Akira sloshed through the foam from

largest building, the only one with a reliable telephone.

I knew my father would be angry. Not about the Leatherman, but about the book.

He would be sad that I had been so careless with it. I pushed away my guilt with feelings of self-righteousness: Wasn’t I the one who actually read Grandad’s books? So didn’t they as good as belong to me? Bending to tie my boots, I noticed one of the laces was fraying. My hand instinctively drifted to my

Macbeth was mostly gone, but what remained was spread open, suspended in the seat springs like a butterfly specimen. the other side of the truck. He held up a tarnished brass button from my jacket. The fire had turned it blue-green. As I put it in my back pocket, I spied a charred crimson cover peeking out from under destroyed upholstery. Macbeth was mostly gone, but what remained was spread open, suspended in the seat springs like a butterfly specimen.

I reached in to grab it, and came up with a handful of soapy blackened pages. I stuffed them into my pocket, and they crumbled.

A few vehicles from Deep Springs lurched to a halt behind me. Nineteen-yearold torsos with shovels spilled out of every door. One of my classmates pressed a shovel into my hand. “The firemen say the only way to put the fires out is to smother them,” he said. The wet pages soaked into my skin through the pocket denim. I fished them out and threw them back into the cab.

Through the windshield-hole, Akira said, “It’s only a book, right?”

W

hile the rest finished cleaning up, I headed back to the college to call the Bishop garage. The fireman told us we had to get the wreck off the road by nightfall. Smoke-streaked and bleary-eyed, I drove down into the valley.

Bouncing over the first and second cattle guard, I passed through the mist from the sprinklers dousing the fields by the main driveway, then turned sharply toward the

hip for my Leatherman, but again it found only my t-shirt.

As I fingered the wet cotton, it occurred to me how much Deep Springs had made me like my father: the constant expectation of having the right tool, the hidden satisfaction waiting to be gleaned from a job well done. I had always thought of my journey to Deep Springs as travelling in my grandfather’s footsteps — joining a radical, intellectual commune he would have loved.

But by now I was as accustomed to having a Leatherman on my hip as Dad was. Would my grandfather even have wanted to get his hands dirty the way my father did? Did he even know how light his books felt after a day’s work?

H

ey, Dad. There was an accident.”

“Are you all right?” He was eating a sandwich, but stopped chewing.

“You’re not hurt, are you?”

“I’m fine. Listen. There was a fire in one of the trucks. Everyone got out fine but a few things got lost. Like my jacket.”

“The stiff one that Uncle Marlon gave you? Too bad.”

“And the Leatherman.”

“Good little tool, isn’t it?” He took a break to swallow. “You always expect tools to last a lifetime, but they never do. You got good use out of it, yeah?”

I took a deep breath. “Listen, I also lost one of your dad’s books.”

“Which one?”

“The red one. Macbeth.”

“Well, I’m in the den now,” he said slowly, “and looking at the holes on the shelves. I was here last night, watching television, and thinking about how pleased I was that those books were finally getting some use. A book is a tool on its own, you know? I was different when I was your age.

I read a bit too. And I didn’t care what happened to that book when I was traveling.

I’d toss it in a pickup with all else. I liked it not just because it reminds me of my dad.

It’s a good book on its own.”

“Yeah,” I mumbled into the receiver.

“Is it for school? Do you need another copy?”

“I was just reading it for extra. I’ll be all right.”

“And we’ll get you a new Leatherman.”

“Dad, you don’t have to…”

“I said ‘we.’ You’ll work for me for a day in exchange. Around the house, some plumbing. Agreed?”

“Agreed.”

B

y the time I hung up, it was evening. Despite the fleeting warmth, the gathering darkness had reduced the desert to more intimate proportions. A flatbed from the Bishop garage, just turning on its headlights, rattled over the second cattle guard with the husk of the truck on its back. As it came into view, I couldn’t suppress a smile. The rear wheels, almost untouched by the fire, poked unnaturally up in the air, like the rump of a puppy digging in a gopher hole. And the front grille had melted into something resembling a skull’s grin.

“Nothing like a job well done,” I said out loud. And though it was meant as a joke, the words sank into me without a splash. Everything was all right. The truck was insured. No one was hurt. The husk passed, and the flatbed’s taillights flickered brightly before turning out of sight toward the metal shop.

On Highway 165, the constant semis, one by one, winked their headlights into existence. Another pickup truck rumbled over the cattle guard, towing the trailer full of wood. I collapsed on my back beside the driveway, watching the constellations faintly assert themselves. The unloading, I decided, could wait until morning.

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FICTION THE LAUNDRESS by Alice Baumgartner The setting is the Great American Desert, where Bible thumpers, outlaws, and gold miners collide with cowboy boots, Bishops and brimstone, and where lovers and gunslingers fight, in the year with no summer.

n the year with no summer, the native women take to their fields in the nude. The missionaries protest and the Christian women are appalled, but the miners crawl out of their shanties at night and peer between the dried out corn stalks at the women in the moonlight, their skin velvety and dark with sweat.

They lift their arms and stomp their feet, so that the ground is worked so fine that the dirt lies light and loose like flour. Sometimes the wind takes it up, and then the women disappear in the dust.

As the Laundress unlaces her boots at the side of the field, she does not think about the naked women. There are two dead men, sprawled beside her, their chests pocked full of lead. Their eyes are still open, staring blankly at the stars, which the Laundress imagines to be nothing more than pinpricks in the sky.

There is a lake of blood in . . . (Continued on p. 31)

The Yale Daily News Magazine January 2009

the first man’s mouth, and his pants are unzipped. The beads of a rosary slip out of his chest pocket. His name is the Reverend. The other man lays on the ground with military precision, his hands by his sides and his chin up high. His hair is knotted and stiff with blood, and there is a big blue hole between his eyes from where the bullet went in. He is known in the Great American Desert as the General, and although he had not attained any rank in the federal army, the title suited the grandiloquence of his character in such a way that it no longer seemed to matter if it was true.

The dead men do not trouble the Laundress any more than the women. All she can think about is the thing in her belly. She imagines it to be large and brown, its skin cracked and chafed like the salt flats. It often hiccups loudly in the amniotic fluid, and bucks against the walls of her stomach, scratching her flesh with its little fingers until her insides are raw and pink. The General laughed at her when she told him that his child would be horned and scaled, with two heads and a forked tongue because he said that having a wedding ring didn’t make any difference at all. But she can’t help but think that it does.

Because if it is possible for spring to turn into fall with no summer in between, then it might very well be that her child will be covered in scales, and she would have to scrape them off like the skin of a fish.

Leaning forward with the slowness that comes with pregnancy, she pulls off her boots and begins the long and almost tedious exercise of undressing. Her elbows knock against the corn stalks as she peels away her long underwear, her skin prickling against the cold air and her legs sticky with dust, so comforted by the slow baring of her body that her motions become mindless, automatic. And then she begins to remember how her clothes became bloody and how the General became dead.

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world. They nailed the boots of the hanged cattle thieves and counterfeiters to the doors of the church, because even if they died with their boots on, they sure as hell were going to meet the devil barefoot. And so as the years went by, the doors of the church grew heavy under their weight until no one could force them open any longer.

The only other white woman in the Great American Desert beside the Laundress was the Indiana Girl — an enormous woman who had made her debut in their camp wearing nothing but the enormous tail feathers of an Australian ostrich. At night, the Laundress could hear the Indiana Girl, moaning like a bear from the shanties beyond the fields. It made the Laundress shudder beneath her sheets.

It was at this time that the General had crawled into the Laundry, holding his stomach together with one hand, and spitting blood into the other. He looked at the Laundress, and asked politely if she could please sew together his insides before they all leaked out. She threaded the needle, burned its tip in a candle flame, and cross-stitched his stomach without a word.

For the next few months, the General slept in the Laundry, beside the tubs of water and the washing boards.

At night, the Laundress would crawl beside him, sitting him up with her palm between his shoulder blades and her shoulder against his back. He leaned against her while she unwound the cloth from his body. She could smell the suds from the wash in his hair. Sometimes they fell asleep this way, with her head against his and her mind on soap.

It was at this time that the General had crawled into the Laundry, holding his stomach together with one hand, and spitting blood into the other.

I

t all began in the Great American Desert, a wide belt of red land that stretched west of the Mississippi until God knows where. One river runs through the desert, but the prairie sod is still so tough that no one but the natives can charm it into productivity. The high mesas are dusty and barren, flecked with the bones of scalped white men who had made the mistake of scarring the Indians’ fields with their wagon wheels. The land was so bleak that no one dared to settle it until a pioneer dipped his tin cup into the river and choked on a gold nugget the size of his fist.

The Laundress came to the Great American Desert with the first caravan of miners to set up shop washing the grime from their clothes. As the heels of her palms grew calloused from the board and her skin blistered from the wash, she became rich, richer even than the miners, who had exposed the ribs of gold in the quartz and dust in the rivers. As the inhabitants of the Great American Desert became wealthy, they built a whitewashed church and a slapdash saloon and a scaffold where they would expedite criminals to a hot place beyond the confines of this

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s the weeks passed, the General’s scar turned from pink to white, the gathered skin running like a ridge across his belly. Often she would run the tips of her fingers along it, wondering how it had gotten there in the first place. She imagined him, alternately, as a vigilante-man, a cowpuncher, a deserter from the federal army. She was happy in her not-knowing until the night in mid-winter when he grabbed her hand as she wove the dressings around his belly. His unshaven face glanced against hers and she lowered her chin so that his face was not touching hers. They paused, deliberating. Then she asked — sin-soft, love-sick soft — about the day his insides almost spilled out of his belly.

He turned away from her, leaning his back against her, and began to explain. Years before Little Bighorn, Custer had pulled him aside — “You ever been close to death?” he asked, but had not let the General answer before he continued. “No matter how many times you has, I’d wager that I’d been there more than you. And each time,” he hiccupped, “I swear to God, I wake up a different man. A better man.” The General figured that that last fight had brought him as close to death as he cared to come, and he did not care to get shot up any more, because he could no longer see any point in good men.

January 2009 The Yale Daily News Magazine

SIN JIN

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He tried to turn her toward him with his hands, but she did not turn at first, her stomach knotted with that last desire to resist. The force of his hands was so strong that soon she gave in to the movement, her hips turning like the hinge of a great machine.

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s the sharp sun struck day after day on the Great American Desert, the riverbeds grew shallow. The miners still hoped that the summer would come and the river would rise and the flumes would run as they always had. But the air grew colder and the sky more pale; and each day, the earth paled too.

As the flats grew cracked and parched, the General’s flesh began to slowly knit itself together. He worked odd jobs — cleaving rock with a sledgehammer, building the flumes that redirected the river to expose the bedrock and the veins of gold within it. At night, he crept between the stalks of dried-out corn in the fields to where the Laundress stood waiting, eager to have left the Laundry, stale with the smell of soap.

It was at this time that the Reverend Baker announced his candidacy for the bishopric of the Great American Desert — a position that did not exist, but that would exist now that the flumes had dried up and the miners had taken to the idea of their civil-i-zation. There was also the problem of the Indians, who had at that time been shunted onto a tract of arid, unproductive land. Although they had packed their deer-hide longhouses in silence, they had left the enormous chambered heart of a buffalo on the church steps, still pulsing against the wood planks, as a

notification that they had given up Father Jesus, and returned to the Corn Mothers.

By the end of June, the election had been called off due to the Reverend’s overwhelming popularity. Just as the miners thought to commission a makeshift miter for their new Bishop, the General had stepped forward and declared on a blessed soap box in the middle of the town their loving devotion to the Lord Jesus Christ, Amen. He wasn’t respectable, and he sure didn’t pretend to be, but he had fought with Custer along the Washita River, which was as good as an ordination in the Great American Desert. What counted most in life, he said from the soapbox, was a big revolver and self-reliance — both of which he had in abundance.

The election had recommenced.

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t was the night before Election Day when the Laundress told the General about the thing in her belly. They were lying in the dried out field underneath the General’s wool blanket, their heads propped underneath the balls of their discarded clothes. She knew that the General must have known from the size of her belly, which had grown round like a globe, but she was afraid to tell him that his baby would be brown like an iguana. When she said it, he had just laughed, kissing her forehead, her eyelids, her ears, her mouth. Then he rested his chin on her shoulder, his palm rough against her stomach. She slid her fingers back and forth between the raised bones of his hand, and tried to make out the constellations between the cracked ears of corn.

The Yale Daily News Magazine January 2009

Finally they folded the blanket, pulling on their jackets and their thick boots. Then they slipped through the field, her hand in the General’s hand, the silk from the cornhusks falling in her hair. But suddenly, at the sound of a commotion, she stopped, and parted the stalks of corn. The Reverend was crouched in the field, with his pants at his ankles. He turned, startled.

He stood up, struggled to dress himself, but tripped on a pant leg. “Only let me get hold of your beggarly carcass once,” he panted, “and I will use you up so small that God Almighty himself cannot see your ghost!”

The General smiled, an ironic half smile, like a crocodile.

“There was a mule, which I had ridden from California Gulch to the Great American Desert,” he said. “She was an animal that I thought a great deal of, as she had saved my life in Colorado from two Mexican desperadoes. And if there is such a place as mule heaven, I’d wager that she’d get there before you,

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Reverend.”

The Reverend said nothing, but sat in the dirt, buttoning his pants.

“While on the subject of the hellfire,” the General continued, “I had been meaning to ask you what sum of money I could pay you to save me from it.”

“I can do as much against a whirlwind with a fence rail,” the Reverend said.

“That unredeemable?” the General asked, clicking his tongue.

The Reverend looked at the ground.

“What about now?” the General asked, pulling the six-shooter out of his belt.

“I don’t want no trouble.”

“Tough. Because you got it coming.”

The men quarreled. She stood beside them, her feet swollen

Infidelity Winter came early that year and we did not turn on the heat.

You fried chicken wings in bacon grease and at the breakfast table I set an extra place for I could see it coming though you could not, not yet. I could see it coming and so knew it was not coming, knew that it was here.

I didn’t speak to it, but set an extra place because we were not alone and I believed then it was best to lie as little as possible.

At night, after you were asleep, I would walk with it the length of the house, whisper in it’s ear: Please stop. Please leave.

Please get out of my house.

I would wake up next to you, its bite-marks on my neck, until the evening you came home from work with it, took off your hat and loosened your tie and said, I believe you two know each other.

How old is it? you asked, And where did you find it? and I said It is two years old and I found it in our house and I can’t make it leave.

It was no relief; there was no relief. Even the satisfaction of seeing you serve our guest was denied for after that night we kept the shades drawn and did not turn on the lights. Not feigning blindness, but acknowledging how little we could see, so that in the morning I knew only that I was bleeding, but could not tell whose teeth had broken my skin.

-Miranda Popkey

SIN JIN

The Yale Daily News Magazine January 2009

and her belly aching and the pink skin on her palms pulsing as she absent-mindedly peeled the blisters away. She moved her fingers along the dried husks of the corn, feeling the soft ridges of the sheath beneath the hard crust of her skin, wondering if that was what her baby would feel like, ridged and dry like a leaf.

Then, she heard the cock of a hammer. The General stood with a gun against the Reverend’s forehead.

“I don’t want to die,” the Reverend was pleading.

And the General said that it was good to die.

She dropped her hands from the husks of the corn, and wrapped her fingers around the belt loops of the General’s trousers, as if she could hold him in this world by the seat of his pants. He did not move at first, and then, slowly, he lowered the pistol. He turned towards the Laundress, and lifted his hand to her neck, tracing the line of her collarbone, which arched upward like the wings of a seagull, rising up and down with each breath.

But, at that moment, the Reverend pulled a gun from his jacket. As he stood there, holding the grip with both hands, he pulled the trigger, a bullet shot out of barrel and rocketed straight through the General’s head. The General fell, and the Laundress broke under the weight of his body, her arms wrapped around the small of his back, and his armpit balanced on her shoulder. He was too heavy, or maybe too bloody, and so he slipped through her grasp. As the General fell, she began to recall haphazard pieces of information: that the organs of the body were contained in a diaphanous sack, that the world was tilted at twenty-three point zerofive degrees, that the bartender in Palisades, Mississippi, where she had grown up, had kept the ashes of his wife in the corner pocket of the pool table. But she wanted the General, not his ashes. Even though she knew it was too late, she pulled the pistol out of his belt, and leveled it at the Reverend, her hands shaking. The first shot went straight into the Reverend’s heart, but she pulled the trigger again and again, her body heaving with anger. The shots rang out in the cold, still air.

Then she sat down and began to unlace her boots.

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he Laundress folds her blouse and her skirt, and places them on the pile of her clothes. She admires the tidiness of her belongings as she stands in the night, her stomach curved like the moon. Then the thing in her belly begins to move, as she knew it would, sliding out of her like a swimmer. Water streams down her legs, and she pulls herself beside the dead General, taking his hand in her own, the calluses of their palms scraping against

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one another. She worries one last time that her baby will be pockmarked with holes or covered in scabs. Then she begins to heave and scream, with the General’s blood wedged beneath the whites of her fingernails and the dust caked against the small of her back. She remembers, in a series of images (each taxing, each beautiful): his hand on her belly, the smell of soap in his hair, the scar arched like a ridge. And she feels her baby slip out of her, no more remarkable than a year with no summer.

Carcass “What is sweeter than honey?

And what is stronger than a lion?”

Judges 14:18 A smear of red and gold ahead, like a crumpled banner along the road’s shoulder — war on the mind. Naturally, insects would invade a carcass.

And so it was with Samson’s lion, indistinct from here, the details of its decay reduced to a buzzing halo, like a second mane.

Samson saw the lion a second time — dead, as he had left it, the red stripe at its throat teeming with smaller lives. Who would approach such an obvious scene, desire to confirm a process confirmed already by relentless repetition? Samson circled his animal as an animal circles, while bees swarmed the blackened hive of the lion’s mouth. Honey clotted its wounds.

As though to say, the lion made honey.

The lion became honey. Or else?

Unmentionable orchards at the story’s margins — bees knee-deep in nectar, dusted with dull pollen, no miracle to the tasting tongue.

-Carina del Valle Schorske

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January 2009 The Yale Daily News Magazine

Ever wonder where the $17 billion that pays for your education is invested?

The Responsible Endowment Project does too.

The Yale Daily News Magazine January 2009

BY ADRIENNE WONG

The Responsible Endowment Project aims to promote the conscientious and transparent investing of Yale’s endowment. Can it catalyze change even as the economy tanks? t ten past seven on November 17, 2008, Hans Schoenburg ’10 stands on stage and looks out at a packed room. He grins. “Welcome to the first meeting of the Responsible Endowment Project,” he says. The room reverberates with so much applause that he is slightly surprised and has to clear his throat.

Schoenburg is the co-founder of the Responsible Endowment Project. He is six foot seven with the kind of flowing blond hair that makes girls jealous. Tonight, dressed in a brown jacket, blue collared shirt and khaki pants, he looks as nervous as a seventh grader at a middle school dance.

Schoenburg articulates a set of points that he and the Project’s roughly 20 original members have refined over a three-month period. The Responsible Endowment Project (REP) was started by a group of students who share a concern for the social and environmental impact of Yale’s endowment. With $17 billion, the REP’s members reason, the endowment and its renowned chief investment officer, David Swensen, have the potential to become agents for positive change in the financial world. For students, a responsible endowment could address a buffet of activist interests: labor, environmental, human rights. Ultimately, Schoenburg announces, “We believe Yale’s mission should apply to the endowment.” The audience claps loudly.

The REP is one of over 75 student activist groups at Yale, and its rallying call has existed since the Vietnam War. In the past, Yale has allegedly invested in companies that produce napalm, support apartheid, fund the civil war in Sudan, and profit from the war in Iraq. Though the Investments Office has divested from some of its most notorious holdings, it has ignored numerous appeals to become more transparent.

PHOTOGRAPHY BY JARED SHENSON

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January 2009 The Yale Daily News Magazine

As Project members point out, the first step towards an ethical endowment is transparency. The majority of past efforts to protest the endowment didn’t know enough about what they were protesting, because Yale’s endowment is famously secretive and because students didn’t always research it adequately. Whatever they did, it was no match for the second-largest endowment in the academic world and its invincible money-making guru Swensen. The story of students challenging the Yale endowment is sort of like playing David and Goliath on repeat — except that David never wins.

Members of the Responsible Endowment Project, like the countless student movements before them, are determined to defy history. This time, the nation’s economy is in shambles and people are crying for Wall Street’s head. Members of the Responsible Endowment Project have a positive message, a broad-based student coalition, and nearly 200 people in a room on Old Campus who care about what they have to say.

This time, they believe, things will be different.

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or the past few years, the Yale Investments Office’s annual report has been a glossy, 32-page bundle of fiscal joy for Yale alumni. In 2003, the report shows, the endowment’s return clocked in at a measly 8.8%. Four years later in 2007, the return had soared to a staggering 28%. Few people know how that happened — and as long as money keeps rolling in, very few people care. But the Responsible Endowment Project is determined to find out.

In its last annual report in June of 2007, the Investments Office broke down the endowment as follows: 23.3% in absolute return (a euphemism for hedge funds), 11% in domestic equity (public stocks of American companies), 4% in fixed income (bonds), 14% in foreign equity (non-U.S. companies), 18.7% in private equity, 27.1% in real assets (timber, oil, gas), and 1.9% in cash. REP faces a daunting task: of these investments, only domestic equity and real assets — 38% — are potentially researchable by its members.

The statistics aren’t exactly exhilarating. “It gets very technical, very quickly,” admitted Aaron Podolny ’12, one of the original members of REP. Unlike genocide in Darfur or the closing of overflow homeless shelters in New Haven, the endowment does not immediately conjure up images of human faces. Because it’s an abstract concept, he said, “very few people think about its impact.”

As a freshman, Podolny possesses earnest enthusiasm that makes him conspicuous in a crowd of disillusioned upperclassmen. During our first meeting in Bass Library, he spoke with such animation that a cranky academic told him to shut up.

In order to gain more knowledge about investing, Podolny has begun reading David Swensen’s Pioneering Portfolio Management and Christopher Browne’s Little Book of Value Investing. “Yale has been able to generate these substantial returns since the 1990’s, and I think it’s worth learning about that,” he said. He and other members of REP have done considerable research from the information they can obtain, most of it on tax forms that the endowment must file. They look up the companies on Google and SEC databases, and they contact activists and experts, some of whom have protested these corporations for years.

REP objects to two of the Office’s current investments. The first is HEI Hospitality, a hotel management company that REP members claim overworks its employees to the point of workplace injury. The second is in 90,000 acres of land in Maine, what’s left of a 446,000-acre holding that Yale bought from Georgia Pacific in 1999. Most of the land has since become a land preservation, but the environmental activists in REP argue that it was mismanaged and only sold because it was rendered completely useless.

“Yale had the option to take a significantly more sustainable approach,” claimed Chris Termyn ’10, the other co-founder of the REP. Instead, he said, the land was logged at the industry standard established by the Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI). It’s “the

The Yale Daily News Magazine January 2009

next step up from breaking the law.”

Termyn has a CLEAN POWER NOW sticker on his laptop and a good deal of hair in his eyes, which he peers through like a curtain as he stares at the ceiling and tries to think of a simpler way of explaining the situation. He believes Yale drew revenue from the forests for ten years, stopping when they could no longer profit from it without degrading it. Now, he and other activists want to make sure that the rest of the forests don’t suffer the same fate.

The tricky part, as Termyn and other members of REP readily admit, is deciding how the Investments Office should deal with its “bad” investments. Do they want Swensen to divest? How do they think the responsibility of investments should be decided? By Yale students? Faculty? Should they not invest in bad companies? Or only invest in good ones?

On the issue of transparency, REP’s position is equally indecisive. Some suggest an expanded role of the Advisory Committee on Investor Responsibility, a standing committee made up of faculty and students. Others want a password-protected site open to the Yale community on which the Yale Corporation would post its proxy voting record. Still others want delayed transparency, meaning the Investments Office would disclose its portfolio from five, ten, or 15 years ago. “It’s a huge grey area,” Schoenburg admitted.

The members of REP know what they want: social responsibility and a transparent endowment. But the question that has them all stumped is how to get it.

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ccording to Professor Bradford Gentry, a senior lecturer at the School of Forestry who currently teaches a class called “Private Investment and the Environment,” there are three different ways to think about social investing these days, and none of them are definitive.

The first, traditional strategy is to invest in publicly traded shares and to cast votes at shareholder meetings to promote socially responsible actions. This is the stance that the Yale endowment takes. If you buy a share in a company, you have a say in what it does. The endowment maximizes returns, and in theory is parlaying its power into encouraging socially and environmentally responsible actions.

“An alternative would be to say, ‘Actually we want the endowment not to generate as much as possible and we’re willing to take a reduction for these purposes,’” Gentry continued. That would mean divesting from companies that are not socially or environmentally responsible, and taking the hit no matter the cost. This is what most student movements protesting the endowment have advocated in the past.

But now, a third way of thinking about ethical investing has emerged. “There are an increasing number of very good investment opportunities around more sustainable activities, from things like The Body Shop and green consumer goods to energy-efficient products, water treatment systems and clean energy products,” Gentry said. With the current “green” movement taking off, environmentally responsible investing could possibly increase returns.

Jack Robinson, Chief Investment Officer of Winslow Management, a firm that invests in “environmentally conscious” companies, has been advocating this view since 1983. In a Master’s Tea he gave in Morse College last month, Robinson said the idea that investors would have to sacrifice returns in order to be socially

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and environmentally responsible is “just not true.”

There are two main reasons that green investing is successful, Robinson said. First, you reduce risk. “If you pollute, you’re responsible for cleaning it up,” he explained, and clean-up is usually expensive. Second, you reduce cost. “A price is going to be put on carbon,” Robinson predicted. He pointed out that Barack Obama’s administration has set a goal of reducing carbon emissions by 80% by 2050, an objective it hopes to achieve by implementing an economy-wide cap-and-trade system. According to Obama’s campaign website, the administration would auction off a limited number of pollution credits, each permitting a company to release a certain amount of emissions. High levels of carbon emissions would become extremely costly for companies and their investors.

Asked what he would do if he were managing Yale’s endowment, Robinson said he would begin with some questions for the Investments Office. “Do you screen for carbon release? Do you know what your carbon footprint is? More sophisticated investors who ‘get it’ are beginning to ask these serious questions,” Robinson said. “If you’re not thinking green, you’re not thinking smart.”

Other members of the investing world are more wary about the growing green sector. “Conceptually we’re very interested in investing in alternative energy because you can hopefully kill two birds with one stone: you can do well by doing good,” said one partner at an investment management firm in Manhattan who spoke on the condition of anonymity, since employees cannot reveal the firm’s investment stances. Over the last year, his firm considered funding three different alternative energy projects — one each in wind, tidal, and solar energy — but ultimately turned them all down.

The projects presented a variety of problems. Some of the technologies were very new, and it was uncertain whether they would work on a commercial or industrial scale as opposed to a pilot scale.

For the wind turbine company that approached the firm, some of the gear boxes were already breaking. Others, like the tidal power project, had not yet passed environmental regulations, and there were worries that an underwater windmill would kill fish. All of the projects required government subsidies, which are passed for terms of two, three, or five years. Investors can’t be sure that the subsidies will continue.

“Obama’s going to be there for four, maybe eight years,” the partner explained when it was pointed out that the incoming Obama administration had vowed to be more green. “I’ve got a 20-30 year project.”

The future of green industries is teaming with minutiae and uncertainty, just like the rest of the financial world.

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leven months before the first meeting of the Responsible Endowment Project, Fortune Magazine commissioned a comprehensive poll on American consumers’ feelings about the U.S. economy. Of 1,000 Americans surveyed, 57 percent believed that there would be a downturn in the coming year, and 19 percent believed that the nation was already in a recession.

“How worried are you?” CNN’s Money Blog asked readers, next to a pie graph titled “Consumer outlook: Gloomy.”

Over the next few months, it became clear that the United States had plunged into a full-fledged recession. In March, the titanic investment bank Bear Sterns was sold to JP Morgan Chase for $2 a share. In September, Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy, Merrill Lynch was sold to Bank of America, and AIG sought a bridge loan

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January 2009 The Yale Daily News Magazine

The members of the Responsible Endowment Project are trying to partner with the Roosevelt Institution and YCC to promote change. from the Federal Reserve. On September 25, JP Morgan Chase agreed to purchase the banking assets of Washington Mutual. It was the biggest bank failure in history.

Those on “Main Street,” as politicians and the media termed the innocent Americans not working on Wall Street, were similarly hard-hit. Asked about their personal economic condition in the Fortune poll, nearly four in ten people said they were worse off than they were a year ago. Today, the unemployment rate is estimated at 6.7%, and likely to rise above 8%.

Many Americans are holding Wall Street accountable for this economic catastrophe. “This financial meltdown involved a broad national breakdown in personal responsibility, government regulation and financial ethics,” Thomas Friedman wrote in the New York Times in November of last year. The leaders of Citigroup, AIG, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers, and other financial giants had “brought the American and global economy to its knees through their reckless, short-sighted, downright stupid investments,” George Packer ranted in The New Yorker on November 26. “I would like to see these malefactors of great wealth apologize to the country.”

It’s a watershed moment for investment management, one that the Responsible Endowment Project can only hope to exploit.

During a crisis involving irresponsibility in the financial world on every level, REP wants to use Yale’s endowment as a catalyst for revolution. “If we started to drive the engine in that direction, we could improve the whole world,” Schoenburg said. REP believes that the prestige of David Swensen and Dean Takahashi, the endowment’s Chief Investment Officer and Senior Director of Investments, would lend more weight to the idea of ethical

investing. “They’ve sent their protégés to other places across the country and they’ve changed the way that universities can invest their money,” said Katie Harrison, another member of REP. If they changed things once, why not change them again?

REP’s timing is either perfect or disastrous. With the nation decrying the reckless actions of Wall Street, the current economic climate could be ripe for the kind of change REP is advocating. But it is also a time in which the majority of the American population is scaling back. Burned by years of Wall Street’s shameless risks, most Americans are intent on holding on to what they still have.

To some, REP represents students so absorbed in their own pristine, privileged worlds that they don’t notice the economy crashing around them.

“No way can I continue study at a university supported by the exploitation of my fellow human beings,” wrote one “appalled” sophomore commenter under the Yale Daily News article that covered REP’s meeting. “Then, um, leave,” replied another. “The rest of us,” continued the responder, “with our own blue-collar labor class parents, are too busy with silly pragmatic things like…keeping a job and getting the education they couldn’t afford at my age.”

According to the Investments Office’s 2007 report, 18% of the endowment, or $4 billion at the time, funds scholarships, fellowships, and prizes for Yale students. At a time when some students are challenging the endowment, there are many others who are just happy we still have one.

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eflecting on REP’s first meeting the next day, Hans Schoenburg was astonished by the tremendous turnout.

“There were lines to get in!” he exclaimed, throwing his

The Yale Daily News Magazine November 2008

hands up in excitement. “There were people on the floor.”

The first goal of any student movement is name recognition.

With a flurry of media attention from the New Haven Register and the Yale Daily News, compounded by a sit-in at the Investments Office by the Undergraduate Organizing Committee protesting HEI, the Responsible Endowment Project has certainly achieved a degree of spotlight.

The next step is figuring out where to go from here. Both Schoenburg and Termyn would like to expand the group’s membership; they are currently talking to cultural, political and activist groups like the Roosevelt Institute and the Yale College Council.

Termyn, for his part, wants to concentrate on creating a REP brand. There should be “tangible symbols that can represent our campaigns,” he said, pointing out the golden egg that REP used in its Facebook invitation, but he hasn’t decided what those images should be. As for specific demands, “it’s a discussion that hasn’t even started yet,” Schoenburg confessed. But the group plans to make a formal address to the Investments Office some time next spring.

“It’s important that we do our research so that when we approach them, we’re at least talking on a similar level,” Podolny said.

The problem, of course, is that they will never be considered on a similar level. As with most activist groups, REP’s idealism provokes a wave of scornful cynicism. “The enviro-religious nitwits are at it again,” announced a commenter on the Yale Daily News article after REP’s meeting. “It’s sad to see the latest incarnation of student activism demonstrate some of the worst traits of its kind,” sighed an opinion article. The Investments Office, predictably, has barely

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deigned to respond to REP’s criticisms.

“As policy, members of the Investments Office do not comment on the University’s investments,” financial analyst Michael Schmidt wrote in an email from the Office.

The Investments Office’s strategy is incredibly shrewd. It will be nearly impossible for REP to build a case against a tight-lipped institution with an untraceable record. Idealism, curiosity, and determination are not enough to take on $17 billion. Professor Gentry cited studies that show boycotting companies — for example, those associated with apartheid in South Africa — was ineffectual. “Owning shares and pursuing shareholder rights in terms of proxy battles is seen as a more effective technique,” he said. In other words, you have to be in the system to change it.

The members of REP believe that simply protesting their ignorance will effect some sort of change. “I know a little about the endowment,” one eager freshman member of REP declared before the first meeting. “I know that we don’t know anything about the endowment!” But this isn’t enough. The members of REP do not have a fiscal plan. They aren’t sure how to determine what “responsible” means. They don’t know if green investing will increase returns. And they haven’t decided on any concrete solution for the investments they find objectionable. It’s true that these are the obstacles inherent to challenging the endowment; they do not stem from the incompetence of REP’s members. But that is irrelevant: the Responsible Endowment Project chose this cause, with all its problems. Until they resolve these issues, nothing will happen.

Indecision is the graveyard of good intentions.

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January 2009 The Yale Daily News Magazine

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BUMMER by Reese Faust