Archived Notes - The Harvard Advocate

Ben Fry is a designer from Ann Arbor, Michigan. He is the founder of Fathom Information Design, a Boston-based design firm. Fry completed his doctoral degree at the Aesthetics + Computation Group at the MIT Media Laboratory, his postdoctoral fellowship with Eric S. Lander at the Broad Institute, and was the Nierenberg Chair of Design at the Carnegie Mellon School of Design. He has authored Visualizing Data, and co-authored with Casey Reas Processing: A Programming Handbook for Visual Designers and Artists and Getting Started with Processing. His work has appeared in the Whitney Biennial, the Cooper-Hewitt Design Triennial, the Museum of Modern Art, Nature, The New York Times, New York Magazine, Minority Report, and The Hulk. In recognition of his achievements, Fry was honored with the National Design Award for Interaction Design in 2011.

George Saunders is the New York Times bestselling author of ten books, including Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the Man Booker Prize; Congratulations, by the way; Tenth of December, a finalist for the National Book Award; The Braindead Megaphone; and the critically acclaimed short story collections CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, Pastoralia, and In Persuasion Nation. He teaches in the creative writing program at Syracuse University.

Garth Greenwell is the author of What Belongs to You, which won the British Book Award for Debut of the Year. His new book of fiction, Cleanness (2020), was published in January 2020. A finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, it has been longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize, the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and France’s Prix Sade. Cleanness was also named a New York Times Notable Book of 2020, a New York Times Critics Top 10 book of the year, and a Best Book of the year by the New Yorker, TIME, NPR, the BBC, and over thirty other publications. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, A Public Space, and VICE, and he has written criticism for The New Yorker, the London Review of Books, and the New York Times Book Review, among others. A 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, he lives in Iowa City with his partner, the poet Luis Muñoz.

Hannah La Follette Ryan is the New York based photographer behind @subwayhands, a viral Instagram account which showcases portraits of strangers’ hands on the subway and boasts over 250 thousand followers. Poetry board member Ezra Lebovitz and design board member Anna Correll spoke with her via email this January about her work, her method, and the rules of subway decorum.

Three years after the Supreme Court declared corporations are people too, a 44-year-old sometimes entrepreneur named Mike Merrill is trying to prove the opposite. Merrill became the world’s first “publicly traded person” in 2008, when he created 100,000 shares of himself and sold them to friends and strangers at $1/share through a website called KMikeyM. On Mike’s website, you can purchase shares in “him,” which entitle you to the same number of votes on Mike’s day-to-day and life decisions, such as whether or not to grow a beard, register as a Republican, get a vasectomy, or date somebody. Every couple of weeks, Mike posts life updates and new decisions for his investors to vote on. I purchased 5 shares in Mike at $5.10 each; given recent, dramatic developments in his life, I think I got a good deal.



When Mike took himself public at $1/share in 2008, his implied valuation was $100,000, which is significantly lower than the FDA’s figure for the value of a human life: $7.9 million. Today, his shares are worth about $6 a piece, implying that Mike’s enterprise value has appreciated to well over half a million dollars. 



After purchasing my shares, I took a look through KMikeyM’s trading history and observed some interesting patterns. On June 14, 2012, he was worth $20 a share. Six months later, he was going for 99 cents. I expanded the date range; there were fluctuations all over the place, cycles of booms and busts. An entire human drama, captured in a craggy chart that looked a lot like a heart monitor.



In some respects, I suppose the chart was not unlike a heart monitor. The trading price logged Mike’s investors’ financial and personal interest in continuing to participate in his life. I compared the trading pattern to his intermittent journals and discovered that the share price was typically unresponsive to mundane, run-of-the-mill decisions such as “Should I grow a beard?” or “Should I invest in a new wardrobe?” Looking at the journals that corresponded to the handful of big booms made it clear what the shareholders were really interested in: Mike’s sex life. In April of 2012, after lagging at around $8 a share for more than two years, KMikeyM posted a new proposal called “Shareholder Control of Romantic Relationships”—which was exactly what it sounds like. “Under normal circumstances, no one is going to complain when someone is buying flowers or going out to dinner and a movie. But as a publicly traded person with a responsibility of productivity to the shareholders, we live under special circumstances,” Mike wrote in an ungainly majestic plural. “It's been about 10 months since our romantic break-up with [Shareholder No. 7](http://kmikeym.com/users/7) and it seems prudent to set up the conditions under which we might enter future romantic relationships.”



The price shot up to $20 in 2 months. Somewhere along the line, Mike began dating a woman named Marijke; a quick scan of her user profile revealed that she had been one of his early investors, having bought 50 shares in August of 2012. One post from January 7, 2015, entitled “Romance Contract Revisions,” hinted at the strain that radical shareholder accountability had placed onto their relationship: “K. Mike Merrill and Marijke have been in a shareholder approved relationship for more than two years and the contracts have evolved,” the proposal read. “The major effect of these revisions is less specific mandates balanced with regular accountability.” The prospect of “less specific mandates” infuriated shareholders, many of whom were particularly appalled by one particular clause (5.2) that would allow Mike and Marijike to get married without putting the matter to a vote. “Should approval of this revision also be considered pre-approval for the parties to pursue procreation if they so wish?” wrote one shareholder, egli, who voted “no.” 



Mike and Marijike broke up last month. The announcement came in a post called “Mutual Release and Non-Disparagement Agreement,” in which Mike implores his shareholders to buy Marijike out: “We both believe that it’s emotionally and fiscally responsible for her to liquidate her shares.” His shareholders were only too glad to oblige (the vote passed 5,509-65) and gobbled up Mike’s ex-girlfriend’s shares at a modest, price-controlled discount. And so a five-and-a-half year long relationship came to an end, with the ratification of the following clause: “Girlfriend hereby ends the contractual romantic relationship and any positions held or once held in relation to the Project and any Affiliate Projects including, without limitation, erotic fanfiction, working groups, hot sauce ambassadorships, snack-based media websites, film, video, or books projects, and any other projects effective as of the Effective Date.”



 



With my five shares, I voted “yes” on the “Mutual Release and Non-Disparagement Agreement,” an exhilarating experience made more so by the fact that I had actually paid around $25, in real money, to have a say in the matter. After I clicked “yes,” I was suddenly reminded of Julian Jaynes’s 1976 book *The Origins of Consciousness in Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind*. The ancient Greeks, Jaynes claimed, were not “conscious” in the way that we would consider ourselves to be conscious today; rather, they understood their thoughts as the direct voices of the gods and simply obeyed them. I believe this imaginative and somewhat fanciful theory contains the crux of KMikeyM’s unsettling appeal. One condition of living in late capitalism is the recognition and frustration of being alienated from capital and the owners of it, which shape our lives, decisions, and identities in invisible and godlike ways. For Mike’s shareholders, the allure of KMikeyM lies in the experience of transporting themselves to the other side of this mysterious mechanism, even if on the scale of just one individual. And for this to be possible it is essential to imagine an unconscious, unquestioning Mike Merrill. That would explain the hysterically self-serious language on the discussion boards, which serves to sustain the illusion. One user who calls himself abodens3 wrote, “My thoughts are about Section 5.2. If the couple has the option to become a legally recognized relationship (engaged to be married) it would assimilate to a public-traded persons' merger.” It’s serious business indeed--the users of KMikeyM do not hesitate to put their money where their mouths are. abodens3 has a portfolio of KMikeyM shares worth over $450. Another user called aaronpk has put more than $8,000 into the project. I hope, for Mike’s sake, that he’s at least an acquaintance.  



After a while, a few considerations about the imperfections of the project began to nag at me. KMikeyM’s motto is “community through capitalism,” which sounds like the slogan of a nightmarish neoliberal dystopia sprung from the imagination of Ayn Rand. The naïve ethic is appealing in its own way: privatize everything! Privatize even what is most private; the wisdom of the market will optimize everything and elevate Mike Merrill to ubermensch status through rigorous shareholder input. The problem was, Mike’s shares didn’t appreciate when the “underlying asset” itself became abstractly more valuable—through professional or personal success. They appreciated when the game became more interesting. Voting wasn’t part of the game; it was the whole game. Mike’s “investors” had little interest in his hobbies or budding entrepreneurial career; what they were after was the thrill of ownership and of living vicariously through him. 



I wondered, then, whether Mike could have improved the design of the project to increase its realism. Say he had structured his stock so that each share paid “dividends” that entitled you to a percentage of his annual income. That would certainly incentivize his investors to take his professional pursuits more seriously. But then the shares would have to be more expensive, and the shareholders might demand additional rights—for instance, the right to submit their own, original proposals for the co-owners of Mike Merrill to vote on, opening a Pandora’s box of moral hazard. I shuddered at what an anonymous online community of 800 “shareholders” could come up with. It was just a matter of time before someone suggested a tattoo, and perhaps other activities far more extreme: sell your house and move to Phuket, run with the bulls in Spain, climb Mount Everest. If the game became too enticing, what would stop someone with cash to burn from staging a hostile takeover—purchasing all of the shares at a premium to seize total control over Mike’s life? 



I thought it was far-fetched until I came across a vote from January of 2012, in which Mike proposed that in the event of his death, the benefits from his $100,000 life insurance policy should be distributed amongst his shareholders. The vote passed 297-10. 



In 1974, the performance artist Marina Abramovic sat in a gallery in Belgrade, Serbia for six hours with 72 objects in front of her and told the audience to use them on her however they desired: “I am the object / During this period I take full responsibility.” The objects included a rose, a feather, olive oil, scissors, and a loaded gun. One participant cut her throat and started to suck her blood. Another put the gun to her head. 



I often wondered who the people in Belgrade were, what they were like. I also wondered what the shareholders of KMikeyM were like, how it would feel to meet one of them face-to-face. Earlier this past week, I sold my shares in KMikeyM at $6.15 a piece—in sum, I made about five dollars.

There are enough uncertainties here that to do anything other than face them head on would be, at worst, disingenuous and at best, cowardly. This could all be hearsay, sort of. The leveling of voices brought on by the Internet has made it possible to peer across the room and eavesdrop on a conversation between strangers –– only the room is much bigger, and it may turn out that the strangers are estranged even to each other; they may not even know they are talking. This story follows one of those conversations, albeit a conversation in the most literal sense, as in the word’s latinate root, derived from the verb *conversari* meaning “to live with, to keep company with,” or literally, “turn about with.” This could be hearsay in the sense that it is my account of how two distant stories came to turn about with each other in the far reaches of the web, and that there is little other than the turning in question to go off of. 



 



When you eavesdrop on a conversation, there’s usually a key word or a loud noise that catches your ear and suggests you zero in on the exchange. For me, this was an email I received in the spring of 2011 with the subject line, “LAY YOUR LIFE INTO OUR HANDS AND WE WILL MAKE YOU HAPPY, TARPLEY HITT” and the discovery that alongside its promise of “MIRACLE INSTANT PENIS GAINS,” the email contained a second, hidden layer of text –– an entire, invisible swath of story taken from the pages of the semi-prominent Christian Romance e-novelist, Judith Bronte. 



***



There is little information about about Judith Bronte available online, but this is what I know. Bronte, a forty-maybe-fifty-something white woman with brown, chin-length locks (just about all you can see in her closely-cropped author photo) has been publishing christian romance e-novels since 1998. Bronte was born in South Carolina, but grew up and currently lives in Southern California. She has two brothers, was homeschooled and is very close to her parents. Bronte’s father, in fact, was the person who inspired her to write and her mother encouraged her to pursue it as a career. The mother passed away a few years ago. Bronte’s family subscribes to a set of deeply Christian values. On her author page Bronte writes, “My mother said that as soon as I was old enough to understand that Jesus Christ had died for my sins, I was claiming Him as my Savior.” Although her narratives are often religiously inflected, Bronte tries not to “hit her readers over the head with her beliefs.” Notably, Bronte has never had any extended romances herself. “The model I use time and again of a healthy marriage,” Bronte writes, “came from observing my parents' strong relationship.”



 



Bronte says her penname blends her favorite writer and her favorite Bolshevik: “Bronte” from the the eldest Bronte sister, Charlotte (*Jane Eyre,* not *Wuthering Heights*), and “Judith” from a young Russian girl, allegedly martyred for her conversion to Christianity during the October Revolution. I say allegedly because, although Bronte claims the girl was known only by “Judith,” presumably in a Madonna or Cher one-name fame kind of way, her existence is undocumented anywhere else online, save for a self-published novel called *Judith, Martyred Missionary of Russia: A True Story*, whose dearth of cited sources and Google hits makes “true story” seem more like a plea than a promise. Judith Bronte’s real name is Sarah Fall, and her pseudonym is a hardly a secret. Fall reveals her double identity at the very top of her homepage: “Hi, I'm Sarah Fall, and I've been writing free love stories under the pen name of Judith Bronte since 1998.”



 



Sarah Fall’s pseudonym resembles her writing: archetypal bildungsromans with blends of Christian mythos and chaste romantic intrigue. Her titles share a predilection for the word “journey” (*Abigail’s Journey* or *Terry’s Journey* or *Journey of the Heart* to name only a few), and her repertoire is narrow in scope: damaged ingenues, burly love-interests, nostalgic Americana, always against the backdrop of unwavering faith. Say what you will about romance novels, but Fall has no delusions about her work, which she reveals in her sole interview, a twenty-minute clip on a now-defunct radio show called *Love-a-licious.*™1“Some people call it ‘wish gratification,’” Fall says in her girlish falsetto. “It’s being able to put yourself in another place to be able to have your Prince Charming say whatever you want to your heroine.”



 



On the homepage of her website, beside the dancing animation of a brunette in maryjanes, Fall advertises her newsletter: “Keep up-to-date on all the announcements and website news!” Beneath the sign-up slot, Fall writes in tight script: “My policy is to follow the Golden Rule (Matthew 7:12); I hate spam too, and will never sell or give away your email address.”



***



To earn the label “spam,” a moniker inspired by a Monty Python sketch in which normal conversation is crowded out by strings of nonsense (“spam spam spam spam”), an email has to be two things: unsolicited and en masse. In other words: you didn’t ask for it, and it went to a ton of people. As a result of the latter criteria, pretty much anyone initiated into email account membership is familiar with spam –– it ranks among modern certainties, alongside death and taxes. The first criteria, on the other hand, is more slippery than it seems. It is easy, for example, to confuse spam with advertisement email: coupons or newsletters you unwittingly subscribed to during one e-purchase or another. This is not spam, as technically, there was an act of solicitation, however nefariously subtle it might have been. The Department of Justice’s explainer on spam is broken into four sections –– Africa-Based Investment Schemes, Medical Products and Devices, Financial Investments, and General –– which succinctly sum up the gamut of law-breaking spam styles.



 



Because of spam’s ubiquity, these categories should be fairly self explanatory.2 But the second group, by far the most extensive, is slightly coded. “Medical Products and Devices” is bureaucratic euphemism –– the category includes the range of “miracle cures” and scams praying on the medically desperate, but most of it is sex (a lot of sex). 



 



Like Fall, spam trades in wish gratification –– but what the former says in subtext, the latter puts in the subject line. Any given junk folder is likely to be filled with offers for porn, dildos, penis enlargement procedures, Russian escorts, French escorts, escorts “only TWO miles from YOU!!,” and medications from Canadian Pharmacies, for bigger, longer, faster erections. Still, if you take a moment to browse through this veritable buffet of sworn sexual enhancements, you may notice that the genre is, on the whole, distinctly un-sexy. The majority arrive in a narrow palette of beige colors, from senders as subtle as “Mrs. Paulette Hersman” or as loud as “Enlarger Pills 389!!.” The messages are concise and direct: maybe just “Buy penis enlargement pills here!” with the requisite “Click on the attachment below.” The emails channel the graphic design of a skeezy injury lawyer –– aggressive fonts, bad pictures, and a few too many exclamation points. 



***



Before writing full-time, Fall worked as a website designer, a revelation which is somewhat surprising because her online presence seems frozen in an early-aughts digital style and because the actual reading of Fall’s books requires some virtual gymnastics. On the 15th of every month, Fall uploads a new chapter of her latest series, *Dandelion Skies*, on to the homepage of her blogspot site, judithbronte.blogspot.com.3 The website has almost no text –– only links to the chapters, and a note crediting the page’s peach floral frame to Blogspot’s “ethereal” theme. The links lead to a URL of still pinker design (a fuschia page with purple cursive script) –– this is Fall’s main website, judithbronte.com, where fans can find chapters, snippets of her biography, FAQ’s, and the comments page. Fall has three other web pages to my knowledge, and a facebook group called “The Works of Judith Bronte,” for her various religion-inspired literary projects. I mention the multiple pages because their inconvenient, user-un-friendly, disparateness captures what is immediately apparent upon visiting any one of them –– that Judith Bronte, an author who has made her name on digital platforms, does not really know how to use the internet. 



***



The spam email I received seemed equally inexpert, but nondescript. It didn’t have much text –– only a short promise of penis enlargement at half the going-rate, written in bold red. But if you dragged your cursor to highlight the text, clusters of words in white ink appeared. Most of these hidden sentences were garbled compositions of simple words: “Nothing to wait until you ready,” for example. Others alluded to characters: “Maggie and jerome was waiting.” Near the bottom of the email, the sender had also camouflaged their source: “homegrown dandelions by judith bronte.” 



 



What most don’t know about messages like this one is that they aren’t scamming the receiver as much as the *vendor*. According to the Register of Known Spam Operations (ROKSO), 80% of Western spam comes from around 100 senders. These operations are sort of like advertising agencies. They approach small businesses and promise promotional campaigns with millions of viewers. After contracts are signed, what the vendor thought to be an aggressive ad-strategy ultimately translates into a half-hearted spam email that goes straight to junk folders. According to a recent study conducted by the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG), this method is effective for fewer than 12% of viewers. So while the spammer makes a tidy profit, the vendor makes next to nothing.



 



It’s because the spammer has no interest in his emails’ success, that their design is, like Fall’s websites, exceedingly dated. More often than not, the messages make as little effort as possible to sell you on their product. 



***



Sarah Fall is not particularly interested in selling either. For one, her work is free (although Kindle versions go for 99¢). And she isn’t after fame. Fall has refrained from interviews or other forms of promotion, except for her newsletter and singular appearance on *Love-a-licous. *In fact, it’s unclear whether Fall writes for any of the other usual reasons –– inner necessity, improvement, inspiration –– either. 



 



By her own admission, Fall doesn’t edit much. In one FAQ, she writes: “...the thought of going back and rewriting my old work is a little daunting. I have so many projects going on, I'd rather use my time writing new material.” She doesn’t seem keen to evolve either. Between her first novel, *Journey of the Heart* and her most recent, *Dandelion Skies*, Fall’s style never strays from a familiar band of stock characters and storylines. I initially found her writerly impulse baffling. It seemed to produce constant, unreflective ejaculations –– a spam-ish triumph of quantity over quality. 



 



I remained skeptical until, at the end of *Love-a-licious*, I heard Fall hint at her endgame. As she explains why, exactly, she so loves *Jane Eyre*, Fall pauses for a moment. “Her dialogue,” she says. “She makes everyday life interesting.” Fall’s own drive might be exactly this. Maybe the quick and continual output is a strategy –– an effort, perhaps poorly conceived, but trying nonetheless, to capture the spontaneity and average-ness of everyday conversation. 



***



Everyday dialogue is the spammer’s gold, and junk folders are their poison. Although spammers don’t need you to buy the product, they do want you to see it –– and in order to succeed, spam messages need to pass as authentic human exchange. Unfortunately, a spam filter is a simple, but wickedly effective piece of technology. It is so slick, in fact, that the contemporary filter is largely the same as it was in 1996, when MIT computer scientist Jason Rennie first developed a program called “iFile.” 



 



iFile was conceived to parse spam emails from normal emails (or “ham,” as they’re called in filtering communities), and it operated on a simple rule of probability known as Bayes’ theorem, after its inventor, the 18th century English priest, Thomas Bayes. With Bayes’ theorem, iFile crunched the likelihood that an email was spam by scanning its text and determining the “spamliness” of each word. “Sildenafil,” for example, a kind of generic Viagra, is more likely to show up in a spam email than a ham email: iFile would tally that. A person’s name, on the other hand, is far less likely to appear in spam: iFile would tally that too. After determining the spamliness of each word, the program would run the numbers on the email as a whole. If the ratio of spam to ham words was high enough, the recipient would never see it -– iFile would send it to the Junk folder, where it would wait to be deleted. 



 



For spammers, this posed a problem –– most of their language (buy, purchase, penis) raised red flags. But like any pest, spammers evolved alongside their vaccine. They developed methods to fool the filters. The iFile process was simple, and so was the spammers’: all they needed was to upset the spam-to-ham ratio –– to masquerade as conversation, not ad copy. 



 



Spammers developed dozens of offensives, but among the most popular was something called “word salad.” These programs scraped text from the internet, minced it, and camouflaged the garbled words with small, white fonts in the background of emails. The added text diluted the concentration of spammy words like “viagra” or “medication” and offset the ratio, tricking the filter into finding an email more conversational than it really was. 



 



Since the Internet is filled with free writing, word salads were easy enough to cook up. For a few years, a common source to scrape were the classics: novels whose copyrights had expired, poems and essays that had been reprinted ad infinitum. The public domain provided an endless source of salad to feed a growing supply of spam. 



 



This strategy had a minor pitfall. It attracted attention. As people started seeing Shakespeare alongside their escort ads, the media tuned in. In 2006, the New York Times published an article called “Literary Spam” by Meline Toumani, about precisely this phenomenon and other outlets followed suit.4 After the publicity, the prominence of literary spam waned: it was too flashy. As Toumani points out in her article, “most legitimate e-mail exchanges don’t sound like Shakespeare.” Filters caught classics, because often their language was out-dated: it didn’t sound like “ham.” It didn’t sound “everyday.” Toulani makes another good point –– modern spam filters also factor in repetition. An email packed with passages from *Oliver Twist* is bound to find matches all over the internet, whereas even the most banal conversation will prove to be relatively unique.  



***



The problem with eavesdropping, particularly of the Internet kind, is that it comes with holes. In a room, you can walk over and ask questions if necessary, but online, it’s easier to avoid being found. So, I’m not sure who first sourced Fall for word salads or when –– only that they did. And I don’t know how many filters have been tricked or how many people received Fall spam in their inboxes –– only that mine was and I did. But I suspect that the reason I still receive messages filled with Fall’s words is that somewhere down the line, she did something right. 



 



Shakespearean salads, for example, might stand out with the odd “thy” or “vassalage,” but Fall’s language is simple, plain, and conversational. Her vocabulary is narrow and laced with names. Fall’s works are obscure and unlikely to turn up matches online –– their arcanity approximates the uniqueness of real dialogue. With her monthly deadlines, Fall offers a wellspring of new material and it can’t hurt, of course, that it’s all free. I suspect that Fall, in her seemingly sterile narratives, managed to approach average conversation –– to capture the incessant banality of everyday “turning about.” And I suspect it is precisely this everyday quality which makes her so appealing a source.



 



1. *Love-a-licious ™*,  hosted by Candace “The Loveista™” Chambers-Belida, is sponsored by a product which deserves a mention. The short ad, which at runs at the beginning of most episodes, opens with the gruff voice of an Arnold Schwarzenegger impersonator. “Hey up there,” the voice says, “it's me, your crotch. My living conditions down here are deplorable –– the itch and burn are too much. Scrub me with Medicated Fungicure Wash when you shower and say, ‘hasta la vista’ to jock itch. Get Fungicure Wash at Walmart and Rite Aid. Do it Now!” When the ad’s 19 seconds are up, elevator muzak comes in and Chambers-Belida opens with her signature line: “If you’re feeling...*love-a-licious...*you’ve come to the right place.” 



2 “Africa-based” is code for the “nigerian prince” schemers, so-called because the first wave of emails of this variety were sent from a server in Lagos by a scammer who claimed to be an imprisoned prince. These messages seek out gullible readers to lend them money with the promise of massive compensation. “Financial Investments” promise the same without the theatrics, often offering doomed business opportunities. The last group, “General,” allows for categorical wiggle-room. 



3 Although Fall has always posted regularly, she has changed her publishing style over the years. When she first started, Fall published her books directly to the web in full. After 2001, Fall began writing her novels in monthly serial. She wrote chapter by chapter, posting each immediately after completion. “With God's grace, I never missed a posting deadline,” she claims on her author page. After 2014, Fall switched to a different method: penning her novels offline and, once finished, releasing the chapters by month. Mostly recently, Fall released the ninth and final chapter of her latest novel, *Dandelion Sky* on June 15, 2017.



4 NPR followed up with a Morning Edition feature of their own, called “Spam Goes Literary;” and by the end of the year “Empty Spam,” or an odd variant of spam comprised of *only* scraped text (all lit; little spam), made it into Wired Magazine’s “Jargon Watch.”

*The ball shall be a sphere formed by yarn wound around a small core of cork, rubber or similar material, covered with two strips of white horsehide or cowhide, tightly stitched together. It shall weigh not less than five nor more than 51⁄4 ounces avoirdupois and measure not less than nine nor more than 91⁄4 inches in circumference. *



 



*–– 2016 MLB Official Baseball Rules *



 



Every professional baseball you’ve ever seen slammed across the diamond or fall into the hands of a desperate fan has been coated in a thin layer of mud from a small waterway in southern New Jersey. Each July, armed with seven 35 gallon trash cans, one Jersey family makes their way to the secret stretch of water and harvests the next year’s supply of baseball mud. And each new season, baseball umpires meticulously **[rub](http://baseballrubbingmud.com/mud1.mpeg) **their balls in it before every game. The reason for this peculiar cultural ritual dates back to a seemingly obvious idea which only struck American baseball in 1920 –– that a baseball loses play value over time, that it gradually becomes worse at its job. 



 



At least, this was the logic which led Major League Baseball to bring a period, later called the “Dead Ball Era,” to a close. From about 1900 until 1920, American baseball was a wildly different sport ––the teams reused their balls. A ball was usable until it began to disintegrate; at times this could amount to a lifespan of several hundred pitches. With more play, the balls became malleable, and this softness had a major impact on the game. Balls were hard to pitch, and even harder to hit for distance. Home-runs were scarce and scores were low. To win games, players relied on strategy, rather than power. They stole bases or became experts at “the inside game,” an offensive strategy to keep the ball in the in field, which included moves like the “Baltimore chop”–– a hard downward swing that sent the ball just in front of the plate. Runs were a rarity: in 1908, the season averaged 3.4 runs per game, its lowest average in history; in 2013, the average was 8.33. 



 



The logic behind recycling was cost-related. Teams were so strapped for cash that fans had to throw balls back on the rare occasions they made it to the stands. Over the summer of 1920, American League1 president Ban Johnson, a squat, bespectacled man whose swatch of hair behaved much like the head of an overused toothbrush, got wind that his umpires were throwing out more balls than they could easily afford. Johnson insisted in a league-wide notice that the umps “keep the balls in the games as much as possible, except those which were dangerous.” 



 



Only a month later, on August 16, 1920 in the middle of game between the New York Yankees and the Cleveland Indians, Yankee’s pitcher Carl Mays sent a ball straight into the head of Indians shortstop Ray Chapman. Chapman never moved to dodge the ball. Commentators assumed he hadn’t seen it, but they never had the chance to ask. Chapman died the next morning. 



 



Mays, a sour and widely-disliked man, whose pitching motion Baseball Magazine once described as “a cross between an octopus and a bowler,” later explained that the ball had been a “sailer.” Mays had a reputation for unusual delivery2, but this time, his aim had been skewed (sending the ball “sailing”) by a damaged spot on the leather surface. That year, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, a tight-lipped Andrew Jackson look-alike and the first ever Commissioner of Baseball3, instituted a rule that balls be thrown out at the first sign of wear, heralding an era of newness in baseball paraphernalia. Unused balls would have smooth, sail-resistant surfaces and bright white leather, so they would stay visible even at top-speed. 



 



But novelty wasn’t all Mountain Landis hoped it would be –– the dawning of the “Live Ball Era”came with its own problems. Baseball teams quickly discovered that the factory-issue balls came with a slippery gloss, making it hard for pitchers to grip them as they threw. All the experts call it that ––a “gloss,” sometimes a “slick”–– which conjures the image of a vaseline-like sheen, a layer of some substance coating the balls and making them hard to hold. But it wasn’t that. The players couldn’t wipe the gloss off, just as the factories couldn’t stop making it. The gloss was just the sheer fact of the balls’ newness, the slick of something never worn in. So almost as soon as leagues discarded their old balls, they began intentionally aging their new ones. 



 



For a while, the purposeful “wearing-in” process was carried out with a coat of tobacco juice or shoe polish or just regular dirt –– anything to break the balls in and make them easier to hold. But each of these cures came with its own problems. Overly grainy dirts could distress the leather, recreating the old-ball effect; tobacco juice discolored the balls beyond usability; and in the heat, shoe-polished balls quickly acquired an overpowering stench.



 



Enter Lena “Slats” Blackburne, a retired player for the Chicago White Sox, who was coaching the Philadelphia Athletics in the 1930’s, where he overheard umpires complaining about this gloss. Blackburne had grown up on the South Jersey waterfront, home to a mud of particular consistency. He had plopped through the sticky mire as a kid, when he went fishing and swimming. And so it was to this old watering hole that the retired in elder returned, decades later, to harvest a handful of South Jersey mud. Blackburne brought a sample back to the Philadelphia Athletics Clubhouse, started experimenting, and soon found that he could remove the gloss from the baseball, without damaging or discoloring it. 



 



Jim Bintliff, a South Jersey family man with a gruff, kind voice who now runs Lena Blackburne Baseball Rubbing Mud, the distribution business Blackburne started almost eighty years ago, describes the mudding process as something like the movement which precedes a pitch. 



“You would dab your finger in the mud and just get a little bit on your finger, put it in your palm and rub your palms together, to spread it out. Take a drop of water and make it a little more liquid and then you just massage the ball,” says Bintliff. “You know like when the pitcher gets a new ball from the Umpire, how he rubs it around in his hand? That’s what it is. It’s that exact motion.” 



The mud, which the company’s website describes as “a cross between chocolate pudding and whipped cold cream,” took off. By 1938, Blackburne was dealing to the entire American League. 



 



He was not, notably, selling to the National League –– the other major league in the nation, against whom American League teams played in every World Series. According to Bintliff, tensions between American and National Leaguers ran deep in the 1930’s and Blackburne was an American League loyalist who refused to sell to the other side. 



 



“At the time, they were mortal enemies. I mean, there was no love lost between the American and National League. They were completely separate,” Bintliff explains.“If you played for one, you didn’t hang around with guys from the other. The World Series was like a battle.” 



 



This particular rivalry may have been speci c to Blackburne, as many other players had inter-league friendships. Still, without Blackburne’s consent, rubbing mud was off limits to the National League –– he had never shared his harvest spot (even today, according to Bintliff, the location is known to only a small handful of family members). So for over a decade, the two Leagues played with wholly different balls: the National League with glossy, factory-issued ones (perhaps mucked with some amateur substitute); the American League with balls aged by hand using Blackburne brand mud4. 



 



Tensions eased in 1950, however, when Blackburne took a new job as a third-base coach for the Philadelphia Phillies, a National League Team. With one job transition, the entire game changed for the National League. Blackburne’s rivalry subsided and his brand became the gold standard of American baseball rubbing mud. Today, Bintliff says, the company sells to the entire MLB and their minor league affiliates, to all the independent leagues, to several colleges (including Harvard) and high schools, and even to a few teams in the NFL. It is now written into the MLB rule book (Rule 3.01c) that before every game the umpire has to rub down six dozen balls to get the gloss off. Nearly everyone in baseball coats their equipment in Blackburne’s mud –– they aren’t required to use his specifically, but for over half a century most teams have. 



 



When baseball season starts back up on April 2nd, umpires across the U.S. will crack open canisters of South Jersey shore mud. One would think, in a culture with its eyes fixed on the next new thing, someone would have gured out a short cut, a way to manufacture new balls, already worn in. But no other treatment, mechanical or manual, does the aging job as well as Bintliff’s mud. The contemporary american baseball is both manufactured and mudded down before every game, and so occupies a kind of liminal age –– just past too new, but not yet overused. It’s a subtle timeframe. According to Bintliff, if rubbed right, you can’t see that a ball’s been aged at all. 



 



“The umpires rub them, they put them in the box. They get through a dozen, then they go back and rub back over them after they dry to make sure there’s no dust or no cake build up on them.”Bintliff says. “And if it’s done right, you can’t tell that it’s done, if it’s done right. The only way you can tell is in the difference in the grip.” 



 



 



 



 



1 An association of teams which includes, among others, the New York Yankees, the Boston Red Sox, and the Chicago White Sox.



2 Mays was known as something of a “submariner,” or a pitcher who elects to throw side-armed and very low to the ground, rather than the conventional, overhead motion.

3 The Commissioner of Baseball had been created earlier in 1920, to serve as the chief executive of Major League Baseball. The position had been determined necessary after the “Black Sox Scandal” –– when it came out that the Chicago White Sox had been paid off to throw the 1919 World Series to the Cincinnati Reds. 



4 Notably, but perhaps incidentally, during these years the American League outperformed the National League in both World Series and All Star Game results. 

In 2013, Tom Berninger released the seminal documentary *Mistaken For Strangers*: a chronicle of his brother’s rock band, The National. It was a film about a band, or, about a band of brothers, or two brothers, fighting. The film is a personal narrative about two brothers, not a band, but a banding together. 



 Tom Berninger is jealous of his brother and band-member Matt Berninger because Matt is  a rockstar, famous and successful, while Tom lives at home with his mom. They embody the tension between the similar. Why is Tom not a copy of Matt?



Much of post-Y2K America can be gleaned from this work: the latest rise and fall of rock, the struggle of man in a harsh land, the tension between brothers, across states, as the one secret subject of a banking crisis that would be realized a mere nine years after the band’s formation. 



***



Nirvanna is a brand new Nirvana1 cover band with a Kurt Cobain impersonator frontman, self-nominating as “the #1 tribute to the greatest grunge band of all time,”2 and a flawless recreation of the “iconic look and sound.” They sound pretty close to the Nirvana. They play the same songs. The impersonator looks like Kurt in the right light. But, this Cobain is too heavy to be from the nineties. The other two look nothing like the old other two of Nirvana.



Just this February, Nirvanna hit the House of Blues in New Orleans, turning the city into their own “Mardi Grunge.” This column is their coverage: a dissection of the fifty pounds this impersonator Kurt has gained since Nirvana last shredded America’s values in 1993; a critical conflation of this band with Berninger’s *Mistaken For Strangers. *The brother’s of The National are marked by their similarity. From it arises both their hatred and themselves. Everything is about this The National documentary, yet, in a way, it also is not. 



There is something unsettling about Nirvanna’s renaming. Perhaps it is a deep similarity of language and letters with a resounding lack of semantic continuity. The name sounds and looks quite similar, but the additional ‘n’ entails that it is no longer ‘nirvana:’ it is neither a symbol for the meditative state, nor the band . In “The Doctrine of the Similar,” Walter Benjamin posits 



*Nature produces similarities— one only need think of mimicry. Human beings, however, possess the very highest capability to produce similarities. Indeed, there may not be a single one of the higher human functions which is not decisively co-determined by the mimetic faculty.*



Nirvanna’s choice to imitate is not novel, but rather a choice to which we as humans are possibly predisposed. Their self-expression is merely the expression of capitalizing on a trope: namely, the trope of Nirvana. But can something new be found in their, presumably, conscious similarity, in their decision to express, in a seemingly original fashion, the expressions of another? No, “it might not be too bold to presume that on the whole a uniform direction can be perceived in the historical development of this mimetic faculty.”3



If what it is to be human is to be original, then only a continuous progression towards the unquestionably original can be assumed. However, this does not refer to an indeterminate and indefinable original, but instead to an Abrahamic sin-based conception of the original. Can the mimetic progression of Benjamin’s projection be one of both assimilation into the past and exploration into the future? Can Nirvanna both become Nirvana, escape Nirvana, avoid its impending battle with its brother, and be its own music by practising the similar?



***



After several viewings of the recent rock-documentary *The History of the Eagles*,and with its corrosive elixir of irony brewing in the back of my mind, there, the cover band Nirvanna began to slip, in and out of conflation, with the brothers of *Mistaken For Strangers.* 



Nirvana and the grunge movement represent the 90’s desire for originality, for individualism in the individual; The National documentary is documentation of a man spiritually murdering his brother, the relation by which he both is and is not his own boy. These cultural artifacts are emblematic replications of the originals, to which the originals offered no foreshadowing. But also of sin. This move in the 1990’s to American individualism was a movement towards depravity, towards grunge, Lewinsky, and the computer-based techno-panic, a prelude to Y2K.



Increasingly, liberal America has forgotten that it, too, is constituted by sinners; that each and every man is born with original sin. People think that to own original sin is to sin in your very own way. Many think that they are not a product nor an aspiration of the similar. Yet, original sin is the timeless sin, the universal sin, and has nothing to do with post-Y2K originality, irony, or sincerity.



Nirvanna is original in the way we think our sin is not but is. It is original as traced back to the beginning— never new or naked, but simply exposed in its uninventiveness. The turn of the millennium, Y2K, has not brought us sweet sinlessness— but rather, its has made us forget that each of us possesses original sin. Our grunge movement was not a rebellion, but a Catholic Crusade. It was the hunt for the inner individual, for the self, for Kurt Cobain’s vapid aspirations. This was grunge, it was original, was the never-before. This was also sin: the sin of heroin, of the murder of Courtney Love by proxy of Kurt Cobain. Yes, there was a suicide; however, it was Love who killed herself, not Kurt, but through Kurt. Moreover, this was the same: Nirvanna is Nirvana, and even Nirvana was not Nirvana. Nirvana itself could only be original as it relates to the similarity of sin. They commit the same sins in the hunt for individualism, and even their suicide, their climax, was an act of proxy: an act through another, through the similar.



Nirvanna is the emblem of our post-Y2K existence, of our denial of our sin, of our Catholic guilt. They are sinful, full of lust and greed and pride for that which is not theirs: Cobain’s music. They are sinful. Yet have no ownership over their own sin. 



We as contemporary Americans pride individualism, but we have perverted our original sin to be sin we believe to be original, sin that we think is not fake or lacking in uniqueness. This is the post-Y2K: the individual, the original, the identity, the personal. But it is not original. Another ‘n’ wont change anything. This is Nirvana still.



Maybe it is just that Cobain never died. A man, a proxy, a figment? Maybe he was a proxy, a hired hand, in own his death. We know he was a proxy when he was married. And so was Love. Maybe we have on our hands the same Cobain, having disappeared for twenty years and gained 50 pounds. He is fat, but he is also himself— he is Kurt-and-fat— and covered in a thin film so as to replicate the process of birth, and by proxy, the process of documentation.



Somewhat little known, and allegedly replaced, rocker Andrew W.K. has, admittedly, never been the same man. And as he says, he never feels real, or has never before felt quite so real. So why must we demand so much of Cobain? Because Buzzfeed does not know what is original, and neither do our concert goers. They do not know the sound of “Pennyroyal Tea”, or know that it hurts to see you Kurt, again, after so long. 



Our perceived sinlessness is sinful. Our perceived originality is a cover band. Our means of crying out is unoriginal, and sinful. So it is sin. And the only sin is the original sin: that with which Adam and Eve left the Garden. Thus, it is not new, but it is original, and so infinite. Just as the deceased Cobain occupies the threaded needle of the infinite, so must Nirvanna, for its unoriginal originality is its very timelessness. Going out of fashion never will.



 Yet, it is as well the symbol of our amnesia. We have forgotten what is original, what is the true Form, who is standing in the tall grass, why we are replicas and simulacra, which band is a cover, that Kurt is no one’s brother, that the first documentary was about The National, and that the New Age is one of sin (the same sin), the first sin, the original sin, the genetic and replicated sin, of the grunge ideology repeatedly breaking open the same punk-freedom riffs and rifts at each step, each time the clock strikes the next generation, each time the golf ball hits a hole-in-one, in our sinful genealogy. 



***



But what can be gleaned from the similarity of these bands (and these brothers)? Is there something to read into this, or out of it to read? The nature of our new sin and new originality is determined only in so far as we can be certain that it is the same. Yet, there remain two ways for us to comprehend the novel originality that erupted from Nirvanna and The National, two means by which we can read into their cultural footprint. Benjamin, again, conceives of such similarities and their readings in these terms:



…This non-sensuous similarity, however, reaches into all areas of reading, this deep level reveals a peculiar ambiguity of the word "reading" in both its profane and magical senses. The pupil reads his ABC book, and the astrologer reads the future in the stars. In the first clause, reading is not separated into its two components. But the second clarifies both levels of the process: the astrologer reads off the position of the stars in the heavens; simultaneously he reads the future and fate from it.



The word ‘Nirvanna” as a symbol is understood only in its similarity, its subtle difference yet inclination to the mythical state and the grunge group, for it means nothing in and of itself. It is a symbol that can be listened to, heard, and read. But one can read more than that. Benjamin’s astrologer reads into the stars the future. Into Nirvanna we can read the past, though we may not want to. Because it is merely a reiteration of the same similarity, the same sin, we can read in it the past as reaching the entire way back to the Garden of Eden. Thus, though unintentionally, it is a crusade, as alluded to above. We can reach the tranquil state of understanding that there no nothing novel and interesting in our movements towards the self, the identity, or the individual, to our movements toward grunge, freedom, or self-expression. All that may be contained in these cultural shifts is a repetition, is the similar, is the the most general, frequent, and defining trait of human: namely, to aspire to the similar. And this similar is sinful. And like the sin with which we were all born, the similarity can be traced back, without genealogy to one event. The death of Cobain. For without this, there could be no impersonator, no inter-band tension, no gripe from which to build a feud or a documentary.



Nonetheless, Kurt Cobain is no longer Kurt Cobain. To cover a band is original only insofar as it is what has always been done. The Pitchfork review will say that Nirvanna sounds too much like Nirvana crossed with Creedence Clearwater Revival and with a drizzle of Danzig, too much like a bowl of sound mixed with a mixer that is Minutemen, while all painted on a canvas stolen from Can, running with a vision stolen from Television. Faux-Cobain is too hefty for his role as Kurt. They, Nirvanna, are the modern sinners, filmed live on documentary. The other two members look nothing like Cobain’s flank-mates. We go to concerts of the cover band because we have forgotten what original means, or because precisely we remember. Our sin is the same sin, and yet it feels so new. This film is still, and has always been, about The National.



1The renowned 90’s pacific northwest grunge band



2 Nirvanna— A Tribute to Nirvana, Facebook Page Biography



3 Benjamin, “Doctrine of the Similar” 

Who exactly is responsible for indoctrinating the American people with the “fake news” that has become a fixture America’s Facebook feeds? Since the election to the presidency of President-Electoral Donald Trump, many Big Media pundits have blamed for the outcome (in part) Facebook and its sudden rise this election cycle as a news outlet. As has been often said, Facebook has become a medium for the spread of ‘fake news:’ factually incorrect headlines and stories shared and read across Facebook that are created for solely capitalistic purposes (rather than for any particular isomorphism to the truth). These pundits have been blaming Facebook’s ‘echo chamber’ for the proliferation of false information; however, Facebook is not an echo chamber, it is our slave. These headlines have (somewhat) undermined our democratic system.



A citizen, in order to correctly vote their conscience, has to nd factual information so that they may make a valid inference from their preferences to a candidate. This is why trustworthy journalism is so deeply integral to a democracy. Yet, the spread of fake news has thrown a wrench into this system; now, with access to false and misleading information, the American citizen is able to unknowingly cast a vote incongruous to their preferences. This is where Facebook comes in. It offers both true and false information, while incentivizing this false information to the user, precisely because the viewer has control over what they see on their feed and because false information appeals to our immediate, lower desires. Facebook is our slave in the sense that we have absolute control over what we see on our Facebook feed. You can unfriend this person, get rid of that headline, follow this news source and not that one, block information, and have advertisements and websites appear tailored-made by Facebook’s algorithms. As irony would have it, you are presented with only articles from pages that you (or your ‘friends’) ‘Like’. That is, in order to get a certain page’s information you must already ‘Like’ it. The capitalist incentive for Facebook to make money (by selling ads) forces Facebook to show you things you already like. Things that comfort you. Nothing like a stale, sterile army bed. I know you remember that cold sheet, firm pillow, and pack of American bedsprings.



As Rousseau said, “Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.” This is the fundamental tenet of positive liberty. Positive liberty is the idea that freedom from oneself can be attained by means of a contract. The thought is that man can be enslaved to their lower, non-rationally endorsed desires. That is, one can be unfree in the sense that one’s lower desires prevent one achieving one’s long-term, rationally endorsed desires.



Take Mike, who often frequents the bar. Mike tells his friend and bartender Tom to take his car keys when Mike gets to the bar. Later in the night, once Mike has had one too many and irrationally wants to drive home, Tom refuses to return the keys. So, Mike takes a cab. In this way, Mike is freed from himself, from his lower, non-rational desire for ease of transport. Accordingly, Mike has both lower-order, immediate desires and higher order, rationally endorsed desires. When he is enslaved it is to the former.



Yet, Mike is able to achieve his long-term goal (to not break the law) because of the contract he entered with Tom. In the case of Facebook, this long-term desire is to be a properly functioning member of a democracy, to vote for the candidate that aligns with your preferences, and this requires access to factually correct information. We must enter a contract with trustworthy journalism to ensure that we have real information on which to correctly vote our preferences.



But positive liberty can also be inverted. The contract we just saw Mike enter can be flipped such that Mike is further enslaved to himself. We can see this in Goethe’s Faust. Faust wants to attain innite knowledge through science (maybe?) and signs a contract with the devil, Mephistopheles, so that he may achieve this goal. Faust will give his soul to Mephistopheles upon dying, and in exchange Mephistopheles will do (through magical powers) whatever Faust wants while Faust is alive. In essence, Mephistopheles will be Faust’s slave. However, Faust does not find this scientic knowledge. Rather he ends up succumbing to his base desires, impregnating Gretchen(?) and causing the death of her relatives. Mephistopheles is Faust’s slave, yet he is the slave through whom Faust becomes enslaved (to himself). Faust cannot complete his long-term goal because his lower desires overtake him, and his slave enables these lower desires. It is exactly the sort of slavery Rousseau diagnoses.1



The ability Facebook presents it user creates the same effect. As users, we may tailor Face- book to show us whatever we want, and for the most part this consists of images, videos, and headlines that are immediately pleasing. And an immediate pleasure has a tendency to con- 



form to a lower and base desire, something that does not align with our rational interests. We can force our news feed to consist of solely people we like, videos of food that appease our gluttonous appetites, images of animals and pleasing headlines that comfort us. Herein the problem lies. We have been given the power to fulll our immediate and base desire for com- fort by tailoring the news we receive to tell us only things we want to hear, true or false. So, our news becomes those things which please and comfort, not which inform. And as we have seen, absolute control over the delivery of one’s lower desires can lead to enslavement (of oneself to one’s self). Our gluttonous appetite for news of food and animals and lies has deprived of us of our constitutive democratic quality: the right to vote with agency. We vote based on information, and this information becomes skewed by misinformation and or appetites, and then we do not vote based on our preferences, for we are voting on misinformation.



Is this why we have a rise in conspiratorial thinking? Does the world seem more appealing to our lower desire for comfort when it can be explained by the stars or shady men behind the Hollywood walls? Possibly, but the upshot from the disintegration of trustworthy journalism has enabled the conspiratorial and base American mind. Isaiah Berlin insists that positive liberty need not be paternalistic. Alex Jones yells like my father. Facebook is a dili- gent slave and has given us tremendous power (possibly even enough to drain a swamp clean), but by doing so it has enslaved us to ourselves and undercut our democracy. So, Facebook must be the goateed devil, Mephistopheles: my Oaxacan goatee I grew to celebrate my grandfather’s funeral, those four weeks. We can blame Shane Smith for secretly dosing his interns with LSD2, and we can blame Zuckerberg and our anything-machines3 for undermining our agency. It seems that what it is to be a human (our freedom, our most-constitutive quality concerning the constitution) is incompossible with the Internet in general (and its incentivized depravity).



Mephistopheles, is it fake news or Internet drugs or fake Persian rugs? Are you Alex Jones and the conspiratorial complex— the investigation into the Climate Change Hoax, as in, the white establishment’s fear. Is this you?



Have we reached a singularity of Big Media pundits and webcam truthers? Our enslavement to fake news has left us in a hole, down a pit, without a bridge, and with a gap. This is the time of gluttonous desires: gluttonous chains in which we were not born. Desires for comfort, reinforcing information, a conspiracy, and the ‘truth’.



Yet, now enslaved, how are we supposed to ever truly understand Ruby Ridge? Connect the Waco Siege to the four corners of the American West (i.e., the Oklahoma City Bombing, i.e., W.A.C.O. as acronym for Washington, Arkansas, California, Oklahoma)? When all we can see are Facebook videos of our shy ex-girlfriend Concealed Carry. I miss her: my woman, my gun, my freedom. 



 



1 I would like to thank Christophe Porot [Harvard University] for this idea.



2 I would like to thank Noah Grossman for this headline.



3 I would like to thank David Kurlander for this term. 

Joanne wants you girls to know that she’s a real messy bitch: a liar, a scammer. “I love robbery and fraud,” she drawls with scandalized bourgeois affect, flipping her blonde wig with a vigor that threatens whiplash. “And I’m a messy bitch who lives for drama.”



For the last two seconds of the video, Joanne teases us with an inviting smile. The space seems to fill with domestic gray noise, perhaps emanating from an air conditioner or an open refrigerator. Her widening eyes never leave the camera.       



From this twelve-second Instagram clip posted in 2015, Joanne the Scammer was born. Smoky-voiced and amply stubbled, Joanne is a self-described “Caucasian” woman portrayed by a half-black man—a comedian named Branden Miller. If her robust social media presence is to be believed, Joanne spends her days making men cry, infiltrating Paypal accounts, and hosting guests in opulent homes that don’t belong to her.



Joanne describes herself as “iconic,” and her six-figure following seems to wholeheartedly, rabidly agree. Her frank accounts of embezzlement and identity theft are greeted with cultish enthusiasm, reverberating through the Twittersphere with thousands of reposts, eliciting worldwide cries of “YAS QUEEN” and the rare “SCAM ME MOMMY.”



Donning a sumptuous white fur coat—presumably loot from one of her scams—Joanne is the id embodied, a unilaterally dishonest, mal-intentioned personality. To Joanne, duplicity comes as naturally as breathing does. She gets out of bed to deceive as one might get up to use the bathroom, and she documents her trickery on Twitter, each heist as mundane as a load of laundry.       



*@joanneprada *



*Woke up to tell a lie. Going back to bed now. *



*12:09 PM - 9 Sep 2016*



*@joanneprada*



*I’m in the middle of being fake, let me call you back.*



*10:40 AM - 20 Sep 2016*



She lies. She cheats. She calls new girlfriends of ex-lovers in the middle of the night, cooing in tones that toe the precipice of goodwill: “Hi, hi! I, I just wanted to remind you that I’m better.”



Her unflinching malice surprises us, although it probably shouldn’t.



*@joanneprada*



*We don’t remember days, we remember scams. *



*8:46 PM - 12 Oct 2016*



Each morning, the sun rises, and with it Joanne awakens, snatching her latest victim’s credit card as she bolts for the door. Although the messy bitch lives for drama, there is little suspense in Joanne’s life of prolific scheming. The central drama of Joanne’s hijinks sits, not in her repertoire of drained PayPal accounts, but in the performance of her identity—Miller’s imitation of white womanhood. From the hyperbolic vocal fry to the plastic yellow hair, Joanne’s trappings of whiteness stand out like thick brushstrokes on an Expressionist canvas. The actor’s dark stubble contrasts the straight blonde hair on his character’s head. We’re made to laugh—problematically, perhaps—because we’re accomplices in Joanne’s scamming, and because we think, at some level, that we too are being scammed.



Joanne’s assertions of her “Caucasianness” are startling, uneasy. “White” is conversational; “Caucasian” is scientific. Joanne’s use of the latter term undermines itself, betraying a cold, darkly humorous unfamiliarity with whiteness. One of her most famous videos, titled “Caucasian Living,” shows the fur-clad con artist answering the door of a Los Angeles mansion, welcoming us to her “Caucasian home.”  



“This is how I live,” she says nervously, shiftily peering at her surroundings. She fumbles with a chrome coffee maker. “Seriously—it’s all me, all this, yes.”



  The term “Caucasian” as we understand it today dates back to the 19th century, when racial “science” flared and bubbled like a sore. An acclaimed physiologist named Johann Freidrich Blumenbach posited that the region surrounding the Caucasus Mountains was the homeland of phenotypic whiteness. Circassian women—who were indigenous to the region—were mythologized as the most beautiful, godlike women in the world. By inventing the Caucasian racial category, Blumenbach codified white supremacy in an empirical “scientific” vocabulary.



Blumenbach’s demarcation of a white homeland, a project meant to extol racial purity, was doomed by geography. Myriad ethnic groups and religious traditions thrived in the Caucasus, a region that bordered the ostensibly-separate Christian and Muslim worlds. The legendary Caucasians were, to the surprise of many, a rather heterogeneous people.



In 1864 New York City, circus tycoon P.T. Barnum staged showings of “Circassian Beauties,” racially-ambiguous women from the Caucasus area. The storied region promised fair-skinned divinity, and the Beauties—some of whom had kinky hairstyles and dark skin tones—posed a visual quandary for ogling audience members. As Sarah Lewis posits in a New Yorker essay, “the idea of whiteness itself was a curiosity worthy of the stage.”



*@joanneprada*



*Sorry, but you’ve been evicted from my Caucasian home.*



*3:50 AM - 17 Aug 2016 *



Joanne the Scammer’s affectatious, stageworthy whiteness is not an invitation for scientific scrutiny—it’s a cutting exposition of the anxiety embedded in the idea of  “Caucasian living.” Joanne is particularly of our moment, and not simply because of her blue-screened ascent to fame. She seeks to lay claim to a Caucasian home, a mission that ensnared the imaginations of 19th-century Americans, a project that re-emerged and simmered menacingly in the year leading up to November 8th.  



Perhaps those who have clamored for harsh bans and tight borders see themselves as the proprietor of the home Joanne invades, the fair-skinned homeowner whose presence banishes the cowering brown-skinned imposter. Yet that forceful assertion of ownership is also rooted in territorial nervousness, the spiraling anxiety that Joanne shows so acutely. Her whiteness becomes all the more stageworthy as she demands that the cameras stop rolling, as she confronts the homeowner who disrupts her cinematic montage: “How dare you ruin this for me!” With darting eyes and stuttering bravado, Joanne lays claim to the West Hollywood mansion, stroking her stolen mink as if the walls of her Caucasian home are about to collapse.  



 

The past days I have spent falling into the blue vortex. What’s really scary about the internet is that it goes on forever. Websites— urls, bookmarks, forums—are only a method of organization, like chapters in a book or the Dewey decimal system. Scrolls disseminated human knowledge before books were able to organize them more efficiently. The Bible was a series of scrolls, lore and prayers merely, before some monks stitched it all together. If the entire collection of Widener Library was a scroll, I wouldn’t be surprised if it reached the moon. If the internet were a scroll, it would be an infinite expanse. I’ve been consuming news at a faster rate than I have ever before. I can’t stop clicking down my Facebook feed, I’ve started reading Twitter. I can’t sleep, and my wrists frequently itch. I see a conspiracy theory behind every virtual door.



I think this is a kind of coping. Some people listen to music or paint, but I can’t stop behaving like some kind of internet-bot, mindlessly combing through short text and long text and grainy images and sharp images until some kind of reality unfolds in my mind like a ghostly program. The more I fall into the blue, the less real my real memories become—friends, family, childhood begin to feel terrible unhinged. This is ongoing insanity. I cast a message out to the web to attempt some kind of empathy. Someone replies.



Her name is Eleanor, married to a white American, retired mortgage banker, 63 years old, with a daughter, and one grandchild. She was born in South Korea, but moved to Kansas in 1975, where she became a born-again Christian. Eleanor is also an active member in the “Asians for Trump 2016” Facebook group. The first thing she demands of me in our first exchange is to reveal whether I was in the country illegally. I write that my parents, who grew up in families left destitute after China’s civil war, had moved to the US on work visas when I was three years old, and that I became a citizen in 2015. Eleanor warms up after this. She tells me she voted based on Christian reasons, and that she thoroughly aligns with Trump’s nationalism, his stances on sexual identity, immigration, and reproduction. She sends me a laundry list that justifies Trump with selected passages from the Bible. How is it possible for me to refute this distilled core of her very being?



I then write to Eleanor that I am 22 years old, was born in China, and grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, not so far from Kansas, and that I was worried about the future. This time, Eleanor does not respond with doubts about my citizenship. She becomes sympathetic. She tells me she had left Korea when she was very close to my age, 21. In her words, she was born Catholic, and even at young age she knew that there was a God, someone, somewhere higher than anybody. She joined the Church of Christ at age 19, but that church felt “empty” to her. One day, she was listening to a Christian broadcast by a Baptist pastor in Georgia. His messages intrigued her, and she started to read the Bible on her own. Her prayers began to be answered during times of personal tribulation. To assuage my worries, she recommends that I attend church and read the Bible, which had given her so much comfort. She writes to me, “God will put you in a position so desperately... so that you’ll get some clarity with what’s troubling you, with Trump’s election—FEAR? Right?”



Eleanor is right. I am afraid. I’m afraid for my friends. I’m afraid for those who are intimately acquainted with hate. I’m afraid of the world. I’m afraid of my ignorance, suddenly sharply afraid of my body, of my face, of my eyes, of my skin, of how easy it is to slip into that endless blue vortex. Is Eleanor a human being that I can feel that through the pop- up window that connected us, or was that a sham littered through platitudes of love and acceptance? I don’t want it to be a sham. I want to believe that a few sentences sent over the internet can bridge a wide chasm of fear. In another world, would I be like Eleanor?



People throw us into a group called the millennials. We are “snowflakes” who are easily offended, “narcissists” obsessed with social media popularity, we are the “participation trophy” generation, constantly seeking gratification and incapable of empathy. The Bible has been replaced by the glass tablets in our hands, the black screen reflected in our eyes.



But it was not the millennials who chose Donald Trump, a man who has used tools of hate to gain his popularity. We feel empathy just as sincerely or hollowly as people always have, but our new world allows us a wider network to share our lives. We feel less antipathy to difference than any previous generation. We are criticized for political correctness, but until very recently in the course of history, women, people of color, and LGBT persons were not citizens with full rights—perhaps our “correctness” is a necessary balm and divergence. Perhaps our neatly tuned emotions allow us to sense something sinister is afoot.



I was brought here as a kid because my parents believed in the American dream. The story that I learned was that America is exceptional because it has been, is, and always will be a nation of immigrants. As a kid I bought the story. I swallowed it. Apprehensions of terrible wrongs were soothed by it. This is the story they told me as I grew up in Nebraska, a state named after the word for “at water” in the Chiwere language. This is the story they told me: African-American and Irish pioneers moved west, followed by Polish immigrants with stockyards, Germans with their breweries, Italian, Mexican, and Chinese rail workers on the Union Pacic, Mormon migrants who never made it to Salt Lake, refugees from Sudan, immigrants building layer upon layer of that great and innite dream. Now, that was only the rst generation, they told me. We weren’t “millennials” back when they told us the story—we were kids. You kids are the future, they said, we love you and have hope in you.



In 2016, 60% of Nebraska voted for a vision of American identity and nationalism that, to my mind, never existed in reality. People like Eleanor, people who were my surrogate grandmothers in childhood, openly admitted that the dream they peddled was a sham, at least in their minds. They loved many of us when we were children, loved us so deeply that they told us stories to calm our nightmares—was that love so hollow that now they see us grief-stricken and frightened, and laugh? Maybe we can reach each other over that great divide. For me, the best thing that can happen now is that the president’s policies will somehow move compromise. The worst thing is that his words will become normal, that his vision will corrupt the American dream into a twisted, shrunken, shattered, demented version of the beautiful dream of my childhood. And then I don’t know if I will be able to believe it. Can you? 

            This past January, I attended a concert at Philadelphia’s First Unitarian Church. The audience in the church’s dimly lit basement was tattooed, bedecked in social justice slogans and, like most punk show crowds, predominantly white. Two hours into the show, a local hardcore band with both white and Black members took the stage. As they launched into their blistering set, I followed my instinct and, bobbing to the rhythm, started to work my way forward through the crowd. By the time the band had finished playing their first song, I had made significant progress toward the stage. That’s when the band’s lead singer leaned into the mic and yelled:



            “It’s fuckin’ 2016! BROWN PEOPLE TO THE FRONT!”



            As the drummer counted in the next song of the set, I began to experience a minor identity crisis. I am a person of mixed Jewish and Vietnamese heritage, and my skin is several shades darker than that of the average Anglo-American. Indeed, even during the dimmest days of winter, my complexion never brightens beyond an even tan. But at that moment, I asked myself: am I *brown *or not? And if not, then what was I doing pushing myself towards the front of the crowd? I didn’t know the answer to the first question—or maybe I couldn’t decide—and so I found myself frozen, rooted to my spot, unable to even pogo.



            That confusion—that sense of misplacedness and strangeness in the face of a racial binary—is nothing new in America. Since anti-miscegenation laws were ruled unconstitutional in 1967, the population of multiracial Americans has grown to represent nearly seven percent of the country. Today, multiracial America is expanding at a rate three times as fast as the country’s population at large.



            The true history of the mixed-race struggle for identity in America, however, goes back for centuries before *Loving v. Virginia*. It’s a fundamental part of our country’s historical confrontation with race. Yet it is often forgotten, something all too evident in the story of one of America’s most obscure communities: the “Melungeons” of Southern Appalachia, mixed-race mountain-dwellers whose encounter with rigid racial norms in the 19th and 20th century led to the near-complete erasure of their multiracial identity. Examining the story of the Melungeons reveals some lessons about the complex nature of race in America—lessons that, ultimately, should serve as a warning to the contemporary activist left as it grapples with race and racism in the 21st century.



 



**The Melungeons**



            First: who are the Melungeons? To answer that question, we must revisit the history of Southern Appalachia. After that region opened to American settlement in the late 18th century, the first pioneers who moved in were poor and peripheral inhabitants of the lowland South, among them mixed-race individuals from eastern Virginia whose “mulatto” status was a source of social stigma in their home region.[[1]](#_ftn1) White Appalachian settlers began to call these mixed-race people “Melungeons,” possibly from the French *mélange*, or mixture. Even in Appalachia, multiracial people often had difficulty fitting in; while unmixed white and Black settlers were known to inhabit the same towns as one another, church records show that Melungeons were sometimes forced out of non-Melungeon communities for their “wickedness.”[[2]](#_ftn2) These ostracized multiracial people came together in settlements of their own, and thus, self-contained Melungeon communities—with a distinct multiracial identity—came into existence in early 19th century Appalachia. In the racially polarized American South, however, this could not last.



            Starting in the mid-19th century, persisting social forces and legal shifts led to the negation of the Melungeons’ mixed-race identity. “Colored” residents of Tennessee were banned from voting in 1834.[[3]](#_ftn3) After eight Melungeon men were sent to court for voting in the federal elections a decade later, their attorney was able to exonerate them by having their “beautiful hands and feet” (evidence, apparently, of a lack of nonwhite ancestry) examined in court.[[4]](#_ftn4) The lesson to be learned from this trial, and from the law that it concerned, was clear. Despite having both “colored” and white origins, Melungeons could legally only be one or the other—and it was better to be white.



            In 1930, mixed-race classifications were struck from the federal census. Instead of being marked down as multiracial or even “mulatto,” individuals with both white and “colored” heritage were now required to register solely as members of their nonwhite ancestry group.[[5]](#_ftn5) Soon after, Virginia Registrar of Vital Statistics Walter Ashby Plecker brought this “one-drop rule” directly to bear on the Melungeons. Plecker was frustrated by the Melungeons’ attempts to list only their white ancestry on the census; he wrote that all the other mixed-race “mongrels” of Virginia were eagerly watching the Melungeons’ efforts to pass as white, “ready to follow in a rush when the first have made a break in the dike.” In 1942 he went through the census records of each county in Virginia and compiled a list of mixed families’ surnames, distributing it to local officials so that all multiracial individuals could be correctly classified as “colored.”[[6]](#_ftn6) In this way, the Melungeons were forcefully relegated to a single racial category, their mixed background expunged from the historical record.



            The greatest distortion of the Melungeons’ identity, however, arose not from external attempts to classify them but from their own desire to classify themselves. Pressured by society to deny their multiracial past, the Melungeons forgot it entirely; from the mid-19th century onwards, they began to ascribe all manner of “pure” ethnic origins to themselves. Most often, Melungeons claimed Mediterranean descent—Portuguese, Turkish, and even ancient Pheonician ancestry.[[7]](#_ftn7) This was a way to account for their non-Anglo appearance while still enjoying the rights afforded to white people. The myth of the Melungeons’ Mediterranean origins became so established that as late as 2005, one author of self-proclaimed Melungeon descent wrote about how centuries of endogamy had preserved in her people “an almost ‘pure’ Mediterranean type, complete with associated genotypic and phenotypic traits.”[[8]](#_ftn8) Only in 2012, after the completion of a genetic study, were the group’s mixed-race origins conclusively proven.[[9]](#_ftn9) Prior to that study’s publication, many modern Melungeon descendants considered rumors of their ancestors’ multiracial pedigree to be simple misinformation.



 



**Racial binaries and the left**



            What, you may ask, does all this Appalachian esoterica have to do with contemporary race issues? I’ll explain. Last May, I helped put on a concert organized by Renegade, a Harvard student organization dedicated to art and advocacy in support of people of color (POCs). The event’s purpose was to showcase the work of POC artists and, accordingly, it featured a number of talented musicians of color from both on and off campus. I have the utmost respect and affection for Renegade. Their formation, two years ago, was an utterly audacious act, and their goals—to empower POC voices, fight race-based oppression, and encourage creativity within the campus community of color—are noble and laudable. The individuals involved in the collective are inspired, welcoming, and “woke.” As for the concert itself, it was, in my opinion, nearly perfect: all the performers sounded great, turnout was solid, and it truly felt as if we had created a positive space for our community.



            Yet in retrospect—and in light of the Melungeons’ story—one aspect of the event now gives me pause. In the lead-up to the concert, some of the other students running the event posted a brief message on its Facebook event page. The post, aimed at white attendees, emphasized that the event was intended for people of color; it mentioned that in the event of a line forming out the door of the venue, POCs would, accordingly, be invited in before white people. At the time, this idea made total sense to me, and when the venue’s authorities ordered us to take down the post, I grumbled along with the rest of my co-organizers.



            After reflecting further upon that incident, however, my opinion has changed. I now firmly believe that such rhetoric is ultimately harmful. Letting in people of color before white individuals, in practice, means classifying all of humanity into two discrete identity groups and then enforcing a hard divide between those two groups. According to the rules of contemporary racial discourse on the left, mixed individuals of partially white descent are considered people of color; if I had been in line for the concert, my Asian heritage would have gotten me inside sooner, despite my half-whiteness.



            This dualistic division between white people and POCs is deeply misleading. As the early Melungeons knew, multiracial people face a lived experience totally distinct from those of unmixed people of all races. I may not be “white” according to the contemporary left’s definition, but by descent I am as white as I am Asian, as Jewish as I am Vietnamese. I have grappled with issues of racial identity my entire life, only fairly recently coming to terms with this duality; I identify with both sides and, just as deeply, as a mixed person. To enforce a binary distinction between the two halves of my ancestry, and place me in a group including only one of them, is to force me to abandon one half of my racial identity and, thus, my mixed-race identity. It also confronts me with difficult, potentially unanswerable questions like the one I encountered at the concert in Philadelphia. If I am partially white, and possess some of that identity’s benefits and privileges as a result, should I have gone to the back of the crowd? Or should I have gone to the middle? Presented with a dual choice between white and “colored,” the Melungeons abandoned their mixed identity and contrived an entirely new one. In my case, I am left feeling confused, out-of-place, and alien.



            I should emphasize that I object neither to the existence of a rhetorical distinction between POCs and white people nor to the inclusion of mixed non-white people in the former category. What worries me, rather, is hard-edged enforcement of this boundary that forces individuals to make a binary choice. In the current political climate, the (non alt-)right is far less likely to employ such a tactic than the activist left; identity policing on the right is likely to be seen as racism, while on the left, it reads as empowerment. To an extent, this seems legitimate to me. If people of color want to create a space solely for themselves, who am I to protest? Then again, if whiteness is not wanted in that space, how should I, a person whose mixed identity contains an immutable component of whiteness, feel about sharing in it? Given the existence of intermediate identities, can exclusionary application of the racial binary ever be justified?



            In summary, it is my belief that the activist left should be mindful of its tendency to actively divide individuals in a way that negates mixed identities. To be sure, the roots of this tendency lie not in the ideology of the left but in the pre-existing racial boundaries that have long upheld white supremacy in America; white supremacists were the first to institute such divisions, and they initially did so from a position of power. In the 21st century, however, as America’s racial binaries are fading away, I urge an understanding of race that better acknowledges the complexity of mixed experience. Otherwise, we risk a revival of the one-drop rule—and is that the conception of race we truly want to uphold?





[[1]](#_ftnref1) Hashaw, Tim. Children of Perdition: Melungeons and the Struggle of Mixed America. Macon, GA: Mercer UP, 2006, p. 27; Ibid., p. 8



[[2]](#_ftnref2) Ibid., pp. 9-10



[[3]](#_ftnref3) Estes, Roberta J., Jack Goins H., Penny Ferguson, and Janet Crain Lewis. "Melungeons, A Multi-Ethnic Population." Journal of Genetic Genealogy (2012): 6



[[4]](#_ftnref4) Hashaw, “Perdition,” p. 13



[[5]](#_ftnref5) "1930." US Census Bureau - History. US Census Bureau.



[[6]](#_ftnref6) Plecker, Walker Ashby. Letter to Local Registrars of Virginia. Jan. 1943. Virginia Department of Health, Richmond, Virginia.



[[7]](#_ftnref7) Hashaw, “Perdition,” p. 14



[[8]](#_ftnref8) Hirschman, Elizabeth Caldwell. Melungeons: The Last Lost Tribe in America. Macon, GA: Mercer UP, 2005, p. 46



[[9]](#_ftnref9) Estes, Goins, Ferguson, and Lewis 2



 

            Dr. Toni Morrison delivered six lectures on campus this spring as the 2016 Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry. She has published 11 novels, most recently *God Help the Child *(2015) and various works of non-fiction criticism. Dr. Morrison won the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012, the National Humanities Medal in 2000, and the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature for giving “life to an essential aspect of American reality.”



            Prof. Morrison generously agreed to meet with Fiction Board member Chloe Brooks on April 13, 2016. Here is the transcript of the conversation.



 



ADVOCATE:



            Throughout your magnificent lectures you turned to various texts, from a medical journal to a Flannery O’Connor short story to your own novels, to illustrate the concepts you discussed—from the role of the stranger to the "color fetish." In your last lecture, you connected contemporary history in your discussion of globalization with a specific literary work you admire, in such a way that one seemed to explicate the other, not in a direct but comprehensive, productive way. Your own works all embed literary narratives within specific historical moments and contexts, but the relation between the two does not stop at mere historical detail. How do you view the relation between imaginative literature and historical events? How does the former, with all the freedom afforded fiction, alter the “picture” of history for the reader?



           



Dr. Toni Morrison:



            I'm up to the last part. But on the penultimate question in there about the relationship between history and literature, I think there's data, and then there's information that comes from data, and then there's knowledge that comes from information. And then, after knowledge, there is wisdom.  I am interested in how to get from data to wisdom. And literature, it seems to me, is wisdom.  Some literature is knowledge, some is just data. But if I can get a "happy" ending—which is when for the characters I'm writing about, something happens that they move from wherever they are in the beginning to knowledge or wisdom, they know something they never would have acknowledged or realized if it hadn't been for my book—that for me is what literature does.



            I did an introduction for Primo Levi. I knew his work, I didn't know it all, but I knew enough. And I read some things that people have said about him, mostly echoing the horrors of the Holocaust. And that was there, but what impressed me enormously about his writings was how he always found humanity, always, he always looked for that, within that context. And what he wrote about are the people who gathered together to save somebody, or the people who *shared* some food, or the people who died with something in their mouths that they said, that impacted him. Actually, I don't think he gave a shit about the guards. He never talked about them.  They were not even people to him—they were like robots that kill people. And they were irrational.  Like, he took an ice cube to suck, and the guard came and took it away, and he said "why, why'd you do that?" And the guard said, "There are no why's or answers here." So that was it. They were almost non-thinking.  But the people, the humans, were the ones in the barracks. His poems were not so even-keeled, but his writings were.



 



ADVOCATE:



It's possible to write about evil in an interesting way . . . I think of Hannah Arendt, for instance.



 



MORRISON:



Yes, she does, but she says "the *banality* of evil." That's right. She's on it.



 



ADVOCATE:



You spoke about that during a question and answer, about evil being boring. Is that it—that evil is unthinking?



 



MORRISON:



            Evil is not interesting. What is it, chopping off someone's head? We used to do that as kids, you know, you tear up paper dolls and stuff. I know everyone's done it in the history of the world, but maybe everybody was dumb and they were just looking for something interesting to do. What's really interesting and hard is being good. That's really hard, thinking that way. I remember the Amish people 20 years ago, somebody shot up everybody in their school.  Sent the teachers out and lined up the girls and killed them. And the people, the Amish people, buried their dead, but first they went to see [the killer's] wife, and ask her if she needed anything, and "what about the children—can we take care of you, do you need anything?" And there was a lot of press, the newspaper people came down, "Oh my God, isn't this terrible." And [the Amish people] wouldn't talk to them. They had one thing to say—I think the leader said "*God* judges." So the story changed in the press from the deaths of these children to the fact that the Amish wouldn't talk. 



            That was a category of something that I thought put evil in its place. It's not that it didn't happen and they're not dead, but we're not talking about it—that's not our main thing. We want to see what we can do to help this widow. We don't even care if you put him in jail. It's not even about forgiveness, they just step away. 



            My metaphor is that evil always has a top hat and a cape, and goodness is over there in the corner. For me it's just too easy, if you hate your country or your wife, so you kill them. You can't think through that, you can't feel through that, you can't do the work. And now we have guns.  Solution? I don't think so. 



            Well, that's my version. It's not Christian. It's just a pure mindful use of one's brain, and language, that's all we got.  If we had no language we'd have nothing. I don't care what the whales do, and the birds—yeah, I got it.



 



ADVOCATE:



Why do you look for "data" in history? Is there something interesting to you about imagining from within historical circumstances?



 



MORRISON:



            First of all, it's what I know. And there are parts of it that I don't know that I want to know about. The past is interesting to me because it's been dumbed down or flattened out, or academically nitpicked so you can't get any life out of it, you just get data.



            And I also have difficulties with contemporary language. *Big* difficulties. I counted, you know, something like 160 words have disappeared from the English language because of the use of the word "like." "I'm like, he's like"—not "thought," not "as if ."



 



ADVOCATE:



There are parts of *God Help the Child* (Morrison's 11th novel, published in 2015) which I couldn't help thinking must have hurt a little bit, for you—to write like that.



 



MORRISON:



            The dialogue. Oh God. But that's what it takes. And of course I didn't even get into the initial things which you see on computers. Some of them, I get it, but why not just say it? Nobody has the time. Language, demeaning it, I guess they think that makes it more easily understood.  And I don't know if that's going to change.



            When I was writing *God Help the Child* I had to solve that problem. Because I put the book aside, because I couldn't get the contemporary language. When I put her in a professional category of being in the fashion industry, I could deal with the fashion industry, when I put him as a graduate student I could do that, when I had the woman who had been put in prison falsely.  I knew what prison life was like, not from experience. But I remember calling Angela Davis, and I said, isn't it true that in a woman's prison, the worst crime you could commit is child abuse or child murder, she said absolutely. Whatever you do, whoever you chop up, if you bother a child, you will be beaten, they will toss your mattress. She said that on all the walls of women's prisons, they have pictures of children.



            Maybe [I care about language] because I'm an editor, maybe because I'm picky, but it's all we got, don't shrink it.  Don't dumb it out, make it little.  I wonder how children talk. I got to listen to my grandchildren. They're 10, 11, real smart. I got to listen to them.



 



ADVOCATE:



            Would you comment on the relation between what you are hoping to represent to others and the kind of discoveries, pleasures, and real inspiration the great malleability of language affords you?



 



MORRISON:



            Well, there's a contract that I make between myself, the author, and the reader. I have to figure out how to give the reader certain powers of recognition, or his own knowledge, his own feelings, but I provide them, so we're working together. And I have a lot of respect for readers because I'm a reader.  That's how I got into writing.



            It's seduction, for me. I want to seduce you, and have you happy, pleased, for what you have received, or what you have learned, or what you have felt. And I want to keep you there, and deliver something worth of your attention, of your feelings.



            The best short examples of that are when I write about sex. Because it's never clinical, it's never graphic, there are no bad words, it's all imagistic and open. Because, first of all I prefer language that way about copulation and so on, and I assume your sex is better than mine.  Why, because it's yours. And if you can sink into the language of that, bringing your own inexperiences or experiences to it, of that.



            So that's the most graphic example I can give you, of the writing. But there are many other examples.



            I say in one book, "They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time" (*Paradise*, published in 1997). Do you want to look, and see who's the white girl? Many people do. Although I never say who she is, ever. And some people spend some time [trying to find out]. Some people spend a little time, and then they get involved in the book, and then they don't care. It's a hat trick, but it really is not irrelevant because of the nature of the book. I thought that was an interesting way to talk about race, by signaling it and then cutting it off. Does it matter? That's me inviting the reader to abandon it all. Artifice with a point.  It's not just beauty, it really is about learning. It's bliss when you give up all that stuff that separates you from other human beings. It's hard, but you break down all that stuff.



            And I felt when I left Princeton that there wasn't a great deal of that left.  I felt that so much of that was being broken down. You could have a conversation about race, maybe, but they'd gotten over it in some sense, the blacks and the whites. Now I only taught a few of them, I guess the jocks are still doing what they do, but I was feeling very hopeful when I left there. What's interesting is everybody's talking about it, and maybe that's good . . . but it's happening. I feel hopeful.  In spite of the murders.



            I was telling my son, all this he shot so-and-so, unarmed, that happened all the time. *All* the time. It was never in the press. It was in the black newspapers sometimes. I didn't know this for a long time, but my father as a boy in Cartersville, Georgia, had seen two lynched people on his street. Two men who owned a country store, they were hanging from trees right outside, down the road.  He was fourteen.  So he left, and went somewhere else. But to have that, to know that, see that, feel that, is a kind of a trauma. He never spoke about it, so I guess that's how he dealt with it.  But I know his attitude about white people was based on that. So I was doing a radio show, and I talked about how he threw a drunken white man down the stairs.  And for me, the horror was he threw out tricycle after him. But the interviewer said, "didn't that upset you?  Weren't you traumatized by that?" And I said, "Well, I would feel just how you did if a black man climbed up the stairs, and your father was there." Silence.



 



ADVOCATE:



            Readers deeply appreciate the political dimension of your work, but for you it seems politics and literature are both infused with and challenged by the same problems and possibilities. Would you say this is true?



 



MORRISON:



            I think it's true. I'm losing the definition now of politics. I sort of don't know what that is anymore. People say politically correct, I don't know what that means. I know what they think they mean.  But most of the really good literature I've read in my life was political, meaning it was important—about something going on in the history of the world—or contemporary. Think of anybody—Dostoevsky or Jane Austen—[their work] was always something that now we would call political.  So I don't see those separations too much, between what is artistic and what is political. Maybe in painting . . . no, I don't even believe that. 



            I think it's like music—it certainly is true of opera—where you have an art form describing, relating, concerning a political situation, whether it's love, or women, or death. Or Shakespeare. It seems to me everything he did was political.  And you can do anything you want with it, emphasize this, or that, but the heart of [his work] is *Macbeth*. It's about something in your life, and the powers that be, whether kings, or queens or armies. That's my feeling. It isn't a question of putting the two together, or separating them, it's a question of letting art do its work. I know there's some poetry that sort of sounds like daisies, but most of the good poetry is also [political], you can feel the heartbeat; it's about some situation that concerns human beings under duress.  It's suggesting a solution, or just acknowledging that [the situation] exists. Art does that.  There are some very powerful contributions to knowledge in the scientific world or the legal world, but art is singular. That's why every dictator gets rid of the artists first. They burn the books and execute the artists first. Then they get on with whatever else they're interested in. Art might do something. It's dangerous.



 



ADVOCATE:



            In an interview late in his life, E.L. Doctorow seemed to say that art and history were one in the same, that "There is really no fiction or non-fiction; there is only narrative. One mode of perception has no greater claim on the truth than the other; that the distance has perhaps to do with distance—narrative distance—from the characters; it has to do with the kind of voice that is talking, but it certainly hasn't to do with the common distribution between fact and imagination."  He later said the thing he'd wanted most, for a very long time—he'd dedicate his whole life to it—would be for the *New York Times* to let him write the newspaper for one day.



 



MORRISON:



            He was fantastic. Of course I loved his writing, but I liked him too.  He was the only other editor who also became a writer, aside from me. I remember he introduced me at some event.  He said, "I don't think of her as a black writer.  I don't even think of her as a woman writer, I think of her as a . . . " and he paused, and I said, "white male writer."  And he laughed.



 



ADVOCATE:



            You discussed in your lectures the power of the voices of your characters to "take over"—you mentioned that you had the hardest time shutting up Pilate in *Song of Solomon—*and you yourself take on an extraordinary range of voices throughout your works, from the murdered child of *Beloved *to the millennial Bride in *God Help the Child. *Is this for you, as a writer, itself a means of "being and becoming the stranger"?



 



MORRISON:



            Yeah, I didn't think of it that way, but there is this sense of belonging and not belonging. My efforts are to get inside somebody I don't know or somebody I do know, and to find what's strange about that.  The bluest eye was the first one.  I had this friend, we were nine years old, and she had this other life, this desire. And the book is about that. We used her, those of us who were not her, we used her demise, and covered up our own vulnerabilities. It's a perennial examination. I don't have—well I do have, but nobody pays attention—solutions to all these problems.  But I can wend my way toward something that would be a confrontation, an acknowledgement of something that is more interesting, more complicated, and harder.



 



 



ADVOCATE:



            When you talk about listening, or creating and simultaneously hearing the voices of your characters, it sounds sort of like the experience of reading. And you were an editor, and describe yourself still as a reader. Is writing like reading for you?



 



MORRISON:



            It's like reading aloud. It's like telling a story aloud. Cause I always hear it. Somebody was asking me earlier how come I did recordings of all my books. Well I didn't in the beginning; I had two actresses—good actresses—but I never listened to the tapes.  And then one day I did, and I said, 'that's not right." She said the same words. But [when I wrote it] I heard, "124 was spiteful." Boom. Pause.  "Full of a baby's venom."  She had put them together.  It was almost like she said, "*because* it was [full of a baby's venom]." I mean, you can do that . . . but I said, "no."



 



ADVOCATE:



            In your third lecture, "The Color Fetish," you expressed your desire to write "non-colorist literature about black people." As the first African American female Nobel laureate, you are a symbolic figure for many, who appreciate your work precisely as "colorist literature."  Yet while you write about black people, you seem not to want to write exclusively about black*ness*. Can you comment on this difference, and the tension between how you are read and what you have in mind when—and why—you write? 



 



MORRISON:



            I used to insist on it being about black people because that's what I knew, and what I wanted to talk about, and [I wanted] to insert that into the world of literature.  And then I wrote, and found myself and the literature *complimented* as black—"this is a good black book." When I won the Nobel Prize, the New York Times ran an article about whether or not it was an affirmative action choice.



            Now I don't have to do that anymore, now I can just take it out. The word. Not the people, not the facts.  A guy can't go to the toilet, in the 50s, and he has to pee outside, or he has to sit in a certain place on the bus, you know he's black. But I don't close it in a black box.



 



ADVOCATE:



            You mentioned in answer to a question after one of your early lectures, that you told your own writing students *not *to write about themselves, or the lives they already knew, but to imagine the lives of people they do not know. Would you care to comment on why you chose to force your students to deal with the unknown?



 



MORRISON:



            It was more exciting to me to monitor that project. Because I know that the formula for creative writing in high school or college is write what you know. And I said they don't know nothing.  Imagine something. Do you know what it's like to be a Madame in Paris, when you're too old to have any clients. No, you don't. I don't either. Write about it. They really wrote surprising things, because they were liberated from "write what you know." You're twenty. Shut up.

Each day a requiem for zeal arrives in my gmail inbox: *The Harvard Crimson*’s Flyby-blog newsletter.



One recent piece reduced earnest service work in “Exploring the lives of Harvard’s homeless business vendors” to sycophantic go-getter-ness with the lead: “Reminding us a little bit of our (formerly) overachieving selves, two high school students…” Another post deemed what are arguably the most prestigious humanities orations in the United States, given, this year, by America’s most prestigious writer, mere fabricated pseudo-intellectualism: Toni Morrison’s final Norton Lecture was called: “the type of intellectual curiosity experience you claimed to be interested in when you applied to Harvard.”



                  No doubt Flyby has its reasons, in a Harvard lambasted for over-achieving, egoism, and self-import, to adopt a deprecating tone. But I am haunted by the scope of that rhetoric, not because it bears on Flyby, but because it articulates and reiterates an alarming self-impression: that Harvard students are banal, disinterested, selfish, and anti-intellectual. It is a mindset given excellent expression by Friedrich Nietzsche’s “slave morality”: a self-fulfilling, self-flagellating prophecy that humans are fundamentally weak. I’d like to call its 2016 incarnation “Netflix morality.” Because, according to this mindset, binge-watching television comatose in bed is a Harvard student’s preferred activity.[[1]](#_ftn1)



                  So what constitutes “Netflix morality”? Sleep is one fixation: “We’re honestly shocked that we could be this sleep-deprived already, given that it’s only week two of classes,” writes one post, “At least we have the upside-down smiley face emoji to perfectly personify our woes.” Exhaustion pervades the content, yet the hope of shifting insomniac tendencies is forgotten in an emoji—that paragon of bland, ironic indifference. Food is another, highlighted in an entire “Free Food Watch” column that succeeds brilliantly in effacing the academic, artistic, or cultural significance of every event in light of its (frankly disappointing) gustatory offerings. No discipline is safe: The other day “If you’re willing to trek to Pierce and sit through some engineering final project presentations” combined with “Farkas will be hosting the reading of one senior’s thesis play at 7:30 p.m. Food will be provided!” to deny the value of SEAS and the performing arts in a single catered-crunch. Meetings sponsored by affinity groups are reduced to the presence of potstickers and pad thai.



                  An alimentary or soporific allure, however, is not, in Netflix morality, strictly necessary to negate intellectual meaning. A recent “Reflections on Rejections” panel (fodder for another day of Nietzsche) was summed up with “if Dean Dingman didn’t have to hand in his thesis neither do you.” This same tone pervades any description of “work”: midterms, readings, but especially theses. School is never permitted to be genuinely enjoyable or meaningful; it is always a chore, a chore holding the vain hope that some excuse could vanish Toni Morrison or a scholarly study of her novels—to make a bit more time for Netflix.



                  In *The Genealogy of Morals*, Nietzsche gives one narrative for how this mindset develops. He delineates broadly between self-affirming moralities and self-negating moralities; the first externalizes emotions while the second internalizes them. More specifically, the negating type posits a “a neutral agent, free to manifest its strength or contain it”—a division between sentiment and action Nietzsche finds absurd. Theorizing this break is essential in self-negating moralities because it allows the formulation “I could have but I didn’t” as in “I could have performed an interest in Toni Morrison or the homeless advocacy but I did not need to.” In a self-affirming morality, such logic would not hold: Validation could not be accrued for something that did not manifest, for “the sublime slight of hand which gives weakness the appearance of free choice and one’s natural disposition the distinction of merit.”



                  To read the opening graphs of Flyby is to confront daily such a sublime slight of hand. My contention lies not with *actual *Netflix watching but rather with the way campus culture projects a message that it *must* be happening, that apathy is laudable, desirable, and fundamentally unchangeable. In a sense, this is a national issue—traceable to millennial self-justifying indifference; or perhaps to material changes in newly addictive technologies like Facebook and Netflix that have someone bypassed our social restrictions for substances like alcohol and weed.



                  Yet its presence is far more perturbing at an institution professed to be the paragon of intellectual, creative, and professional passion. Harvard adherents to “Netflix morality” deny all previous accomplishments and earnest work ethics as simply the false projections of overachieving high school selves, offering those daily epitaphs on the tombstone of zeal. But why are we so quick to posit a split of intention and action, to identify interest homeless advocacy and Nobel lectures as inauthentic? Are we truly so intellectually deadened and narrow-minded that earnest engagement becomes impossible once we step into Harvard Yard? How do we ignore the glaring observation that millions would love to nourish their minds on the engineering projects and thesis theater Flyby deep-fries into food each day? Perhaps, Netflix morality has arisen as a defense mechanism to this very construct, a fear of what a self-affirming morality would look like in the Harvard student: narcissism, egoism, pretentiousness.



                  Or perhaps it is the *result* of the normalizing discourse we see on Flyby, a discourse that creates what it presumes to name. Nietzsche noted that “the ascetic priest, seemingly life’s enemy and great negator, is in truth one of the major conserving and affirmative forces,” for he shepherds “the vast flock of defeated disgruntled sufferers and self-tormentors.” Is this not the precise role of the Flyby author, the high priest of Netflix morality? In constantly appealing to the anti-intellectual, anti-motivational sensibility in its readers, the writer becomes the most wondrous validator: the figure who justifies every self-negating action, who normalizes acedia with a shepherd’s gentle hand. We imitate what we read; we forget affirmation and speak lines of negation without knowing it; we say no to our friends’ invitations—and begin to watch Netflix.



                  “Is there really enough pride, courage, self-assurance, intellectual energy, responsibility, *freedom of the will*, to make philosophy possible in our world today?” asked Nietzsche a hundred years ago. I must ask the same question of Harvard today. Luckily, a genealogy of morals never implies fatalism, but rather charts the arrival of a certain mindset to gesture at other options. Could we imagine an alternative? A self-affirming campus morality of unabashed pride in homeless advocacy; courage to earnestly love a thesis; self-assurance to be intellectually energized by events and by peers; a demand that the gratification of sedative, self-abnegating pleasures not be a requiem for our minds and our bodies; in short, a freedom of the will, a will to be free of Netflix.



 



 





[[1]](#_ftnref1) One enormous qualification: Though I find aspects of Nietzsche’s theory remarkably poignant for contemporary binge-watching culture, vast sections of his work are downright despicable, particularly in the way they have been appropriated to justify an assortment of twentieth-century narcissistic, ignorant, and xenophobic terrors. There is no doubt a piece ethically justifying Donald Trump on Nietzsche’s morality waiting to be written. Still, I hold strongly to the tenet that poignant ideas can be culled from a sundry intellectual history, that we must not reject all materials from a brilliant mind due to the fates of its more protean products.

To the Modern Reader, Edna St Vincent Millay’s poetry is-- in a word-- unfashionable. Certainly, he may be acquainted with a work or two of hers; likely he has seen a cute rhyme of hers somewhere. Most ubiquitous, perhaps, the “First Fig”:



           



            My candle burns at both ends;



            It will not last the night;



            But ah my foes, and oh my friends--



            It gives a lovely light!



 



This, our jaded Modern Reader well knows, is the stuff of epigraphs and “inspirational quotes”. Millay’s fleeting fancies of the Jazz Age are now unfathomably distant; she is captive to ossified conventions of form and rhyme that no one has used in *aeons*. The Modern Reader, contemplating Millay with a certain distaste, gives thanks to his Modernist Pantheon-- Eliot, Pound, Yeats-- for sweeping all that romantical junk out of the collective consciousness, for Making Poetry Serious Again. The Modern Reader appreciates Eliot’s formally experimental pastiches and Pound’s clean Imagism and impersonal, Symbolist Yeats. Edna St Vincent Millay, however, is representative of a poetic world stuffed with sentimental fluff, a set of aged traditions that lingered unfortunately into the beginning of the twentieth century, till Eliot & Co. cleared her overwrought romanticism out of poetry.



 



Or that is one version of the story. Certainly, Millay adhered to traditional forms and valued meter and rhyme. But the story of Edna St Vincent Millay isn’t just that of a poetic dinosaur who couldn’t realise that 1920 was time to stop writing sonnets. It’s a more complicated story of misrepresentation and wilful ignorance—for, leaving aside the question of form, Edna St Vincent Millay was a radical. There's a radically modern engagement with female agency and sexuality and emotional subjectivity in her work that is nowhere in the Modern Reader’s Modernist Pantheon. Consider the unapologetic disregard for convention on view in her “Sonnet XLI”-- leaving aside, for a moment, the fact of its sonnetness.



 



I, being born a woman and distressed

By all the needs and notions of my kind,

Am urged by your propinquity to find

Your person fair, and feel a certain zest

To bear your body’s weight upon my breast:

So subtly is the fume of life designed,

To clarify the pulse and cloud the mind,

And leave me once again undone, possessed.

Think not for this, however, the poor treason

Of my stout blood against my staggering brain,

I shall remember you with love, or season

My scorn with pity, —let me make it plain:

I find this frenzy insufficient reason

For conversation when we meet again.



Which is to say: just because I slept with you doesn’t mean I *like* you.



Back to form: the sonnet has always been about love, and so the sonnet has always been about sex, but the traditional form of the sonnet is as a vehicle of desire that the male subject inhabits to seduce some typically-female object. Shakespeare queered the sonnet tradition when he wrote to his Fair Youth, and thus we can all concede that the sonnet need not represent strictly prescriptive male-female desire, but the canonical sonnet-voice was *always* male. At least, that is to say, until Millay, who left us the best sonnets of her century in her wake, and the most feminist (or proto-feminist) of the canon. It is a radical act to take a cultural form that descends to you but does not represent you, and remake it in your image.



When Millay wasn’t writing sonnets about the one-night-stands she never wanted to see again, she wrote about love, and nostalgia, and mourning: all intuitive and emotional topics that a certain formulation of literary establishment treats with condescension at best. Which is not to say that she met with only condescension: people loved her at the time! She won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. But the critics who wrote about her in the 1920s and 30s seemed to agree on two points: that, firstly, Millay was undoubtedly one of the finest woman poets to date, and secondly that the entire accumulated body of “women’s poetry”, Millay included, was worth very, very little. Aggressively trivialized by her male contemporaries and ignored by her descendants was her transformation of the genre-ghetto of “women’s poetry”: she was flipping a gendered poetic canon on its head, redefining the love poem in the woman’s voice in a free and radical world of shifting lovers and desire un-prescribed by any social norm.



 



In the decades to follow, while the Modernists rose up in prominence and swept Millay’s poetics out to sea, an onslaught of explicitly gendered critical attacks framed her work as feminine and thus lacking in nature, inherently inferior to the “rigorous”, “intellectual”, “masculine” poetics that those same Modernists represent. To this day her poetry remains dusty and outdated to our venerable Modern Reader; certainly we don’t attach the label *radical* to Millay, however ahead-of-her-time her project. The radicals, we have decided, were the ponderous men who decided to dismantle poetry and pass judgment on Western civilization in the process (though never nearly as critically as one might hope); at least, until the next wave of radicals displaced *them*. Millay lies in the canon’s attic, dusty, motionless symbol of what could have been: a reclamation of canonical poetry by the unbound female voice that never got to progress further.



 



One story of Millay’s poetics ends there. Another, unexpectedly to all, has picked up in recent decades: in it her aesthetics and preoccupations and lyricism and rhyme-and-meter linger, adding up to a modern movement she foreshadowed and never foresaw. This new Millay story? It’s indie pop. Sweet-ish, iconoclastic-ish, rhymed-and-rhythmed indie pop music, preserving so much of the formally constrained emotionality of Millay now unfashionable in our poetry. For comparison, consider Nitsuh Abebe’s description of 90s indie pop subculture in the Pitchfork article “Twee as Fuck”: “Happy pop geeks in love with all things pretty, listening to seven-inch singles released on tiny labels, writing songs about crushes, and taking a good deal of pride in the fact that everyone else found their music disgustingly cute and amateurish and girly.” Now apply that descriptor to Millay’s happiest brief rhymes: this first stanza of “Afternoon on a Hill”, for instance.



 



I will be the gladdest thing



            Under the sun!



I will touch a hundred flowers



            And not pick one.



 



It doesn’t matter to Millay whether Serious Critics think her appreciation of an afternoon’s flowered hill has any consequence. The point is the joy of the moment, and the alignment of rhyme that discovers that joy in language; the larger political project is elevation of the emotional experience as topic for art. Fundamentally, it is the closeness of her poetics and these lyrics—the centering of the emotional moment— that make her the distant fairy godmother of indie pop. Transplant Millay to the modern age, and all she needs are some sparkly guitars and a sleepy vocalist to play her songs as though they were by, say, The Magnetic Fields. Don’t believe me? Here are Recuerdo and Tied to a Stone, one by Millay, one by indie band The Math and Physics Club. Each set in a “we were”, in a companionate remembrance, implicitly romantic, sincerely sentimental, carefully rhymed, separated by the better part of a century, each bending towards the same nostalgic mean.



 



 



**Recuerdo**



We were very tired, we were very merry—



We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.



It was bare and bright, and smelled like a stable—



But we looked into a fire, we leaned across a table,



We lay on a hill-top underneath the moon;



And the whistles kept blowing, and the dawn came soon.



 



We were very tired, we were very merry—



We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry;



And you ate an apple, and I ate a pear,



From a dozen of each we had bought somewhere;



And the sky went wan, and the wind came cold,



And the sun rose dripping, a bucketful of gold.



 



We were very tired, we were very merry,



We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.



We hailed, “Good morrow, mother!” to a shawl-covered head,



And bought a morning paper, which neither of us read;



And she wept, “God bless you!” for the apples and pears,



And we gave her all our money but our subway fares.



 



 

REPRINTED FROM 1921 ISSUE



 



It is an ungenerous platitude and a true one, to say that by far the greater part both of our actions and our thoughts have for their roots noting but dogma and cant. It is as true of politics as it is of religion; and it is becoming daily truer of the hitherto untrammeled field of criticism. In politics we have had our Robespierres, and we are still suffering from the effects; the political market is glutted with *liberté, egalité, fraternité*. Mr. Wilson has succeeded Jean-Jacques, and Lenin is still with us. In religion Bossuet has followed has followed hard on the heels of Luther, only to be displaced by the sing-songs of “independent morality” and the emasculated doctrines of modern Sunday schools. But literature, all through the ages, has made a strong stand and fought a brave fight against the Scylla and Charybdis of cant and dogma.



 



 



It was not till, weakened and unmanned by the terrible inroads of Taine and Brunetiére  that our modern criticism succumbed to the temptation to make of literature an exact science. Not until the shade of Sainte-Beuve had been laid to rest, that the French mania for classification took firm hold upon us. Today we could no more “appreciate” Shakespeare without applying certain scientific laws to the progression of his genius, without dividing him into as many compartments as there are stages in literature, without splitting him up into a “before and after,” than we could thoroughly enjoy the movies without music. It is as much an essential of our literary self-consciousness as fur coats are of our social standing. We could no more attribute the proper “literary emphasis” to Charles Lamb or William Hazlitt without first knowing what prenatal influences shaped their minds, without placing them in the wake or the beginning of a classic or romantic movement, than our literary consciences would allow us to split infinitives. Even in our moments of larger recklessness we cannot altogether forgive a dramatist’s transgression of the “law of time and place.” Voltaire is as unintelligible to us as Zeno if we do not know that “he marks the transition from the sixteenth to the seventeenth century”; French classicism would be a hopeless riddle to us if M. Lanson did not tell us that it is a “combination of rationalism and aesthetic taste.”



 



In short, literature would be a complete waste of time if we could not seat ourselves before it as we would before a vivisection table, dissecting here a phrase or a general movement, scrutinizing there a “tendency” or the fulfillment of an immutable law. In our mad rush to classify, to make literature “accessible to every home,” personality and style go by the board. Whatever cannot be made to fill a text-book on the “Origin and Development of the Novel” or the “Evolution of the Drama,” whatever, in sort, is real literature we cheerfully ignore. It has no vendible character; it cannot be spouted in a classroom—it has not even value as erudition. All that can be expected are a few workable rules, a few “literary tests” which can be indiscriminately applied and unswervingly followed. This is criticism; this takes the place of appreciation.

Some facts about risk:



 



* Recklessness is not a consistent trait. According to Elke U. Weber—the man who is to risk what Pavlov was to obedience—there are five domains of risk-taking, and our propensity to take risks differs across these domains. In other words, being an inveterate gambler makes you no likelier than the next person to enjoy skydiving, or to take back a cheating significant other.





 



* The amount of risk we feel comfortable with is fixed, and we will modify our behavior to make up for changes in risk-level. The paradigmatic case is the driver who buys better brakes: He’s no less likely to end up in an accident because, to compensate for the lessened risk of his brakes failing, he’ll tend to drive faster.





 



* People in committed relationships are less likely to take risks because the pressure is off to woo potential mates with flashy gestures.





 



* Driving is objectively risky. It is one of the riskiest things we do on a regular basis. It accounts for about 30,000 deaths per year, in the United States, and is the leading cause of death for Americans aged five to 34. It is perfectly reasonable to fear that we will die in a car crash. Over the course of a lifetime, one in 108 Americans does.





 



But we don’t fear it. Vehophobia is rare—much rarer than aviophobia, even arachnophobia. It is so generally un-feared that articles about risk will cite it as the foil to activities that tend to inspire anxiety: You are much more likely to die in a car accident than in a plane crash, of a rare disease, of a shark attack, etc.



 



The reason we don’t fear driving is a product of evolution. Generally speaking, we are programmed to fear what early man feared: that which we can’t control, that which seems to pose an immediate threat to our safety (Picture a highly agential tiger coming right at you.) A correlative to this is that fear strengthens memory. So, when a fear-inducing event is covered in the media, our brains latch onto it, and perceive it as being likelier to befall us than it is.



 



Driving fills none of these criteria. The danger at a given moment seems small. Car crashes receive little news coverage. There were no cars in the veld. In fact, the instincts that make us fear what early man feared incline us to act foolishly in the face of vehicular peril: When something is speeding toward you, your brain—sensing an animal predator—tells you, freeze.



 



In Kolkata, where I spent this past January, you are roughly 1.6 times as likely to die in a traffic accident as you are in America. My rock and a hard place were a bus and a concrete road divider, usually inhabited from the backseat of a three-wheeled, open frame auto-rickshaw. The backs of the autos said, “Obey The Traffic Laws.” The backs of the buses said “Danger!” But even though I was more attuned to the perils of driving than I normally am, I couldn’t truly fear it.



 



At first this was frustrating. Not because I wanted to fear a thing I couldn’t avoid—Kolkata is emphatically non-walkable—but because I have a tendency to fear things that, statistically speaking, I shouldn’t. The preceding weeks had offered striking proof of it. Spending the holidays in Harrison, New York, I realized I’d developed a fear of movie theaters shootings: a receptacle for a broader anxiety about mass shootings that I worry might eventually make me fear all public spaces.



 



In terms of its status as a potential danger, mass shootings are the opposite of driving: low risk, high fear. Going into a public space will never be “risky.” In order for an incident to qualify as a mass shooting (acc. the US government), three or more victims must die in an “indiscriminate public rampage.” Six shootings from the past year fit the bill—not a small figure by any means, but many fewer than The Washington Post’s “more one mass shooting per day” headlines suggests. In 2015 in the US, 367 people died in mass public shootings, slightly fewer than the number who died falling out of bed.   



 



But unlike driving, a shooting pushes all of our evolutionarily-programmed fear buttons. It is immediate, literally as fast as a speeding bullet. It is intentional: another person deliberately trying to hurt us. It is outside of our control and has what Don DeLillo in 1993 called an element of “shattering randomness.” And when it happens, it’s news. It rides that fear train straight to the hippocampus, and sticks.



 



The upshot of all this is that fear and risk, complementary though they might seen, in fact have nothing to do with each other.



 



There is a positive side to this: For every non-risky thing we do fear, there’s a risky thing we conveniently don’t. In Kolkata, it was heartening, even thrilling, to be greeted daily by my inability to fear a risky thing—to know precisely how much danger I was in, to know it to be a higher risk threshold than I am used to, and yet not feel fear.



 



Unfortunately, prescriptions for dealing with the other side of this neurological coin often fail to account for the discord between fear and reason. A typical method for tackling a so-called irrational fear is to appeal to reason—to tally the hard facts amassed in our corner and tell ourselves that the feared occurrence is extremely unlikely to occur. In other words, to evaluate the risk. Not the way our brains do make when faced with a hungry tiger, but consciously, a fact-based calculation that yields an objective, non-instinctual assessment.



 



But treating fear like risk is an ineffective means of assuaging it. Because we haven’t falsely assessed a risk. We don’t believe that the feared event is more likely to occur than it is. We’re just scared—the victim of our brains reacting in ways that made sense, back when the latest technology was fire.



 



This method of fear-management—providing ourselves with information that belies a faulty assessment of risk—might actually make matters worse. If you consider yourself a rational person, reassuring facts can act on the brain like a placebo pill: I expect myself to respond positively to this kind of data; so, when facts fail to ameliorate my fear, I feel, at best, stupid, at worst, crazy.



 



It’s likely that several of my friends have experienced this too. But I don’t know, because we don’t talk about this kind of thing. Because while I can find articles in which Anne from Connecticut confesses to not being able to enter a movie theater without scrutinizing her fellow audience members for signs of derailed-ness; while I can form an imaginary alliance with the 35 percent of survey respondents who said there should be bag checks at movie theaters, I cannot confess this fear to a friend without fearing that they will be put off by it—will judge me the way I judge myself.



 



This view of “irrational” fear is insidious in the extreme. Because a crucial component of the misery that attends an “irrational” fear is shame: feeling like you’re wrong to fear the thing you do, because objectively, virtually risk free.



 



Admittedly, mere awareness of why we fear the things we do does little to stanch anxiety. But I believe that if we took the placebo pill out of the equation, if we stopped trying to quell our “irrational” fears on our own, we might stand a better chance of beating them. If we felt comfortable expressing these fears, with the expectation that our feelings will be validated and possibly shared, we might be able to escape the mental prison that an unvoiced fear can be. And then, perhaps, we could go see a movie together.  



 



 1. For more on the interesting politics of calculating shooting statistics, see Mark Follman’s coverage of the issue on Mother Jones.



 2. According to the Gun Violence Archive, which uses the definition “four or more shot and/or killed in a single event, at the same general time and location, not including the shooter” to qualify events as mass public shootings.



3. <http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1887/the-art-of-fiction-no-135-don-delillo>



 4. Specific relaxation techniques—e.g. breathing exercises, frequently prescribed by psychologists—can be an effective means of mitigating anxiety. But this is professional advice, not common sense.



 5. <http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/16/business/mass-shootings-add-anxiety-to-movie-theater-visits.html>



 

The reputation of today’s college students has, by now, been raked through the mud in the pages of most of America’s prominent publications. We’re coddled, spoiled, out of touch, addled by an overdose of political correctness, desiring nothing other than to be swathed in comfort, shielded from anything our social-media fueled, reactionary hysteria might deem “unsafe.” Heralding the death of both free speech and American excellence, pundits and writers of op-eds have sounded the alarm on what they see as a veritable epidemic; the prognosis is dim.



For the generation raised in an era dominated by apocalyptic climate-change predictions and the post-9/11 discourse of terror, this may come as no surprise. All signs point to doom and destruction, and we are reminded tragically and frequently that danger is still unequally apportioned along age-old lines of identity and privilege. Can we be blamed for running to safety?



In 1866, The Harvard Advocate was founded to run in the opposite direction: For 150 years, Dulce est Periculum has been our magazine’smotto, rendering danger—not beauty or truth—the value by which we orient our writing and art. As President and Publisher, we have found that our organization lies in a disjointed cultural position: far from aligned with the op-ed pundits, but sensitive to their appraisal; a step out-of-sync with undergraduates and administrative deans who discount the real merits of danger. It’s an uncomfortable spot.



And it has lead us to believe that these warring factions have conflated two forms of safety. On the one hand there is physical harm, slander, discrimination, perils that tasted sweet to the wrong people in the past and must never do so again. On the other there is intellectual insecurity and combative debate, the grit of a challenge. To banish the second in name of the first robs undergraduates of the risks we need to both better ourselves and tackle more ambitious, collective pursuits.



The millennial generation has long been derided for ignoring such challenges. Before the reign of the “coddled” epithet, we were “apathetic.” To prioritize the perfect selfie angle over issues of global importance signaled our narcissism, we were told. But as we have turned our attention from Instagram feeds to more pressing social movements—Black Lives Matter, Occupy and its offshoots, the newly prominent campaign against campus sexual assault—a different source for our apathy has surfaced: fear. Cautioned and discouraged by the inability of our predecessors to adequately and definitively succeed, we worry about stepping on each other’s toes, panic at the thought of leaving someone out. When so many things are problematized, the scope of our ambitions narrows, and we begin to focus on small, immediate, and—in the grander scheme—relatively trivial concerns.



And nowhere does triviality seem so trivial as at our crimson-colored bastion of American academic elitism. Harvard, as understood by administrative envoys and Crimson editorials, applies too much pressure with its comps and cut-throat classes, generating an exclusive, hierarchical, and unsafe environment. This is sound reasoning, but reasoning that has come to inflate the relative smallness of collegiate pressure—and to ignore its many merits. As any top-rate athlete knows, if we want to improve, we must work hard, usually very hard. A small group of admission officers did not grant those who matriculate a carte blanche of permanent validation, and sometimes, we will deserve a C. Sometimes we will not want to hear a Marxist professor invalidate our future professions. Sometimes we will be cut. Insecurity in these moments, in a classroom or comp, can be a productive sort of discomfort.



But something about the Harvard bubble has obscured this logic, letting us equate personal invalidation with structural injustice and, most insidiously, ignore actual injustice. True, there remains on this campus a cornucopia of traditions and organizations tinged with distasteful remnants of archaic power structures, and there is much to be reformed within Harvard if it is to uphold its promises. Progress starts small, and it starts at home. But something is wrong when every student opines on exclusivity in Harvard’s elite social clubs, while remaining silent on issues far more central to our global future. We argue more about the politics of an introductory comp meeting than about actual politics. These conflations, these slidings of scale, arise from the same fear: a fear of offending each other, of potentially disagreeing, of confrontation. When we hold back, we stop talking, we stop listening, and we stop connecting. Very often, we stop acting.



Over the past four years, the two of us have seen a rise of that paralysis at 21 South Street: a tendency to swap sweet danger for bland cordiality, to keep meetings serene lest one undergraduate provoke another. Too often, the Advocate’s members say no to perils before tasting their flavor, closing their ears to each other and falling prey to suspicions that fracture meetings before they have begun. This fear of real engagement is particularly disquieting when it bears on relations to the broader Harvard community. Amidst the best intentions for organizational improvement, the Advocate find itself caught up in obsessive analysis of its own culture—in examining a minute position on this campus and trying to divine the mental states of all who perceive it. A quote spoken at the wrong moment, a candle misplaced—these are the details that have become invested with the greatest weight. Constant inward-facing dialogue has inflated our membership’s sense of self-importance beyond reasonable proportion. Hyper-concerned with imagined complaints, many become deaf to valid criticism and distanced from the magazine’s actual purpose.



As we bid farewell to the Advocate, we hope those left behind will recall that purpose’s primacy: This magazine should serve as a space for fearless debate over literature and art, our aesthetic risks ideally playing a small part in a campus culture that boldly demands not just extracurricular and dormitory justice, but racial, gender, sexual, environmental, and economic justice. The fear that narrows our focus to trivialities and personal affronts should impede neither pursuit, so we must remain vigilant to differentiate between species of fears, and of safeties.



To fuel that vigil, we return to our timeless motto, and to the firm belief that beyond its appeal as a decent spot for a cocktail, the Advocate still holds a commitment to one or two lofty ideals. On its sesquicentennial, this magazine—be it a victim of Comstockery, an organ of responsible criticism, or great organic zilch—has something to teach us muck-raked millennials: Danger, when shaken right, is still sweet.

Among the theories that abound as to the authorship of Elena Ferrante is the suggestion that she is, in fact, a collective of writers. As with all matters surrounding the continually posed question of why she remains anonymous, Ferrante has an arsenal of analogies for such occasions. But we accept that Elsa Morante wrote both *House of Liars* and *Aracoeli*, she observed in the *Corriere della Sera*; Joyce, *Dubliners*, *Ulysses* and *Finnegans Wake*, in the *Paris Review*. We happily interpolate a career’s coherence where we are given someone to pin it to; in its absence, we flounder. Mercifully, the best recent criticism has been more attentive in conceiving of a kinship between Ferrante’s works that shouldn’t be difficult to see. In fact, Ferrante intimated a kind of unifying vision behind her early works over a decade ago in “La frantumaglia,” the last chapter in her non-fiction book of the same name (forthcoming in English this year). Reading those words now, with the Neapolitan quadrilogy behind us, offers another way to conceive of Ferrante’s evolution over time—lends it the appearance, even, of inevitability.



 



In 2003, Giuliana Olivero and Camilla Valletti of *Indice* wrote to Ferrante. They observed that her protagonists till then—Delia of *Troubling Love* and Olga of *The Days of Abandonment*—seemed to come from myths and models of Mediterranean femininity from which they had extricated themselves only in part. Was their suffering, the editors asked, “the result of this intermittent rapport with their origins, of this difficult and never resolved estrangement from traditional roles?”[1] Ferrante responded that she found their theory intriguing, but that to engage with it she couldn’t proceed from their vocabulary: “*origin* is too loaded a word; and the adjectives you use (*archaic*, *Mediterranean*) have an echo that confuses me.”[2] She proposed instead a word of Neapolitan dialect, inherited from her mother: *frantumaglia*. Though not standard Italian, it seems to follow a recognizable rule: *frantumi* means fragments or shards; the *-**aglia* suffix turns feminine plural nouns into pejoratives.



 



Because Ferrante suggests that she never asked her mother what was meant by the word, her initial sketches of what *frantumaglia* is work backwards, drawing inferences from childhood memory: “At times it made her dizzy, gave her a taste of iron in the mouth… it was at the origin of all suffering not attributable to a single obvious reason… it woke her in the middle of the night… suggested to her indecipherable tunes to sing under her breath that soon extinguished themselves with a sigh."[3] (Though Ferrante never states it, *frantumaglia* is clearly a femininely-coded affliction.) However, as she acknowledges that nowadays the word has more to do with her own conception than her mother’s, her definitions become increasingly abstract, though often related to a fear of losing the capacity for self-expression. It is the painful realisation of life’s incoherence and to confront the ugly frailty of bodies. It is both what causes suffering and what those who suffer are destined to become; it is an “unstable landscape” that violently reveals itself as your “true and only interiority.”[4] Drawing on a discarded passage of *Troubling Love* where a young Delia hacks off her hair in filial revolt, Ferrante summarized the effect of *frantumaglia* as the small movement that causes a tectonic shift. That moment, she wrote, dissolves distinctions of linear time, schematic ideas of before/after, past/present or myth/reality; sinks us into the primordial depths of “our unicellular ancestors” and “mutterings… in the caves,” all while we suppose ourselves anchored to the computers at which we sit.[5] What lends coherence to Ferrante’s vertiginous piling-on of definitions is the convenient fact that it functions in the same way as the concept itself: the ordinary opens out—in a sudden and not completely explicable way—onto the cosmic.



 



To consider what *frantumaglia* offers that “archaic,” “myths of Mediterranean origin” and settling accounts with the past to become “women of today” do not is an interesting proposition. In fact, it makes sense of the leap between the compact early novels and the sprawling Neapolitan cycle. First, that the series returned directly to Naples and to girlhood, depicting the course of a life rather than adult women in exile. Archaic can simply mean very old, but it also implies an element of incongruity—an antique object out of place in a prevailing present. Olivero and Valletti suggested an “intermittent rapport” with one’s past and origins, a failure to conform to or properly dispose of “traditional roles” as the source of suffering. Their phrasing implied adult women removed in time and space from their origins, and the management of their relationships to this past as the problem. Yet Lila and Lenù suffer in girlhood not from the residue of an unreconciled past either personal or abstract-historical, but in response to their immediate surroundings: protracted episodes of malaise “not reducible to a single obvious reason.”



 



As if to underline the fact that *frantumaglia* belongs not solely, or even first, to the upwardly mobile, middle-class protagonists of Ferrante’s first novels, *My Brilliant Friend* also features an expanded cast of Neapolitan women. Figures who had heretofore been peripheral—appearing only to Delia, Olga and Leda as threatening visions of fates narrowly avoided—became full and important characters in their own right. The dead Amalia of *Troubling Love *is supplanted by Lenù and Lila’s living mothers, Immacolata and Nunzia; Melina Cappucio is the *poverella* of *The Days of Abandonment*, minus drowning. Beyond the strictures of motherhood or marriage, Maestra Oliviero crucially steers Lenù towards a high school education, and Manuela Solara presides over the neighborhood with the secrets aggregated in her ledger of debts. Dayna Tortorici argues in n+1 that one of Ferrante’s strengths is her ability to lucidly incarnate concepts of feminist theory like entrustment and the “symbolic mother,” her gift to literary women “books that speak to them in a language their mothers can understand.” What Tortorici observes of Ferrante’s novels in general is also true here: *Frantumaglia* is a word legible to the women who would most identify with the experience it describes. In declining the editors’ lexicon and supplying her own, Ferrante rejects what might be considered “obfuscating theoretical language,” however well-intentioned it may be. Lenù’s mother openly resents her daughter’s intellectual pretensions. These women would sooner identify as Neapolitan than Mediterranean; Lila, by choice, never leaves Naples in her life. *Frantumaglia* is a formulation they might embrace, even if “myths of Mediterranean origin” is not.



 



By supplanting abstract terms with a very specific one, Ferrante was paradoxically suggesting a broader scope to her concerns and signaling the extent of what David Kurnick called in *Public Books *her “grand novelistic ambition.” Ferrante concluded that her problem with the kind of theory suggested by Olivero and Valletti was its neatness. The past, in her view, is urgent; it is not something that can be superannuated, but only possibly redeemed. Delia’s achievement is not to put distance between herself and her mother but to realise that she had “been” Amalia. Olga overcomes her abandonment only by realising the constitutive role the *poverella* has played in her life and according it its proper place. Ferrante, defining *frantumaglia *and her theory of female suffering in an ever more expansive and associative way, begins with her mother sighing and weaves around it an atmosphere of intangible menace, explaining and interpreting until that first image is of a piece with the collapse of time and the contemporaneousness of all history. Even if Ferrante had not yet thought to write them, it gives some account, perhaps, of the scale of her Neapolitan novels-to-be, and their deft interweaving of the personal and the political.



 



[1] “Il dolore è il risultato di questo rapporto intermittente con le proprie origini, di questo faticoso e mai risoltato distacco dai ruoli tradizionali?”



[2] “origine è un vocabolo troppo affollato; e l’aggettivazione che usate (arcaico, mediterraneo) ha un’eco che mi confonde.”



[3] “A volte le dava capogiri, le causava un sapore di ferro in bocca... era all’origine di tutte le sofferenze non riconducibili a una sola evidentissima ragione… La frantumaglia… la svegliava in piena notte… le suggeriva qualche motivetto indecifrabile da cantare a mezza bocca che presto si estingueva in un sospiro.”



[4] “La frantumaglia è un paesaggio instabile… che si mostra all’io, brutalmente, come la sua vera e unica interiorità.”



[5] “Il dolore ci sprofonda tra le antenate unicellulari, tra i borbottii rissosi o terrorizzati dentro le caverne… pur tenendoci ancorate - mettiamo - al computer su cui stiamo scrivendo.”



 



 



 



 



 

Ruby Rae Spiegel’s Dry Land takes place almost entirely in an empty locker-room. Two high school athletes named Amy and Ester straddle and stand on its benches, spread and sprawl on its floor, leaving Gatorade bottles and Hostess wrappers in their wake. They discuss menstruation and athlete’s foot, imagining their blood leaking out of their swimsuits and their skin flaking on the floor. When Amy takes a pill to induce labor, Ester asks her what she will do with the “thing,” and Amy, panicking, suggests that she puts it in a locker.



The abortion is sudden and bloody on the locker-room floor. On opening night at the Boston Center for the Arts, one woman left the theater, hand over mouth. Her companions remained seated but welcomed the excuse to look away from the stage.



Theatre-goers expect the abortion, though. The program has two pages devoted to placing “abortion in context.” The play’s most jarring scene comes a few minutes later, when a janitor pushes an industrial mop down the theater’s left-hand aisle. On stage, he picks up crumpled newspapers and wipes down the set. He scrubs the brown stain in the middle of the floor, until it becomes watery and red, and then disappears.



In the wake of the staged abortion, the janitor denies the audience emotional reprieve. Watching him feels like closing your eyes after looking at the sun, and seeing a yellow sphere burn behind your lids. On the clean, empty stage, the girl’s twisted body remains as afterimage.



The bodies we are forced to imagine stay with us longer than the ones displayed on stage. Early in the play, Ester asks Amy whether she’s ever wondered what her organs taste like—steak, maybe. Another character remembers that after they kissed at a party, Amy asked him to tell the other guests that he came on her face. When the hostess asked her to leave, she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. Amy and Ester reconstruct their bodies with words, inhabiting empty spaces.



This insistence on female presence comes to Boston at a crucial moment. Last spring, Harvard University conducted a survey that found that one in three graduating seniors had experienced sexual assault while enrolled. President Drew Faust released those results just a week before the opening of Dry Land, calling for an emergency assembly in Harvard’s Science Center. Strangely, though, as students and administrators reckoned with those results, female bodies rarely entered the conversation.



If, after  Dry Land, the female body burned as afterimage, then after the assembly, it faded into white space. David B. Laibson, an Economics professor and member of Harvard’s Task Force on Sexual Assault, delivered a 45-minute PowerPoint presentation. By its conclusion, the central fact of assault had been buried under percentage points, breakdowns and breakouts. In that narrow lecture hall, where students sat on hard metal seats, and clean vacuumed aisles, one could no more see flesh and blood than an elephant squatting on the stage.



The discussion moved from female bodies to gendered spaces. Midway through the presentation, Laibson noted that 14% of reported assaults took place in “single-sex social organizations that are not fraternities or sororities”  That statistic framed much of campus discussion in following weeks. In her e-mail to the student body, Faust proposed four areas of further investigation, including “the locations where [sexual assaults] occur.” Chair of the Sexual Assault Task Force Stephan D. Hyman echoed that sentiment, asking the College to interrogate “the relationship between social spaces and sexual assault.” Though most administrators first responded to the survey with moral outrage, they quickly turned to narrow analysis. Because that analysis focused more on the where of sexual assault rather than the how and why, it lended itself to logistical calculation rather than human understanding.



Students, too, focused their analyses on the logistics of assault rather than the fact of it. Some sought to combat Harvard’s problem by absenting themselves from problematic spaces. A student and a professor published their resignations from exclusive Final Clubs. Several students publicly refused to “punch” those organizations . Others demanded that Harvard restructure those spaces. A Crimson editorial demanded an investigation of the Clubs and one student wrote in to suggest that “the Women’s Center occupy the Porcellian building.” Such arguments implied we can eliminate the sexual assault the way a surgeon eliminates cancer: localize, then remove.



On one level, this approach makes sense. But fighting sexual assault exclusively by fighting Final Clubs offers only a simplified solution to a more complex—and more human—problem.  It’s easy to spot the women slipping behind hired bouncers, tightly wrapped torsos angled sideways. It’s harder to see the flesh and blood under those tight dresses. So, we look at the architecture.



When we fail to consider the presence of female bodies in all spaces, we risk excusing ourselves from dealing with them. Administrators have sidestepped criticism with with vague nods to “inclusivity” and donations to House social budgets. Meanwhile, laying the guilt on certain spaces pardons those who don’t occupy those spaces. It’s the old fallacy of rape—only strong, powerful men could commit such a crime—mapped onto Harvard’s social scene. When one man confesses to the guilt of Final Clubs, those not in Final Clubs can absolve themselves of sin. One resignation letter ended with a plea for Harvard to “rise from the ashes of assault into a new awakening.” If we awaken only to the problem of spaces, and not to the problem of human nature, we might as well just stay asleep.



Fortunately, Harvard women have begun to reinsert their bodies into the campus discussion. Two survivors published bylined narratives of their assaults in the Crimson. The point of such articles is clear: to match names, individual identities, to numbers. If administrators and students respect these narratives, they must not only acknowledge female presence, but see beyond victimhood. The survey defines penetration as “when one person puts a penis, fingers, or object inside someone else’s vagina or anus.” Man as actor, woman as acted upon. One Crimson op-ed noted that “one of every six women who received a diploma last May was raped.” In between the tragedy of rape and the triumph of commencement, those bodies live and breathe in every space on campus. We must meet them in every state, in every place.



Perhaps that what makes Dry Land truly radical. The bodies it forces us to imagine suffer, but they also just exist. Ester sits on Amy’s stomach, and then tickles her, making her laugh until she pees. Amy presses the soles of her feet against Ester’s butt, and shouts “I’m fondling you!” Ester does not take off her swimsuit for a week as a superstitious measure before swimming for a college recruiter. She develops a full-body rash, and triumphs. The play ends as Amy watches Ester’s recruitment video, silent in front of the elegant swimmer on screen. Ester is not beautiful in the way that the girls in the magazines left in the locker-room are. She is beautiful in grossness rather than perfection, in the privacy of the moment rather than in the public gaze.



If Dry Land fills empty spaces, it also imbues moments of pain with triumph. After the abortion, after the clean-up, Amy and Ester practice delivering a presentation about the Florida wetlands. They describe swamps and green ferns that gave men gangrene and malaria and stymied agriculture. Now, the swamps and green ferns are paved over but still present, heavy and throbbing under strip-malls and freeways. They are a reminder of past injury, but also the secret of progress. As Amy and Ester exchange notecards on the now-clean floor, their voices grow louder. They are strengthened by the phantom stains of blood.

A few short steps from the entrance escalator in Boston’s new CityTarget stands a section called Local Pride. It is filled with t-shirts whose heathery fabric gives an appearance of wear and fade—a style CityTarget calls vintage. They are emblazoned with catchphrases, figures, and logos meant to invoke the spirit of Boston: How Bout Them Apples runs overtop a clover, Capt. Carl Yastrzemski surrounds an image of the beloved Red Sox great taking a swing, faded logos of Cape Cod potato chips and Marshmallow Fluff sit just beneath the chest of two v-necks. There are baseballs, water bottles, tote bags, and Moleskines adorned with the phrase Local Boston Pride. Yellow, green, and red foam fingers litter a display stand. Their erect indexes display a #1 and their palms read Local Boston Pride. Yellow drink cozies proudly offer the phrase We Are Boston.

Boston’s CityTarget has hawked this version of Local Pride since its opening on July 26th of this year. The three-floor, 160,000 square-foot retail megacenter is the ninth in a line of Target stores designed to offer, according to a company press release, “customized assortments and services to meet the needs of guests who are increasingly moving into urban centers.” Local Pride is just one fixture of this customization—an attempt to situate CityTarget in a specific urban context.



This attempt at contextualization doesn’t stop at the boundaries of the Local Pride section. The store entryway features several original stadium seats from Fenway Park. In 7-foot helvetica, the phrase hi boston hangs on the wall at the crest of the escalator. The in-store Starbucks features Fenway Park references, listing coffee roasts in the style of the left field scoreboard. There is one red seat in the Starbucks that Sox fans will note as a nod to the marker of Ted William’s longest Fenway home run: a lone red seat in Fenway’s section 42. And there is Fan Central, over which towers a gigantic, shadowbox Target bull’s-eye, filled with baseballs, and within which are sold all things Patriots, Red Sox, and Bruins. Fan Central rounds out the Boston branding, distributing t-shirts, golf shirts, jerseys, hats, baby clothes, ski caps, plush blankets, Pedro Martinez memoirs, helmets, and 30-racks of Bud Light, all branded carefully with Boston sports logos.



The utter inundation of CityTarget with avatars of Bostonian lore suggests that this branding thesis of Local Pride—more than apartment-friendly furniture sets or smaller package sizes—might be what CityTarget is really selling. As the company suggests, the not-so-subtle push to invoke Local Pride ultimately points toward a new demographic paradigm: People, especially young ones with lots of social and economic capital, are moving out of the suburbs and back into cities. For some 40-odd years, the urban center was the recipient of our culture’s most neurotic projections and was largely maligned as a place of crime, drugs, and general decay. However, there has been an urban renaissance of late in which our most colorful and optimistic impressions of America have again become manifest in the symbols and spaces of our cities. Heads of industry are moving corporate headquarters back into downtowns. Retail is filled with clothing branded as “urban” or “streetwear.” People laud the city’s potential for cultural production, as every city we hear about “really has such a cool restaurant scene.” There are tales of blossom in cities like Birmingham or Kansas City and stories of revival in cities like Detroit or Cleveland, all with the tone of: Can you believe this is the new reality?



The suite of analysis of this sociological phenomenon has largely focused on gentrification, the destruction an endemic urban way of life via the suburban interlopers’ attempts to remake the city in their image. In considering the quirks of CityTarget’s presentation—Local Pride, Fan Central, and the like—we are offered insight into a specific component of this dynamic: the suburban émigré’s gaze of the urban.

One imagines that Target’s lifetime guests grew up across the wide expanse of American suburbia. The Targets that dot these suburban landscape are interchangeable, just like the endless subdivisions of cul-de-sacs of two-story vinyl-sided Cape Cod houses in which these guests lived. And now more and more of them are living in places like Boston, perhaps either in school or working their first or second job. They are sleeping in a twin XL in a dorm in Cambridge or under immaculate white sheets in a swanky Back Bay apartment or on the better smelling couch in a friend’s place in Somerville. These émigrés are meant to see in CityTarget what many likely see in Boston: a hodgepodge of symbols that suggest they’ve entered an environment full of distinct culture and history of which they should actually be proud.



To understand how Target has decided to market its new urban shopping center to its moving consumer base is to begin to understand why those same people are moving. It is this suburban-perspective mythologizing of the urban that continues to push many people into American cities. In the coming years, as more and more people continue to hollow out the suburbs in search of the Metropolitan Dream, we will likely continue to see many more spaces like CityTarget that display these fetishized takes on urban history and culture. At the same time, we will also continue to see many new Bostonians will crest CityTarget’s first escalator, turn to the 7-foot hi boston, and feel at home.

Look at the opening of Anna Akhmatova’s “Requiem,” her monument or memorial to the years of Stalin’s Terror:



             No, not under the vault of alien skies,

             And not under the shelter of alien wings—

             I was with my people then,

             There, where my people, unfortunately, were.   



 



“There, where my people, unfortunately, were.”1  Could you write that line as an American poet? Even laying aside the “my people,” could you say “unfortunately”? To say unfortunately about the Terror is to reclaim that word completely—it was not merely injustice, sin, mass murder, but mishap, the utter failure of good fortune—and, by linkage, to make every surrounding word new and real again. American poetry is afraid, I think, of that total, reconstructive accuracy.



This accuracy is not unique to Akhmatova. Nor is it entirely a matter of content: it’s actually part of a style common to translated poems. This has something to do with what Steven Owen described, in his 1990 essay “What is World Poetry?”, as poetry that succeeds “not by words, which are always trapped within the nationality of language and its borders, but by the envisagements of images possible only with words.” But it’s not just portable images, not just poetry at one remove from native verse. Translated work has a linguistic style at the native level of the target language, a blessed awkwardness that we can value on its own terms, even if it is merely the accidental result of “bad” (overly literal) translation.



I’m going to call that style “adjective,” not because poems written like this are particularly adjective-rich, but because they throw themselves at (ad + ject) meanings which may not exist yet. Like noun phrases with a lot of modifiers, adjective poems fail to provide us with exact coordinates, making us triangulate—unsurprising, since translations require words that don’t exist, or don’t quite exist, in the target language. (Adjectives are the opposite of connotations.)  Adjective poems have air in them. They abandon puns in favor of literalism or unfamiliar clichés. Because they stand in ethical relation to their subjects, they are accurate even where they cannot be precise. The bee in my bonnet: why do I feel, reading translated “adjective” poems, that they touch the untouched parts of my language in a way only a foreigner could?



It’s hard to separate this style from the poetry of witness—poems, like “Requiem,” that mark public trauma on time. And we do have a sense that trauma is something that only happens to other people. Consider the following (translated) lines, found more or less by flipping at random through Carolyn Forché’s anthology Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness (hereafter AF; all emphases mine):



  



    and in their eyes worms pretended to be

            question marks



There is a literalism to the translation that produces awkward constructions in English, which,



            And in that cry such horror

            and such supplication

            so great was its despair

            that I asked the helmsman



reinterpreted as native poetic choices,



            I saw a man who had been tortured

            he now sat safely in the family circle

            cracked jokes ate soup



exemplify an aesthetic of accuracy, one genetically linked to a reportorial stance.

You may respond, isn’t this kind of witness poetry a twentieth-century practice? Why write about it in 2015? Just nostalgia for the 20th-century left? But look at Kirill Medvedev, writing in 2002 a poem only collected in English in 2012:



            Who’s to blame that

            Leni Riefenstahl remained alive

            while thousands starved to death in Leningrad;

            it’s not clear why we need to

            think about this now;

            tell us about something else,



 



This—witness poetry, adjective witness—is not a naïve or a fixed style, lacking in historical dimension. Medvedev is playing7  here with the history of the politics of memory, and the poetics. This might be how he deals with the commodification of public trauma (which—shocker—happens in Russia too). And others, like Polish Nobel laureate Wisława Szymborska, or Israeli national poet Yehuda Amichai, write poems informed by public trauma but not centered around the need to bear witness.

But it’s also not an entirely native style. Medvedev and Akhmatova feel similar in part because the translation obscures the size of the gap between them; Akhmatova writes in fine rhyme and meter, while Medvedev uses free verse and seems in search of what a Slavist friend of mine called a “maximally blunt idiom.” Adjective style comes in part out of the ethical imperative that drives witness poetry, but it’s also created by the translator’s own ethical imperative to render the original as accurately as possible. This is not utilitarian protest poetry—it is the sought-after aesthetic byproduct of ethics, the pearl of translation. If we want to understand what feels like the honesty of such poetry, we have to postmodernly abandon the idea of the poet as the source of their own work.



And yet a lot of what draws us to this translated poetry—and to adjectivity generally—is its feeling of reportorial authenticity, that “total, reconstructive accuracy” which we (Americans, and especially White Americans) are not sure we have any right to claim ourselves, but which we are desperate to hear in others. And there’s something disturbingly imperialistic, or at least hegemonic, about this demand to eat other people’s tragedies. Owen thinks we accept “world poetry” only because we are “assured that the poetry was lost in translation.” But with the poetry of public trauma, we actively seek out the brutal, witnessing voice, and in the broader case of adjective poetry, we crave the blunt instrument of our own language made simple and strange. The foreignness of the poet merely authorizes the consumption of the style we are already hungry for. These, then, are practices of the undeniable, and we support them because we want to feel unable to deny them. A little bent, no?



I’ll end with an (overstated) speculation. Might the problem lie in the outlook of American poets? Far from strutting with unearned authority, we parody that strut. We pun. Compulsively talkative, we are actually too afraid of our own voices, too convinced of having no news to report, no public life to witness. Might this learned helplessness be why we (especially we on the left) try and get our jollies from foreign pain?



No, with a question. How do we get out of this?

This spring, Joan Didion became the new face of the French luxury brand Céline, and the fashion blogosphere dissolved into a lilac-scented pleasure cloud. Céline dressed Didion in black; maxi-skirt wearing girls from Tumblr domains far and wide re-blogged the writer’s LA packing list. Before the literary world could cry “commercialization,” the fashion world cried, “She worked at *Vogue*!”



Even outside of the oversized-clutch toting demographic, commentators praised the ads, lauding the fashion industry for its newfound respect for brains and beauty. The purveyors of all things hot-or-not had finally given smart women their scented seal of approval—what a victory for feminism. Never mind her National Book Award. Didion finally made it when they stamped her face on the back of a $1200 leather jacket.



With a spritz of eau-de-Didion, Phoebe Philo did to Didion what popular culture has done to women writers for years: She made her pretty. I first read Emily Dickinson in a blue picture book; on the cover the branches of a white-blossomed tree folded into the shape of a heart, a white dove nesting in its tip. “Pink, small and punctual” appeared on page two; “Wild Nights” was nowhere to be found. Children’s publishers sell fake gold lockets with *Wuthering Heights* and *Jane Eyre*. You’ll find Austen quoted in as many works of Tumblr-ism as criticism. Harvard calls its only undergraduate course centered entirely on the novelist “From Jane Austen to Chick-lit.”



Female writers still carry baggage, and not just the history-of-marginalization kind. They carry 2 skirts, 2 jerseys or leotards, 1 pullover sweater, stockings, face cream, and the rest. For marketing purposes, it helps to be pretty—or at least, to wear fashionable sunglasses, to write works whose titles might be written in cursive over curly-haired silhouettes on pink hardcovers. It helps to accessorize.



Austin Dickinson once recommended that his sister write more simply. “I’ll be as *simple* as you please, the *simplest* sort of simple,” she promised him in a letter. “I’ll be a little ninny—a little pussy catty, a little Red Riding Hood. I’ll wear a Bee in my Bonnet, and a Rose bud in my hair.” 46 years later, Lawrence Knowles featured a drawing of Dickinson alongside a selection of her poetry in *The Golden Treasure of American Songs and Lyrics*. The white-dressed poet lounges under a tree, a rose bud in her hair.



That image of Dickinson would persist—even as scholars restored her original manuscripts, wrote about her bisexuality, and attempted to compensate for the gender bias with which her works had been read for years. In 1976, just a few years before R.W. Franklin reprinted Dickinson’s original fasci- cles, PBS produced a television version of the play *The Belle of Amherst*. In the first scene, Julie Harris, white-dress clad, carried a cake on screen—made from Dickinson’s own recipe.



The next day, *The New York Times* printed an article titled “The Poet’s Black Cake,” alongside a portrait in which an aproned Dickinson, rendered as a tight-smiled housewife, holds out her Bundt. The piece concludes with a quote from Harris, who, asked what she’d say to Dickinson if she had the chance, replies: “I’d ask her to show me how she made her rye and Indian bread.” If the seventies had Tumblr, the quote would have been typed up in Edwardian script and re-blogged next to a picture of Miss Emily in the kitchen.



Lest you think it’s just the silly seventies, visit any bookstore to purchase titles like *A Brighter Garden* and *Emily*, each featuring some variation of the pastel watercolor flowerbed, the pretty white-dressed girl smiling over her roses. Never mind that Dickinson’s poems about death and sex breach typical garden party etiquette. We need only smooth out Emily’s punctuation, cut her erotic odes, and paint a few pink hearts in the margin. (*The Poetry for Young People* edition counts nineteen.)



We infantilize rather than analyze. After all, it’s easier to assess Austen’s contribution to rom-coms than to consciousness, less threatening to transcribe Didion’s packing list than her psychoanalytic profile, more polite to talk about Dickinson’s spring days than her wild nights. We make writers “women writers,” and then we make them girls.



Male poets can be marketed toward children, too. Poetry for Young People also sells a hardcover Robert Frost Collection. It opens with a three-page account of his life and includes commentary on each of his poems. The biographical information in the Dickinson edition contains only brief mentions of the poet’s childhood, telling us, “Emily was much like other girls.” Then, of course, come the hearts.



And you’ll find no Robert Frost paper dolls. No Fitzgerald novels sold with lockets. No black-bearded silhouettes of Hemingway against any colored background. Male writers don’t need the add-ons. Their work, popular culture tells us, needs no accessories to sell.



Sometimes, the accessories don’t need the women writers. Etsy.com sells a collection of *Pride and Prejudice* purses: hardcovers with pages removed, lined with pink cloth, featuring beaded handles. Nine by six inches, the reviews promise, roomy enough for your lipstick and perfume. (Does one who totes an Austen purse spritz herself with Didion, or do novels and nonfiction clash?). Not quite wide enough for a book.



The Ce?line campaign might be one small step forward for the fashion industry, but it’s a giant slap in Didion’s sunglassed-face. Didion, who spoke sardonically in a 1977 *Paris Review* interview about the “fragility of Joan Didion myth,” has always been hyperaware of the attention given to her physical appearance in popular culture. Then, she claimed that she dealt with stereotypes about women writers by “just tending my own garden.” Today, the 80-year-old icon who consented to Ce?line’s campaign seems to have retired to the rosebeds. When the *New York Times* asked the face behind the glasses why she thought the campaign made such a sensation, she only said, “I don’t have any clue.”



Like the owner of hollowed-out Austen novels, the Ce?line consumer (though she might consider her brand more tasteful) has no need for the writer’s prose. Under the guise of a “literary aesthetic,” she claims the female writer without her work, without her complications, without her strangeness. Didion, leather-jacket edition: the simplest sort of simple.



A feminist victory? I’ll believe it when Calvin Klein features Norman Mailer in a denim campaign. I’ll believe it when I see those $1200 jeans, Mailer’s face grinning on the left ass cheek. 

*Twenty-thirteen was the year I got super into SoulCycle. It’s gross but I don’t care because I need it and I love it (ha ha so gross). Actually, wait, that’s completely misleading because I only got into it two months ago. Whatever, it’s the best. *



*— Mary HK Choi, the awl.com*



 



Replace “SoulCycle”—the spinning phenomenon sweeping the affluent, pro-fitness nation—with “heroin,” and Choi seems clear-cut for a dependency diagnosis. She has all the telltale signs: skewed perception of how long she’s been on the drug; repeated revulsion at her “gross” behavior; recognition of the compulsion but complete inability to stop. The habit consumes Choi’s resources and displaces old vices. She “stops buying clothes, shoes, cigarettes, weed, cocktails (what a racket) and pounds of bulk gummy candy” to pay for the privilege to “zone out for a spell.” She ends by proselytizing: “SoulCycle feels gross, is gross and I’m grateful to have found it. If you’ve ever suspected you’d be into it, get over yourself and go.” Even as she reviles the cultic exercise class, she desperately pulls others into the fantasy.



Choi’s story epitomizes the emerging micro-genre I’ll call the “SoulCycle Narrative”: personal pieces structured like tales of addiction and published on blogs and local news outlets, even in *The New York Times*. The dealer of choice is the exercise franchise SoulCycle, which, for 34 dollars, offers 45 minutes of pedaling on indoor stationary bikes, in the dark, with house music blaring. Printed on the candle-lit studio walls is a manifesto with lines like “we inhale intention and exhale expectation.” Instructors shout a mixture of encouragement, dance instructions, and new-agey, spiritual mantras: “I want the next breath to be an exorcism.” Exercise is not an uncommon contemporary addiction, but SoulCycle dresses its junkies in exclusive style1, and the new narcotic for the rich has transformed a single Upper West Side studio into a national franchise with over 1,200 employees in 40 cities. What distinguishes the SoulCycle Narrative most of all, though, is that it recounts a distinctly postmodern addiction: affirming dependence as transcendence, abandoning critical distance, embracing the irrational with irony.



Though “addiction” did not arise as a medical term until the nineteenth century, people have been telling tales of dependence for millennia. Roman historian Seneca wrote, “excessive alcohol will destroy the mind and magnify character defects.” The Bible is littered with concern over Noah’s delight in drink. Recent archeological evidence suggests 30,000-year-old cultivation of opiates, the drug that spurred the modern addiction narrative with Thomas De Quincey’s *Confessions of an English Opium-Eater* in 1821. The genre passed through Charles Baudelaire’s riff on Quincy in *Les paradis artificiels* to its more recent forms in William S. Burroughs’ *Junky* and Caroline Knapp’s *Drinking: A Love Story*.



From Quincey to Knapp, the addiction narrative traces similar story arcs with similar language. In an intimate, confessional register, it begins by recounting trepidation, building to the climactic moment of first exposure. Those initial experiences are tinged with rapture and breathless nostalgia; the retrospective narrator cannot help but yearn for unpolluted intoxication. Then comes the slow descent, coated in motifs of monstrous transformation, of being taken over by a demon. Loss of mind follows loss of friends until...rock bottom. The result is slow, painful recovery, reconciliation, and—in the better tales—shrewd insight.



The SoulCycle Narrative fits comfortably into these tropes and story arcs. Like a teeneager taking her first bong-hit, the cycling protagonist is anxious as she anticipates the initial class. She finds herself overwhelmed by social codes: online reservations booked days in advance, waitlist lurkers waiting for no-shows, an insider language with inscrutable phrases like “tap it back” and “add a quarter turn.” (Translations: Move the buttocks to the rear of the bike, lengthening the spine; increase the bike’s resistance to maximize calorie burn in the thighs.) But once the spinner takes her first endorphin-toke, there’s no going back. “The body has no choice but to submit,” says David Holmes in a pando.com piece, and the “emotional misery your fucked-up life’s been serving you” vanishes in the room just as when a fiend enters his opium den or Alice in Wonderland rabbit hole. A perfect mix of upper and hallucinogen, spinning grants the narrators energy, escape, and transcendence. In a piece on *The Verge*, Nitashak Tiku reluctantly attends a first class with the sole aim of speaking with Twitter’s CEO. Unsurprisingly, the social media hotshot’s a SoulCycle devotee, and Tiku thinks she can leverage the cycling endorphins to start a conversation despite the strobe lights and techno. She fails, twice, but along the way SoulCycle becomes her “new best friend.” Drugs have always been great companions, and by the narrative’s end, Tiku hardly remembers the reason she first came to the class.



Next comes withdrawal from old communities. Holmes is reticent to advertise his habit because he thinks he will be unfairly judged as “a person who craves status and exclusivity.”2 He hides from watchful eyes and cites other cyclers who are even more dependent. Several pieces quote fanatics selecting apartments due to SoulCycle studio proximity, ensuring their dealer is always within reach. One woman rearranges her work schedule to leave prime class-booking time free. “I would do anything I could to afford these rides,” she says of her thirteen-class-a-week lifestyle. “Don’t knock it until you try it” says a shirt. “This isn’t spinning, it’s a way of life” echoes another cycler.



In the classic addiction narrative, those statements would signal a turn toward crisis, the first hints of rock-bottom, withdrawal, and treatment. The SoulCycle analog, though, makes no such move. Holmes opts for the perplexing resolution, “if we are elitists, then it’s a close-knit community of elitism—an in-crowd of equals,” fully embracing his drugged-up cohorts, all but glorifying the economic barrier to being “equal.” He acknowledges the transience of the high, the need for another fix within hours—but ultimately affirms his behavior: “Surely there are worse things to be addicted to.” So the SoulCycle Narrative ends not by confronting the drug, but by accepting it, indeed celebrating it. While the habit may be expensive and indulgent, the narrative deems it beneficial and, mostly importantly, connective.



Connection, in fact, is what makes SoulCycle a distinctly postmodern addiction. The traditional narrative of dependence is told by an outcast whose consumptive habits have made him a modernist monad: someone, like Edvard Munch’s subject in *The Scream*, who stands alone, observing the world at a harrowing distance. But the SoulCycle spin-off reels with spiritual exclamations of how riders pedal—and breathe and exorcise—to a single beat: a transcendence of subjectivity that spurns ecstatic wonder without any of the darkness that makes most addicts shriek. In his famous case-study on postmodernism, Fredric Jameson calls this the swap of modernist “expressions” for postmodernist “intensities.” Intensities are “free-floating and impersonal”—developing between cyclers rather than within them—and they are dominated by a “peculiar kind of euphoria.” If modernist addiction confronted the horror of isolated expressions, postmodern addiction ends with the acceptance of relativism and affirmation of irrationality. The moral quandary of a connection so soaked in wealth is forgotten amidst all the endorphins. If the body has not broken down, if the pack rides together, the next squat can be popped like a pill without shame.



Postmodern addiction, then, no longer plagues the individual, but rather satisfies her so fully she forgets the rest of the world. Perhaps most insidiously it allows for and incorporates its own critique. Though the SoulCycle Narrative is filled with complaints about the price and the practice—half the riders, like Choi, revile themselves for going—any objections are irrationally abandoned at its end. Jameson, too, noted that postmodern capitalism elides distance between an analyst and a cultural phenomenon, so “the luxury of the old-fashioned ideological critique, the indignant moral denunciation of the other, becomes unavailable.” The SoulCycle Narrative is too bound up in its own luxury to hit rock bottom, too connected to the pack of riders to stop and think about its place in the broader cultural fabric. The critic holds her ironic relationship to spinning right up until she enters the candle-lit room. But then, in the wake of her contemporary spiritual nihilism, a rider’s connection to that pack is simply too wondrous to resist: “the visual culture of consumerism” fills her “voids” and she is blinded in euphoria. She will die gloriously, sweating like the Übermensch in a room beyond good and evil—even if the rest of the world burns.



 



---



 



1 Literally. The brand has an overwhelming assortment of paraphernalia: water bottles, skull-shirts, leggings, sweats, fingerless gloves, bandanas, “embroidered cashmere socks,” even their custom candles. Plus, there’s supplemental material on the best Soul-music, Soul-diets, Soul-lifestyle. For every Bob Marley and White Castle reference in stoner tales, there’s an Avicii-remix or chia-seed smoothie in those of the cycler. The bike itself comes for a reasonable $2,200: the equivalent of two months of every-day SoulCycle or a few-year membership at a well-equipped gym. 



 



2Never mind that he clearly is that person. “I am one of the privileged few who have reserved their spots for the 8:00 AM session,” he says, describing the intense competition for bikes that causes people to pay double ($60+) for priority access. In the SoulCycle addict community, “privilege” does not denote the financial luxury of affording a class, but rather the good fortune to have beaten out other riders for a bike. The “unprivileged,” one presumes, are those who clicked too slowly, who remain burdened with that extra thirty dollars. A January *New York Times* piece “A Race to the Front Row” describes the “status symbol” of peddling in the front of a class. By delineating the haves and have nots within a spin community, the article boldly ignores the status symbol of just belonging to the community. Sterilized, safe competition arises between members of the elite—for a front bike, for a favorite instructor. 

Somewhere downriver in the nation’s conscience, magnolias are in bloom. Slavery is having a moment in American culture. It has made its presence felt across the arts, from plays such as Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' *An Octoroon* or Suzan-Lori Parks’s *Father Comes Home From the Wars*, to art installations like Kara Walker’s *Marvelous Sugar Baby*, an homage to the “unpaid and overworked Artisans” of plantations past. James McBride’s *The Good Lord Bird*, a picaresque retelling of the abolitionist John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry, won last year’s National Book Award for Fiction—the same year that *12 Years a Slave* won the Academy Award for Best Picture, and just two years after the release of Quentin Tarantino’s *Django Unchained*. Louis C.K. has done slavery stand up, while in one recent sketch, Key and Peele went so far as to put themselves on the auction block. Slavery has even insinuated itself into video games, with the recent release of two new versions of *Assassin’s Creed* that make it a central subject. A century and a half after abolition, slavery has become—of all things—popular.



Or, more accurately, the unpopularity of slavery has become popular, its uncomfortable infamy universally interesting. America is passing through a period of antebellum fauxstalgia, a perennial revival of interest in slavery which is equal parts a memorial and an exorcism. We have passed through this mo- ment before. Fifty years ago, the Civil Rights movement and its aftermath carried slavery forcefully into the national consciousness, interrupting decades of anxious silence, compulsory ignorance, and revisionist nostalgia. Scholars like Eugene Genovese educated the country on *The World Slaves Made*, while artists like Malcolm Bailey used the Middle Passage to highlight continuity between the past of slavery and the present of legal segregation. (Bailey’s “Separate but Equal” is a modern blueprint of a slave ship, with white and black figures chained on opposite ends of the hold.) The popular peak of this resurgence was the television mini-series *Roots*, starring LeVar Burton as the enslaved Gambian Kunta Kinte. *Roots*’s searing melodrama, now forty years old, remains the dominant image of American slavery. Its continued popularity, evident in Kendrick Lamar’s recent track “King Kunta,” suggests that our own era of recalcitrant racial injustice has an affinity with this earlier time. As in the seventies, we seem to have run up against the hard limits of American racial progress. Moments of rude awakening like these seem to demand a ritual return to slavery as the origin point of American racial injustice.



And yet, our own obsession with the antebellum period is, by comparison, strangely depoliticized. Today, slavery is a subject that allows audiences to feel morally engaged with violent racial injustice while remaining safely distant from its contemporary ravages. It is a cultural placebo politics, enabling a liberal public that craves the chance to engage with questions of race to do so without the discomfort of proximity. Audiences have confused the antebellum world’s problems with those of our own, so much so that *The New York Times* is able to call Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ *An Octoroon*—the revival of a melodrama more than a century old—“the most eloquent theatrical statement on race in America today.” This is itself an eloquent statement about race in America today. It speaks volumes about the liberal public’s desire to think about contemporary racial injustice *through* slavery—and through slavery alone. Pick almost any black writer, and if they’ve written a book about slavery, it’s become the most celebrated of their works. Octavia Butler, Toni Morrison, James McBride, and Ishmael Reed have published many excellent books, but *Kindred*, *Beloved*, *The Good Lord Bird*, and *Flight to Canada* are the ones people read.



On the side of black artists themselves, the subject of slavery can, ironically, enable a certain freedom. It satisfies the liberal public’s craving for black artists who “express themselves” on the issue of racial injustice, while avoiding the contemporary specificity that might make that same public feel implicated. Its historical remove also allows these artists to avoid having their work reduced to political statement or personal grievance. Creating art about racial injustice *today* risks making you look like a propagandist. Creating art about slavery, or that deals with contemporary racial injustice *through* slavery, allows you to remain a serious artist.



This is not to deny that the art of antebellum fauxstalgia has often been both beautiful and politically provocative. It is only to point out that the antebellum world has become in many ways a segregated district of the national imagination, a closed arena where the country can exorcise its racial demons without touching too closely on the here and now. It is the only context where representing racist violence—and violent black resistance to racism—is reliably acceptable. Audiences are ready to applaud the vengeful Jamie Foxx of Tarantino’s *Django*, to bleed with Lupita Nyong’o in *12 Years a Slave*, and even to backstab overseers as the escaped Ade?wale? in the game *Assassin’s Creed: Freedom Cry*. They are less hungry for stories of resistance set in more recognizable worlds. It’s hard to imagine a blockbuster about Black Panthers facing police in the 1970s, or about the Tulsa Race Riots of 1921, when members of the local black community defended themselves against thousands of rioting neighbors armed with guns, bombs, and planes. These conflicts, which took place between free people in an America recognizably our own, are more dangerous than slavery—which, for most Americans, is less a historical period than a mythic locale. Staging our national anxieties around race within the safety of this myth is a popular alternative to telling and listening to the riskier stories of other periods, especially our own. It is because we wish to avoid ourselves that we build so many imagined plantations—effigies for our General Shermans of the screen, stage, and page to burn down.

On March 5, 2012, if you logged into Facebook, a video entitled “KONY 2012” was sure to pop up as every third or fourth post. 



Perhaps at first, you ignored it. However, after seeing it posted over and over again for hours, maybe you clicked on it, and watched at least some of the 29 minute, 59 second video. Even if you only watched the first few minutes, you learned that there is a warlord named Joseph Kony wreaking havoc in Uganda with a rebel militia group, that he is kidnapping children from their homes to make them unwilling soldiers, that the situation is getting worse, and that something must be done. It is a call to arms, for the people of America to do their part to combat a foreign terror. Like many of the other people on your Newsfeed, you probably felt horrified, outraged, catalyzed. And maybe, just like them, you shared it.



KONY 2012 is remembered today as one of the first Internet trends to spread like wildfire across feeds from Twitter to Facebook, Tumblr to YouTube. As most of its proponents and critics will remember, the fall of KONY 2012 and Invisible Children came as quickly as its rise to fame. The organization was simply unprepared for the rapid onslaught of support (at the time of the video’s release, Invisible Children had one intern to fill 500,000 orders of their $30 “call to action” kit). Within two weeks, the organization’s founder and the narrator of KONY 2012, Jason Russell, was famous himself, though unfortunately due to a nude mental breakdown on the streets of San Diego.



Like with Britney’s change of hairstyle or Kanye’s defense of Beyonce, KONY 2012 showed the world how quickly fame devolves into infamy. Invisible Children closed in December 2014, just under 2 years after the video was released, and Joseph Kony remains at large today. Ultimately, the disaster that was KONY 2012 remains more “famous” than the warlord it sought to blast into the spotlight.



When a campaign is as unprepared for mass sensation as was the KONY 2012 publicity stunt, could it be that virality actually hurts the cause it hopes to relieve? This question came under serious debate in late 2014 due to the retraction of a *Rolling Stone* article entitled “A Rape on Campus.” The piece, which focused on the rape of a student pseudonymously dubbed “Jackie” at the University of Virginia, went viral on social media when it was published in November. The article, written and researched by Sabrina Erdely, used Jackie’s heart-wrenching story to comment on the injustices of unreported and unpunished rape on colleges across America.



Like the KONY 2012 video, the graphic details of the article made readers feel horrified, depressed, and then incensed: why was no one talking about this major problem as fervently as this article? Could journalistic publicity, more delicately handled and less flashy than KONY 2012’s video, help Jackie and girls in similar situations? As with KONY 2012, social media users shared the piece in hoards, urging others to read it and work to help end rape culture on college campuses.



Unfortunately, also similarly to KONY 2012, the downfall of the article’s viral success came quickly, and swiftly. Soon after its publication, outlets such as *The Washington Post* began to point to blatant discrepancies in Jackie’s story, unraveling a chain of spurious journalistic practices that began with Erdely and wound their way up to Rolling Stone’s top editors.



In April, the Columbia School of Journalism compiled a lengthy report on the problems with both the article and the practices surrounding its reporting. In an introduction to the report (which *Rolling Stone* willingly elicited and published), Managing Editor Will Dana writes, “Sexual assault is a serious problem on college campuses, and it is important that rape victims feel comfortable stepping forward. It saddens us to think that their willingness to do so might be diminished by our failings.” Here Dana succinctly summarizes the dangers of viral, incendiary stories: when the method by which the specifics of a crisis or crime is criticized, the problem itself runs the risk of losing its credibility.



Though many of the accusations in the article, and of Jackie’s story, were ultimately proven to be untrue, the actual percentage of rape reports that are deemed false is believed to hover at or below eight percent. Because of the sensational popularity of its article, and its subsequent retraction, *Rolling Stone* must face the consequences of having potentially hurt, and not helped, its campaign to end rape culture on college campuses. Sexual assault, and the bureaucracy involved in the process of getting help and pressing charges is still a very real problem for many students. However, a highly publicized article that pointed fingers, and had to, in turn, point one back at itself, was not the correct method of activism.



The social media users that contributed to the virality of KONY 2012, “A Rape on Campus,” and other such stories are ultimately not to blame for the failings of seemingly reputable organizations and news outlets. If a nonprofit or a magazine is generating content to start a moral revolution, the information they share should be rigorously fact-checked down to the last detail. Invisible Children should have had resources at the ready for the fame that was to follow, and *Rolling Stone* should have published an article it was able, willing, and proud to defend.



If a story is too good to be true, or even too bad, or sad, it probably is, especially when it comes neatly packaged in an explosive article or well-produced and easily shared YouTube video. Topics that are messy and complex are just that—they have solutions that are difficult to grapple with, and must be conveyed with the utmost care in order to convince naysayers. If an organization creates a digestible form in which to catalyze readers, viewers, and ultimately, sharers, there is most likely a large chunk of the story missing.



In real life and online, we have an obligation to be our own skeptics. We must constantly sift through the click-bait, listicles, articles, and videos thrown at us in every direction—even, and perhaps especially, when they come from supposedly reputable sources. The world cannot be saved in a click, nor should it be. Examining and investing in important causes should not be discouraged, but we must be careful not to believe everything we read, especially when it comes with a shining, tantalizing “share” button, ready to broadcast a cause around the world. 

Adrienne Rich was not writing in an age when women could video chat each other while riding their male partners cowgirl-style. But when she wrote about existence as a spectrum of decentralized pleasure—about the hands and the clit and the cunt, about the wrists and the toes rather than the vagina—she might as well have been writing about *Broad City*. 



Season One, Episode One: The opening image of the show. Abbi and Ilana—two young women whose codependent best friendship and stoned New York City adventures star in the Comedy Central series—are video chatting. Ilana bounces to music as the women plan their day. Or we think Ilana is bouncing to music. Suddenly, she adjusts the webcam, and we discover that Ilana is mid-intercourse with a man. 



“Okay,” says an exasperated Abbi. “I don’t want to see you have sex.”



“That was hot. That was cool. That was like a threesome,” Ilana says. 



Abbi and Ilana are partners. They spend each day together. They video chat in the morning and before bed. They are obsessed with each other. They are, for all intents and purposes, in love. But Abbi and Ilana never have genital sex. 



Other characters think that Abbi and Ilana have sex. Ilana wants to have sex. She routinely attempts to glimpse Abbi naked; she suggests they try a sexual position called the “Arc de Triomphe”; her world shatters, momentarily, when she learns that Abbi has made out with another girl. Abbi always turns Ilana down. 



Yet Abbi and Ilana’s relationship is intensely, even grossly, physical. Ilana stores the pair’s weed in her vagina. She manually moves Abbi’s poop when Abbi’s crush is over and the toilet is clogged. Even the more squeamish Abbi likes to call Ilana during hookups: post-sex next to a sleeping man in bed, or from the bathroom mid-sexual encounter to discuss the merits of anal penetration. The women want sex, they have sex, they talk about having sex, and they do all of it together.



The weird physicality of Abbi and Ilana’s relationship—the intensely intimate, yet non genital-sexual physicality—is more than a story of best friendship. It challenges the very dichotomy between genital and non-genital eroticism. In doing so, the show speaks for and to the ambiguous snugglers and the lip balm-sharers, to those of us in wild friendship. *Broad City* opens up new kinds of desire with our friends.



 



 What’s the difference between friends we do and don’t have sex with? 



Despite the moral uproar about millennials being a generation of friends with benefits, our thinking has maintained a fundamental dichotomy: There is friendship, and there is romance, and the two different kinds of relationships are distinguished by whether or not we have genital sex. 



This binary is hierarchical. Yes, we love our friends. Yes, we value them. But what we ultimately want—the climax of every marriage plot; the ordering logic of *Sex and the City*—are “significant others,” as though only our sexual relationships are significant. Or, as though sexlessness leaves us as unfinished Platonic bodies, “other halves.”



But in *Broad City*’s universe, Abbi and Ilana’s obsession with each other is the central story. And it’s pungently physical. Yes, the women have genital-sexual partners. But they are rapt with each other. Abbi watches erotic cupcake-eating videos with Ilana, not with her sex partner. And when Ilana goes into anaphylactic shock from a shellfish allergy, it is Abbi who, in the slow motion of a romantic hero, carries her out.



“We begin to discover the erotic in female terms: as that which is unconfined to any single part of the body…as an energy not only diffuse but, as Audre Lorde has described it, omnipresent,” writes Adrienne Rich in her 1980 essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” Rich is one of a coterie of lesbian feminists, including the likes of Audre Lorde and Monique Wittig, who seek to liberate eroticism from the vagina. Though with diverse political and cultural affiliations, these theorists agree on one thing: Decentering the linear and patriarchal logic that privileges genital sex can reorder our relationships with our bodies and each other. This more diffuse eroticism is politically radical. Rich argues that non-linear lesbian pleasure challenges institutional heterosexuality. And in Wittig’s work, eroticism between women can reorder the very logic of the body.



 Abbi and Ilana’s relationship follows this alternate logic. It is not the neutered homosociality of demure lady friends, the female friendship carefully sanitized, the duo in a quest for men. Ilana telling Abbi, as they sip ice coffee on Ilana’s bed, that she’ll watch her give birth even if Abbi poops during the process (“Bitch, duh!”) isn’t exactly *The Lesbian Body*. But it’s close. 



 



In an essay on racialized sexuality published in *The New Inquiry*, Luke Pagarani argues for weird friendship as a political practice. For 2300 words he writes that Grindr culture creates a neoliberal grocery-store model of sexuality. And then he says, screw it.



 



 Forget sex. We live in a time when friendship can be more revolutionary than sex. Society seems to fear the transformative potential of friendship, that amorphous concept of partiality...Perhaps we should take that seriously and see love as that desire to discover new desires with our friends, the base unit of politics.



 



With their pseudo Skype sex and strange codependence, their knowledge of each other’s habits and excrement and hands, Abbi and Ilana challenge the dominance of sexual and narrative linearity. The intense physicality of their desire for each other—the intense physicality of our desire for each other—disrupts the tyranny of the genitals.



*Broad City* tells us that sexless, we are not half-absence, but full to the brim. We are collaborators in pleasure with our friends. 

As a child, I often fantasized about killing Hitler. Many of these fantasies involved gruesomely humiliating him—and this, more than his death, seemed to be their salient aspect. As I remember it, when I felt emotionally paralyzed—beset by an uncomprehending nausea at the magnitude and inventiveness of evil—these fantasies distracted and pacified me. Oddly, in these imaginings I never quite appeared or acted; I pictured the violent scenes in such a way that the perpetrator remained anonymous. This anonymity shielded me from the painful irony that I had unwittingly stumbled upon the same violent fantasies in myself that I detested in others. Perhaps then, the true horror stemmed not from my inability to comprehend the subterranean roots of evil but from sensing these roots in myself and grappling with the possibility that forbidden, half- conscious impulses could be acted on.



Today’s collegiate consciousness suppresses this uncomfortable fact, disavowing perverse fantasies, exiling them to the realm of perverse action. The art of Socratic ignorance and self-questioning is thus abandoned. Certain values and moral judgments are taken for granted, and assumed patterns of thinking and reasoning are confused with thought and reasoning as such. Biased and exclusive modes of consciousness masquerade as objective and inclusive totalities of consciousness. Where we might ask questions, we instead assert unassailable facts of human relations.



Abuse and abuse of power, from police brutality to rape to misuse of privilege, are almost never considered in relation to individual desires and fantasies—in terms of psychological structures present in all our minds. What is thus lost is an awareness of the distinction between natural feeling and aberrant behavior. We (justifiably) vent our frustration and rage, belittle and exclude those with disagreeable viewpoints—and refuse any kind of identification with those guilty of or sympathetic to violent or oppressive acts. Ironically, in doing so, we betray the presence in ourselves of the same impulses that, when outwardly expressed by others, we reflexively disown and condemn.



Would it even make sense, or be conceptually possible, to experience rage and indignation over acts committed by people with feelings and desires utterly foreign to our own? When an animal is killed for killing a human, our empathy tends to attach itself to both the human and the animal, both the victim and the culprit—our psychological distance from the animal allows this. Why, then, when solely humans are concerned, do we recoil from empathizing with the guilty? Perhaps our revulsion obscures the inward injustice we feel upon discovering that, where we tyrannically inhibit ourselves, others indulge.



Our wrath is consistently aimed at institutions and impersonal offenders. We confront the puppet strings of oppression in political, legal, and educational systems—but these puppet strings are anonymous, invisible, difficult to grasp, impossible to control. At Harvard, University policies and Final Clubs are frequently scrutinized for condoning reprehensible behavior—while quietly, imperceptibly, we become unable to stomach the innateness of impulses that deserve censure as actions, not as fantasies. The recent controversial Spee Club invitation sparked a fervent backlash against ‘structures’ and ‘cultures’ that reflect power imbalances and promote the degradation of women. Students are eager to discuss and reform these structures and cultures, but how can such an endeavor possibly succeed if we do not first explore the individual feelings and motives such incidents betray. If the loathsome desires at stake were not shared by perpetrators and condemners alike, I cannot see how Final Clubs would be a problem—no one would attend their parties.



It is likely that an uncanny half-awareness of the omnipresence in imagination of that which we detest in reality defensively directs our scrutiny toward policies and practices and away from individuals—toward an institutional unconscious and away from our own unconsciouses. However, if we cannot acknowledge the existence of aggressive and base desires in ourselves—if we do not dare investigate the repulsive majority that underlies the rational minority of the mind—how can we hope to do more than retroactively address instances where the mind ceases to function democratically and its hostile and unprincipled majority forsakes the lofty demands of socialization? How can we strive not merely to punish and protest but to anticipate?



The rise of political correctness expresses precisely the opposite of that which it purports to represent. Targeting fantasies and impulses that have leaked into gesture and speech but not action, PC dogma also gratifies tamer versions of them. The desire to censor, to include all by excluding some, undoubtedly stems from aggressive feelings. Moreover, unreflective political correctness suppresses a crucial dimension of self- awareness, conflating the natural scope of feeling and desire with reprehensible behavior. Such a paradoxical collective attitude is bound to depress and provoke, alienating us from both our communities and ourselves and exacerbating the same problems it addresses. Where feeling and speech become shameful and forbidden, acting out becomes more likely. Of course, PC dogma is itself a form of acting out, at once prohibiting aggression and indulging in milder forms (i.e. aggressing against the aggressors)—and it thus projects the imperative to resolve this conflict of feelings onto the external world. It requires offenders as fervently as it denounces them.



As Nietzsche observed more than a century ago, when such a vast portion of our inner lives becomes unacceptable and inaccessible to us, we become lost, aimless intruders in our own lives. We desperately need reasons to live, motivation to act, senses of purpose, and causes by which to stand. “When I think of the craving to do something, which continually tickles and spurs those millions of young people who cannot endure their boredom and themselves, then I realize that they must have a craving to suffer and to find in their suffering a probable reason for action, for deeds...These young people demand that—not happiness but unhappiness should approach from the outside and become visible; and their imagination is busy in advance to turn it into a monster so that afterward they can fight a monster.”

Last semester, black student leaders organized a confrontational protest at the start of Primal Scream, an annual Harvard undergraduate streaking tradition. *The Crimson*’s editorial board decided to opine. Typically, the board invites all interested staff members to convene, deliberate, and then vote on a consensus opinion. But when they scheduled this meeting during the March on Harvard—a campus-wide #blacklivesmatter solidarity protest with almost 1,000 participants—they left certain voices outside of the conference room “consensus” and came down against the Primal Scream protesters.



The choice was either ignorant or slyly malicious. The board may have not known about the protest or it may have known about the time conflict and intentionally left participants out of the decision. In either case, the size of the protest, combined with the overwhelming turnout of Harvard’s black community, meant that one side of a divisive issue was unable or unlikely to attend the meeting.*





It’s worth taking a closer look at this decision, which fits into a pattern of journalistic exclusion that often leaves people of color, queer people, and others outside of conversations that directly affect them. At the heart of this pattern is the issue of bias. 



*The Harvard Crimson* strives to avoid bias. When the involvement or opinion of the journalist enters into a purportedly unslanted piece, this bias is known as a conflict of interest. *The Crimson*, like most papers, has a defined conflict of interest policy to help staff handle biases. The paper aims to “recognize that the appearance of a conflict of interest is the same as an actual one,” and, like all such policies, this one’s lines are left blurry, open to interpretation.



Over the past few months, however, *The Crimson*’s management has made decisions about the blurred lines of those policies that consistently leave out those traditionally on the wrong side of Harvard’s ivy-covered walls. They cling to an outdated gold standard of journalism, in which “objectivity” lines up with the perspectives of straight white men. 



 



Walter Lippman, often considered the father of modern American journalism, sought to eliminate the presence of bias by creating a standard of scientific control. His theories can be seen as a possible origin for *The Crimson*’s conflict of interest policies. An excellent piece of journalism, for him, achieves “the unity of the disciplined experiment.” The journalist distills the world through interviews and observations and swirls it around in his test tube, holding it up at arms length to the light streaming through his lab window.



Lippman’s model of scientific uber-detachment is now considered outdated. A recent Poynter Institute publication declares, “Where we once argued for independence, we now advocate transparency.” Concerns about bias can no longer revolve around involvement, for involvement seems inevitable in a connected world. Are you involved if you like an article on Facebook? Tweet at a political or activist figure? The new model sees bias only if these perceived or actual entanglements hurt the experiment. 



On a college campus, complete detachment is particularly difficult, unless the journalist is a monk. Students sleep with one another, they work with one another, they see each other hungover in class. The best we can do, it seems, is to follow Poynter’s new recommendation and be straightforward about those connections. 



*The Crimson* hasn’t caught up to these changing standards. Their current ones are a holdover from a significantly less-equitable past, and over the past few months, it has become increasingly clear that* The Crimson*’s ethical transparency isn’t transparent or ethical at all. 



This February, I had been writing a 5,000-word article for *The Crimson* on black student activism. I wanted to paint a detailed portrait of a new generation of activists that had risen up over the past few years. It was the exact sort of narrative that *The Crimson* and American journalism at large often miss out on, unless protesters are blocking highways and throwing water bottles at riot police. 



I had also attended the March on Harvard, the same massive march mentioned earlier, a few months before. Two nights before the piece was supposed to run, the managing editor and president told me that this violated *The Crimson*’s conflict of interest policy. The piece could not be printed even if it included a note about my attendance, or a brief explanation. All my involvement in the article—hours on hours of interviews and research, countless conversations, trust built—all had to be scrapped.



For many people of color, the decision was none too surprising. Many of my interviewees for the article brought up incident after incident in which they felt *The Crimson* had published material that excluded or hurt their communities. For many activists, a catalyzing moment was a 2012 op-ed claiming that affirmative action “makes as much sense as helping the visually impaired become pilots.”



Many agreed to be interviewed only after I explained that I was trying to include unheard stories and voices in *The Crimson*. They worried that the story would cherry-pick quotes to falsely suggest either unanimity or chaos in communities of color. They worried that I would have no sense of the organizational or social landscape and that I would continue to alienate the persistently disrespected through omission of important details, background information, and context. 



The paper at times has failed to cover even major events that may not be on the radar of white people at Harvard. *The Crimson* never covered the Blacktivism conference, a meeting of hundreds of student-organizers from around the country and world and a continuation of the nationally known “I, Too, Am Harvard” movement. Their newsletter on the first day of the conference featured coverage of The Bach Society’s latest concert and a piece on the Cronut, a New York City pastry fad.



Every person of color I know was at the March on Harvard. If mere attendance at a protest constitutes a conflict, then very few people of color can cover any facet of black activism for *The Crimson*. This forces journalists of color to make a choice: stay on the sidelines, mute, or engage in the most important issues of our time and sacrifice their journalistic voices. 



Uninvolved reporters interested in covering these issues must become explorers, on the hunt for sources and stories in a terrain in which they’re unfamiliar. This comes in the form of longform, purportedly definitive articles on “the Asian American experience,” the life of the “gay and female,” and an article on interracial dating. The last piece used only three couples as sources; the author explains that “other couples that represent many other ethnicities” declined to be interviewed. 



Those trends cannot be chalked up to Harvard alone as an institution that for too long was a cozy staging ground for a narrowly sourced elite. The admitted class of 2018 was made up of almost half visible minority students. Over 65 percent of students here are on financial aid. We clearly have the tools, or at least the stats and bodies, to actively remove barriers to understanding and fair representation. 



It’s up to publications to start using those tools and removing those barriers. Institutions like *The Crimson* must not only adopt policies reflecting the changing journalistic standards, but also ensure those policies do not exclude the narratives and voices they currently do. Undergraduate organizations should be leading the nation-wide movement on this account, not lagging behind it. The March on Harvard should pose neither a conflict of interest nor a time conflict to responsible and well-rounded coverage; readers and writers, publishers and the public alike would all stand to benefit.



 



 



*An Addendum: 



 There was, in fact, a second editorial board meeting a few days after the March on Harvard to allow those who attended the protest to contribute to the editorial. The meeting was a majority-rules, yes-no, vote on the pitch and editorial drafted following the December 12 meeting. Ethnic minorities are just that—less than the 50% majority required to win a majority-rules vote. Unsurprisingly, the majority elected to run the editorial drafted during the original meeting. *This note has been added for accuracy and clarification. *



 

In November of 2014, Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art hosted the work of acclaimed Brazilian painter Adriana Varejão, marking the artist’s first major consideration in the United States. Upon entering the exhibit, the viewer immediately encounters the life-sized figure of a nude woman painted in deep steel-blue against an off-white canvas. Right arm wrapped around an oversized war-axe, and left arm outstretched sweepingly, she appears at first to welcome the viewer into the space. But there is a guilefulness in her smile. Her hand, inscribed with the same floral tattoos that traverse her entire form, gestures beyond the columns behind her, not in the direction of the other paintings on display. Between those columns unfolds what can only be described as cannibalistic bacchanalia. Smaller, nude figures dance and cavort around large fire pits over which legs, ribcages, and various other dismembered human bits roast grotesquely. A few of the anthropophagi participants stand apart from the others. Partially obscured by the gesturing woman in the foreground, they plunge their teeth into human meat, backs bent into the action, heads severely ripping flesh from bone.



Scenes like these are common in the homes and meeting places of 18th century Portuguese aristocrats. Like Varejão’s image 300 years later, they are called “entrance figures” and are typically found on walls adjacent to the entrances of buildings. One such figure painted in the Church of Santo Antão do Tojal in Loures, Portugal bears striking resemblance to the nude warrior woman: though he is clothed and male, his right hand clutches the same weapon as hers, and his left extends the same welcoming motion. However, the viewer will find no cannibalistic orgy taking place behind him or any of the other baroque figures commissioned by wealthy Portuguese nobility. For that, the works of the 16th century Flemish printmaker Theodorus de Bry must be consulted. Drawing on narratives of cannibalistic indigenous people such as the Tupí, who ceremonially consumed the bodies of defeated warriors, de Bry fashioned dramatically affecting prints that depict naked men, women, and children gathering hungrily around roasting human limbs. Both of these motifs—the aesthetic tastes of Portuguese colonizers and the accounts of savagery that formed the moral basis for their subjugation of native people in the first place—are profoundly important to understanding modern Brazilian culture. In “Entrance Figure I,” Varejão consumes, digests, synthesizes and reorganizes them. In short, she cannibalizes them.



The importance of this “cultural cannibalism” to Brazilian culture cannot be overstated. First espoused by Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrade in his 1928 “Manifesto antropófago,” (or “Cannibal Manifesto”) it arose as a means to construct a coherent national identity. The Brazil of the early 20th century was a land of confused multiplicity. The progeny of Portuguese colonizers lived among (or rather, better than) the offspring of the same groups against which the colonial state had historically perpetrated violence: various indigenous peoples, the five million black slaves brought over in the Middle Passage. Portuguese influences abounded, yet the remnants of colonial-era tropes like the cannibalistic Tupí filtered through the lens of European supremacy and worked to station the modernizing country between worlds: the savage old and the civilized new.



Drawing from the cannibalisms of both de Andrade and the Tupí, Varejão’s work deals with the devouring of influences and cultural barriers as well as the devouring of human life. She accomplishes both by bridging the gap between the literal and metaphorical conceptions of the “body.”  In her 1992, “Map of Lopo Homem II,” Varejão reconstructs a 1519 world map created by Portuguese cartographer Lopo Homem. The oceans are non-continuous, Antarctica wraps dramatically around the basin of the globe like a well-nourished serpent, and Europe is either bloated or Africa deflated, as they both appear to be roughly the same size. Down the center of the atlas, perhaps where the Prime Meridian would sit, runs a long, puckering gash wound. This jarring evocation of human trauma set against the ostensibly inert illuminates how our conceptions of history and civilization—our beloved bodies of knowledge—are just as susceptible to coercion and violent manipulation as we are. Similarly unexpected juxtapositions appear in “Carpet-Style Tilework in Live Flesh.” Using masterful trompe l’oeil, Varejão presents what appears to be a wall covered in Portuguese “azulejaria” tiling (made ubiquitous in Brazil by colonial tastes) bursting with innards and guts. The piece has a decided dynamism. The intended illusion is that the rupture is new and ongoing, that just before the viewer approached, the wall was intact, its bloody secrets held at bay.



Like the cannibals of lore, Varejão recognizes the power gained in the consumption of human life. In doing such, she acknowledges that sources of authority in our lives—narratives, countries, societal structures—all bear the blood and viscera of the bodies broken for their construction. She also recognizes that in post-colonial, post-slavery societies like Brazil and America, a disproportionate number of those broken bodies have been and continue to be dark-skinned. In a series of three self-portraits entitled “Eye Witnesses X, Y, and Z,” she depicts herself in the skin-tones and garb of three racial minorities that have been marginalized throughout Brazilian history. Each of the Varejãos—Chinese, indigenous, and Arabic—is missing an eye. The bloody sockets painted in their lieu suggest a painful extraction process—perhaps surgery, but more likely, brute force.



“Eye Witnesses X, Y, and Z” is the first of an ongoing series of self-portraits wherein Varejão portrays herself, a light-skinned Brazilian woman, as different races. If authored by a contemporary American artist, such works would undoubtedly be accused of minstrelsy and insensitivity, and not wrongly so. However, Varejão’s work betrays an approach to collective history and racial identity that is distinctly anthropophagic and distinctly Brazilian. Whereas much of the current dialogue on cultural difference in America centers on a general desire to preserve it, Brazilian racial self-conception is much more fluid but also much more concerned with the identity of Brazil as a whole. Americans will readily trace their ancestry back generations, but cultural cannibalism and miscegenation has left Brazil with no desire (or ability) to do so. It’s an interesting approach to the type of diversity that the two countries share, one that lies curiously in the space between assimilation and multiculturalism. To be sure, Brazil is not the “racial democracy” that it often claims to be—a quick glance at the demographics of an inner-city slum versus those of a top-tier four-year university will reveal as much. Still, as a culture that insists on marketing itself as a melting pot, The United States can undoubtedly learn from a society that has made cannibalizing difference into a single, syncretistic identity a source of national pride.