“Hollywood Splenda,” by Tomaso Mukai

“Rockets,” by Meghana Mysore

“What’s up, doc?” by Greg Suralik

“You doo you,” by Megan Pritchard

“Peeping Tom,” by Will Nixon

Design by Haewon Ma

“Shooz!,” by Adam Moftah

“Midnight tea at the Lizzy,” by “Sunny Turner”

“Learning to look back,” by Jordan Cutler-Tietjen

“Of Sharyn and away,” by Charlie Bardey

“Nara Dreamland,” by Eve Sneider

Given the events on campus, the Herald has reached out to Yale students and professors to share their personal reading recommendations on how to help get a better grasp of recent racial discourse on campus. Read away! 

Professor Vanessa Agard-Jones

“Women of Colour as Diversity Workers” and On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life by Sara Ahmed

Sara Ahmed’s work is particularly instructive for us in this moment. Her blog post here, on “Women of Colour as Diversity Workers,” is a great introduction to the arguments she makes in On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life.

“NHI: An Open Letter to My Colleagues” by Sylvia Wynter

While it was written in the early 1990s, Sylvia Wynter’s “NHI: An Open Letter to My Colleagues” is uncannily current. Wynter helps us think together about the relationship between anti-Black violence and the structure of the university–it would behoove us all to heed her call to “rewrite knowledge” to make the questions that we need to ask posable, not to mention, resolvable. Her work isn’t an easy read, but students in my co-taught class with Laura Wexler (Dialogues in Feminism and Technology) are sharp analysts of this part of her oeuvre, so can likely help folks who are interested in taking on the challenge.

This Bridge Called My Back by Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa; “Remembering This Bridge Called My Back, Remembering Ourselves” in Pedagogies of Crossing by M. Jacqui Alexander

Finally, I would recommend the text and reflection that I offered to audiences at the teach-in a few weeks back: Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa’s This Bridge Called My Back (originally published in 1981, and reissued just this year) and M. Jacqui Alexander’s reflection “Remembering This Bridge Called My Back, Remembering Ourselves,” published in Pedagogies of Crossing in 2006.

***

Alex Zhang

“All Lives Matter: 1800s Edition” by Anthony McPherson

Short two minute video. Just watch it, please. Here: http://bit.ly/1Ht1Gv9

Don Nakanishi ’71 Keynote Address at the 2015 Yale Asian American Studies Conference

One of the “fathers” of Asian American Studies and a Yale alum, Nakanishi speaks about several of the things at Yale we now regard as signs of progress yet whose histories we take for granted. He describes how he helped start MEChA and AASA at Yale, how ethnic studies was so vital to his personal and professional development, and much, much more. Knowing the historical background he presents is absolutely essential to understand current movements at Yale. The keynote can be found here: http://bit.ly/1lzac1m

On Strike: Ethnic Studies 1969-1999

This short documentary gives an inside look at how ethnic studies was formed in the United States. It details the Third World Liberation Front movement in California, which eventually spread to Yale around 1969 and 1970. Full documentary available here: https://vimeo.com/23242564

***

Olivia Klevorn

How to be Drawn by Terrence Hayes

This book should be on many reading lists this year. It is this year’s Between the World and Me of poetry. Inventive, funny, and painful, the book explores blackness without triteness or trope. It is a wholly original immersion into the mind of Terrence Hayes and his life in a black body.

When My Brother was an Aztec by Natalie Diaz

This book of poetry is an agonizing recounting of moving through the world as a native, both on and off the reservation. It was published several years ago but its immediacy is time-resistant.

“Everybody’s Protest Novel” by James Baldwin

This is an essay in Notes From a Native Son that puts reading lists like these in context. It deconstructs the idea of the “protest novel,” specifically the liberal consciousness generated by reading one, and the subjugation of blackness that results from these novels’ ultimate support of racial hegemony.

***

Brea Baker

For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When The Rainbow is Enuf by Ntozake Shange

A series of poetic monologues and chorepoems that highlight the stories of seven women suffering in a racist and sexist society. This piece is so important to understand the psychological impacts of sexism and racism and the intersectionality of the two on black women.

All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men: But Some of Us Are Brave edited by Gloria Hull, Patricia Scott, and Barbara Smith

This text demonstrates just how black women are able to slip through the cracks in the wars against racism and misogyny. This series of essays explores the role of black women and their fight for acknowledgment and validation throughout history.

The Possessive Investment in Whiteness by George Lispitz

A look at various aspects of public policy that place white people at the top of the American food chain. This book perfectly demonstrates how pervasive racism and misogyny can be to black people on a daily basis.

Hopper’s Game

A man and woman sit in an empty café in the daylight. The man is holding a burning cigarette, gesturing towards her, perhaps attempting to make a move. The woman’s head is cocked in his direction, suggestive, full of yearning, but her gaze is directed towards her hands. Sunlight streams in: rigid, frozen trapezoids. On the table rest salt and pepper shakers, the pepper shaker shaped like an hourglass, the saltshaker oddly phallic. There’s no one else in the cafeteria. The loneliness is stark. The sexual tension is palpable.

Man and woman sitting in an old-school post-war American cafeteria? Or lonely millenials post-Toads hookup, sitting in Blue State on a quiet Thursday? Clearly, they’re both tryna. They’re playing the Game. Don’t wear your heart on your sleeve, don’t show interest, act chill. If she replies too quickly, she’s desperate. So she looks down at her phone instead. If he makes a move, he’s coming on too strong. So he stares at the gross looking plant outside of the window instead of her beautiful face. And so nothing happens, trapped in a “thing,” where no one is willing to show their cards.

Ask each other out, dammit. Hopper wants you to.

— Yi-Ling Liu

Redon or JE fangirl?

Vibrant, shimmering flowers overflow from the silver vase in Odilon Redon’s “Nasturtiums.” Gold, crimson, and flaming orange petals float in front of softly green leaves, all fading into a background awash with pale reds. This painting, which hangs in the second floor European gallery of the YUAG, has always captivated me with its promises of whispered wealth and subtle luxury. Something winks through its metallic sheen, beckoning me to come closer, to peek in, to join…

Why am I so intrigued by the scene presented in “Nasturtiums”? It calls to me like a half-remembered dream or long-dormant desire. It’s familiar, but slightly out of reach, an elegant party glimpsed through a slightly ajar door.

Perhaps it’s one of the dinners I’ve seen through the leaded glass windows of Jonathan Edwards College, full of tinkling glasses and draped linen, where Spiders hobnob and laugh about their halcyon, ivy-covered days.

Oh, to sit in that ruddy courtyard, surrounded by eaves and gables, and feel at home. What would that be like for me? To walk among the crinkling leaves of fall, pass under the strands of twinkling lights in winter, and gaze upon the silken grass of spring — oh, would that I were in JE!

I’ve walked the Spiders’ pristine halls, sat in their worn leather chairs, and snuck into quite a few of their family dinners. From the angular tower of Ezra Stiles, I wonder what quirk of fate separated me from my burnished brick destiny.

Like the tulips that bloom in the spring, bursting into a patchwork of color from underneath a wintry blanket, I too await the moment when I can dress in silver and green, gain private access to the Sculpture Garden, and not have to ask to be swiped in. Onwards, my friends, to the Great Awakening!

— Claire Goldsmith

Bass Café, Night Café, nightmare

I am somewhat certain my hallucinogenic vision of Bass Café is a symptom of the purple mold spores sprouting from the book I retrieved from a dark corridor of Sterling. I prefer to believe that it is a result of the similarity of the tortured, creative genius I share with Vincent van Gogh. Perhaps the similarity between his Night Café in the YUAG and Bass Café is because it is always night in the Bass Café, because it is underground.

I walk through a cloud of angst and graduate student cigarette smoke after descending into a dark hole, before awkwardly shuffling through double doors. The air is thick, like waves of heat rising from sun-scorched ground. No oasis awaits me behind the Bass doors, only work and numerous abandoned Borrow Direct books. The sickening temperature of the light radiates from florescent bulbs not so different from van Gogh’s nightmarish eye-bulb light fixtures. Thain Family Café does not sell absinthe, but campus reps for 5-Hour Energy frantically peddle their poison.

When I became an Art History major, I pledged to only dress in grey tones, eat at Book Trader, and to never forsake my mother and life source: the Robert B. Haas Family Arts Library. This subterranean battleground of so-called group work is as jarring as the upward tilt of van Gogh perspective. The freshmen wandering aimlessly around me, discussing their idea for a new, socially conscious student investment fund appear to be faceless aliens just like van Gogh’s fellow bargoers. Alas, this was the only location where my TA agreed to meet me. Can’t wait till the Schwartzman center opens.

— Jake Stein

Orange you lovely

Every time I look at this Rothko in the YUAG, my mind is on the Haas Art and Architecture Library.

First, the loud color of his orange is similar to the carpet in Haas. Ironic. Both spaces they occupy are supposed to be quiet. But are they? Bruh, your whispers are louder than those Sun Chip™ bags that are eco-friendly. This is not Bass Café™. Let me vibe with these vibrant colors in peace.

Second, I can’t bring in coffee to either spot. I won’t fight the rule in the art gallery since they have mad security, but I know I can sneak it into Haas in my Fjall Raven™ or my Patagonia™.

Oh wait, Haas has security too and they are artsy vampires that don’t actually have a job at the library. All that they have are their opinions that they add primarily to their moleskines™ with quill and ink when they aren’t sneaking up on their next victim to ask if the Blue State they are currently drinking is their own. Regardless of the answer, they will suck your blood if it is artisanal.

Third, both buildings are on York Street but they have an ostensible affiliation with High Street. It’s maybe a thing. It’s maybe a scene. Use those close reading skills you developed in Les/Gay to figure out what I mean.

But, after all this critique, Haas is bae. And so is Rothko, when we’re not on a break and he is pictured in your next profile picture.

— Austin Johnson

Trumbullshit

In a small corner of the seriously under appreciated Puritan art section of the Yale Art Gallery, I found an old friend, Jonathan Trumbull, hanging out in a miniature painting. The work was no larger than my hand, and it was surrounded by four other pocket-sized portraits embedded into a frame. As I expected of a governor, Mr. Trumbull confronted me with a confident pose, his steely eyes stern and unyielding, his lips downturned in a sturdy frown. He honestly looked like he had never ever laughed at anything. Ever.

I was first acquainted with this statesman over email a few months before this in-person encounter. Only a few hours after I moved into my room in Bingham, I had three messages from a “Jonathan Trumbull” waiting in my inbox, notifying me with mounting enthusiasm about a massive sale of Trumbull College gear and signed affectionately “JT.” I was surprised to see the colonial politician’s adeptness with emojis and colorful fonts, but I figured he was just trying to be a man of his people. It was weird—considering the portrait, he did not seem like the type of guy to send emails with exclamation marks. JT transformed?

I started looking at my college through the lens of JT’s portrait. Perhaps the Gothic arches were inspired by the shape of Trumbull’s hooked nose? Perhaps the severity and strict verticality of the buildings symbolized his political uprightness and moral virtue? I started to wonder: could I find characteristics of other colleges in the portraits of their namesakes? Wandering through the early American galleries, I happened to meet a number of other familiar colonial men. They sadly shared very few characteristics with their residential counterparts. I walked past a portrait of an intellectual but friendly-looking Ezra Stiles, surrounded by books (with right angles!), and made awkward eye contact with a rotund George Berkeley (who was very much intact, and not severed into North and South parts). Like college, like painting? Apparently not.

— Zoe Dobuler

The Pumpkin Spice Latte: sweet release

Today, I decided that if I make it to 80, I’m going to try heroin. I don’t know the twists and turns the river of my life will take, but I know that when I am soon to empty out into the vast and cold ocean, one last burst of artificial warmth will be a necessary closure to a life spent fighting, losing, and persevering.

This burst is the pumpkin spice latte: in the face of the deadening chill of winter, the “PSL” is all we have. Seeking an ever-receding hipness is a summer’s game; times of outdoor concerts and trendy food festivals are long gone. In the dark, there is no need to fight.

Our hands will be frozen, and our blood Vitamin D deficient, and our throats scratchy and sore. The calories you spend being “not basic” will be reserved for the warmth of your beating heart. So drink your PSL, and relish it before you sink back once more into the icy rivers of death.

—Charlie Bardey

#PSL: trending never

I started drinking coffee in eighth grade and haven’t looked back. By the time I started freshman year of college, I was so dependent that my primary concern when departing for FOOT was not whether or not I’d make friends or survive the hiking, but how on earth I was going to be able to poop without any coffee. In 2011, when I began to imbibe regularly, my ratio of milk to coffee was an alarming two to one, but back then I never thought to bastardize the drink with sugar. It didn’t even cross my adolescent mind. Now I drink it black or with a splash of milk if I want to cool it down a bit. So I avoided the Pumpkin Spice Latte for years, not because I was afraid of the stigma of basicness, but rather because it sounded truly disgusting to me. Why put artificial pumpkin flavoring into a perfect drink? I rolled my eyes at the long lines of people in puffer vests who had probably downloaded the Countdown app on their iPhones just to track the coming and going of the beloved PSL. I would never try one of those things. Ever.

Then last month, I went to Des Moines, Iowa to be a bridesmaid in my cousin’s wedding. As a bridesmaid, your only responsibility is to do exactly what the bride wants you to do. The bride wanted us all to get pumpkin spice lattes the morning of her wedding (I don’t know why this was important to her, and I didn’t ask). A dutiful bridesmaid, I gratefully accepted my PSL and prepared to take my first, blasphemous sip—I needed my caffeine, after all. The scent of the pumpkin spice leaked through the little oval cut in the plastic top. I braced myself. I took a sip of the warm beverage, which had already cooled a little on its journey through the crisp autumn air on its way to our hotel room.

Dear lord, it was disgusting. I nearly spat out the tiny sip I had deigned to take. I decided I’d rather suffer the headache and constipation of a coffeeless morning than the 64 grams of sugar contained in the cardboard cup. I left the rest of it to rot like the trash it was on the sink of the hotel bathroom.

Never again, Pumpkin Spice Latte, you disgrace. Never again.

—Emma Chanen

A latte, a lie

You know how self-righteous health nuts are always telling you that your Coca-Cola would be green if not for the caramel coloring? Or how white bread is bad for you, because brown bread is somehow more natural or wholesome? Yeah, these people ruin fall, too. Turns out your PSL is not what it’s cracked up to be.

You may have heard the claim that Pumpkin Spice Lattes do not even have pumpkin in them, but are the product of a carefully synthesized blend of aromatics that merely simulate autumnal gusto. This is a myth. A one-minute gander to the Starbucks website yields an ingredient list, and that ingredient list yields the nugget that ingredient number three is, indeed, “pumpkin puree.”

But more secrets are to be told from this crude offering of a recipe. After the three major components (sugar, skim milk, and pumpkin), two percent of the syrup in your PSL is made up of some wacky things. “Fruit and vegetable juice” — vegetable? Like, a green juice? Pumpkin spice is—and I hate this word—betchier than previously thought.

Then there are “natural flavors.” Hmmm. This is the umbrella term food companies use to hide whatever synthetic crap they’re actually putting in your drank. But I can’t imagine it’s worse that whatever else a Yale student is putting in his body on any given day in late fall.

But let’s go back to that fringey aunt you have who’s always reminding you about the dyes in your food. She will certainly bring up how “Annatto” (PSL ingredient six) gives pumpkin spice latte syrup its rich, orange color. Burnt Sienna? Jack-O-Lantern? Annatto is the same substance that gives cheddar cheese its iconic orangey hue, which is jarring given that I am now imagining a latte made with a pump of queso. But I digress. The vegan cheddar substitute your aunt is having with her Thanksgiving tofurkey also has annatto in it—rub that in her face! Starbucks, your latte is a lie.

—Austin Bryniarksi

Book Trader: Pumpkin Ginger Bread with Raisins

Let it be noted that this is not Pumpkin Gingerbread with Raisins, but Pumpkin Ginger Bread with Raisins. This is an important distinction to make. That being said, there is a strong ginger flavor to this bread (in a good way) that causes me to question whether I really know what a pumpkin tastes like.

If you took the ginger and raisins out of this Pumpkin Ginger Bread with Raisins and asked me to distinguish between a slice of equally sweet, equally non-gingered and non-raisined bread, WOULD I BE ABLE TO? Could I identify this particular loaf as pumpkin if I hadn’t personally ordered it from the grumpy Book Trader barista? Does life have any meaning? Are we just floating masses of hydrocarbon chains distracting ourselves with arbitrarily seasonal treats in order to get through the pain of it all? Did I leave my laundry in the dryer again?

To distract myself from the sheer horror of a questioning mind, I decided to continue eating my slice of Book Trader Pumpkin Ginger Bread with Raisins, and a new, slightly less horrifying question arose. Why the raisins? I don’t mind raisins, and can appreciate them in the occasional cookie or kugel, but I’ve never had anything that was made better with raisins than it would have been with chocolate chips. Especially pumpkin! I hate to get political, but things just taste better with chocolate chips.

Also I panicked when ordering my Book Trader Pumpkin Ginger Bread with Raisins and ordered a steamed milk without specifying a flavoring, and when the grumpy barista didn’t ask if I wanted one, I was too frightened of human interaction to say anything. So I got what was just hot milk. Why would any person who wasn’t a young child in a 19th century novel want that? But it was actually pretty good with my slice of Book Trader Pumpkin Ginger Bread with Raisins. So I’m sorry, grumpy barista.

—Rachel Lackner

Gluten free fall freedom

Autumn should be my season. ’Tis high time of year for seasonal basics like me to dive whole hog into pumpkin scones, muffins, cronuts. But alas, I’ve managed to out-basic the betches, surpass the Starbucks lovers, and banish myself to the corner of rice cakes, salad, and corn Chex at this most festive time of the fall. That’s right. I’m gluten-free. Voluntarily. This is my story.

It’s a sad lot, my self-inflicted high-maintenance lot. Starbucks thinks they have me in their corner with little pumpkin cakes but, as always, I am one step ahead of their capitalist festive machine.

When I walk into a coffee shop, here’s what I see: a bunch of tasty treats with big ole red X’s over them. I see food; I see food I can’t eat. Blue State usually has one gluten-free cookie (usually a bland snickerdoodle), and Book Trader serves up these weird little grain paste bar things that are also vegan. Fuck that. I hate vegans. I want good food. I want pumpkin food!

It’s tough to be me. So I’ve decided to take a stand and take everything at Blue State that I CAN eat and dump raw pumpkin paste atop it! Gluten-free granola? Check. Turkey sandwich (hold the bread)? Check. A large non-fat double-shot soy latte with three pumps of classic sweetener? Yasss. Pour some pumpkin on it. I simultaneously love and hate when people know that I’m gluten-free. Now you all know. Now you all can join me, and you can bring me quinoa puffs and jars of pumpkin paste. Yas. Happy Halloween.

—Lora Kelley

A scone too soon discredited

“Would you like your pastry heated, sir?” the barista asked me as I shuffled to place my Starbucks card back into my wallet. I stammered out a barely coherent “yes, please,” and made my way back to my seat. I had ordered a Pumpkin Scone with a Tall Hot Chocolate, the perfect remedy for a rainy October day.

Scones usually have a reputation of being dry like the Saharan Desert, but this particular scone was a bit on the moister side. A light cream cheese frosting sat atop the baked good, a small orange drizzle adding a touch of fall flair. I’m pretty sure that the scone was not the most healthy way to get my pumpkin spice fix, but it was worth every calorie.

“Pumpkin Scone for Dominic,” the barista called across the store. As I walked over to the counter to pick up my decadent morning indulgence, I could hear the barista’s coworker asking why she had heated up my pumpkin scone. “You’re not supposed to heat that up. The cream cheese melts from the heat.” Unfazed, I smiled at the barista and went back to my seat to devour the sweet treat.

I noticed right away that the cream cheese was indeed squishier than on any past scones I had consumed. Upon my first bite, however, I realized what I had been missing out on. The spices in the pumpkin scone and the creaminess of the frosting became even more pronounced post-warming. The desiccated pumpkin scone I had once known took on a whole different personality. One barista’s “mistake” provided me with an even better rendition of an already wonderful pastry. It is something that can be best summed up with a chemical equation.

Pumpkin Scone (In the presence of heat) yields The Starbucks Autumn Menu’s Most Tasty Treat.

—Dominic Schnabel

Sights and sounds from this week’s festivities. 

Pressure, panic, Pink Lady

Founders Day: a celebration of decorative hay bales, Yale’s Instagram clout, tours of the enigma that is West Campus (maybe it’s just Mamoun’s??), and an overweight bulldog who is undoubtedly oblivious to his own celebrity.

Upon approaching the Cross Campus buffet, I was immediately drawn to the baskets brimming with over five kinds of apples—sweet, crisp, bursting with insoluble pectins. Who wouldn’t be? But it was here that I encountered a problem. To choose between Gala, Honeycrisp, Empire, and still more varieties was a near impossible task. I’m just one girl. What’s more, my backpack was already stuffed with my sensible fall sweater, so pseudo- surreptitiously shoveling produce into it for later was out of the picture. The New England apple season is fast closing. Do I come back with a tote bag? Do I take one bite of each variety, flinging apples to the grass under the pretense of an #InspiringYale art installation? Do I just damn it all and try a peach?? Like a fool, I panicked, picked up a Pink Lady, and walked on.

by Lea Rice YH Staff

Founders keepers

Founders Day was insanely festive this year. Way better than last year (so I hear), when they brought in that dragon that breathed fire all over WLH!

The dignity of the celebration, and the implicit nostalgia for an era of Yale when only white Protestant males were allowed here, was heightened by the presence of giant, blue, inflatable noodle men. Yale may not display many portraits of women, but they’ll be damned if they won’t present those jolly, flapping fellas with pride!

Everywhere you turned—cookies! There were little burgers—meat cookies! They had apple cookies! (jk they were just apples). And macarons! So many macarons!

Instagram nearly crashed amidst the deluge of photos from the #InspiringYale photo contest. Not because there were so many posts, but because each post was just so inspirational. I think I saw the ghost of Yale benefactor and colonial businessman Jeremiah Richard Dummer in the corner of my selfie. But then I realized it was just a grease smudge—meat cookies!

I have never seen Yale so energized and unified. I’ve only been here for like a month, but still. I transcended my body and was my best self, for the first and only time in my life, at Founders Day. Can’t wait ’til the next invented holiday graces Cross Campus with its convivial bliss!

by Lora Kelley

Founders Day has sold out

Remember when Founders Day used to mean something? I do. It was a time before pumpkins had hashtags on them and before throngs of Yalies fought to get the best Instagram with the cardboard cutout of Peter Salovey. Newsflash: Peter Salovey was NOT a founder!!! Founders Day is NOT his day!!!!! Nowadays, the only thing on our minds when we congregate on Cross Campus for Founders Day is that sweet, sweet kale salad we all love so much. I’m not saying that those tiny cups of kale salad aren’t delicious— Elihu knows they are—but that’s not what Founders Day is about! We need to put the Founders back in Founders Day. Nowadays, I’m not even sure if I can remember who the founders are. Handsome Dan? Maybe, but I have a hard time imagining that he had the stamina to carry all the necessary bricks, what with his genetically bred breathing problems. John C. Calhoun? In all likelihood, yes. I say we need more education on the founders, fewer Instagrams, and the same amount of that life-affirming kale salad.

by Charlie Bardey YH Staff

Lost in translation: Mini essays on words that don’t translate.

Bimyou – Eve Sneider

If you look up bimyou in a Japanese-to-English dictionary, you might read that it means subtle, delicate, complicated. But none of those really capture it at all.  Bimyou is a fuzzy word. It refers to the gray space in between places, the neither-here-nor-theres. It is as amorphous as it is ubiquitous. How do you feel about the upcoming presidential election? Bimyou. How was that test? Bimyou. What is the weather like today? Bimyou. How are you feeling? Pretty bimyou.

We  are  sitting  thirty  stories  above  Tokyo,  surrounded  by  panoramic  views  of the bruise-purple, light-polluted sky. This is our last night–together, that is–and our plan was to do something Big. We wanted to sit at a rooftop bar in a fancy hotel, surrounded by sleek furniture and brooding, sophisticated people. But the bar is expensive and we are young and cheap so instead we drink convenience store booze and sneak into the indoor swimming pool. This is a good substitute.

We don’t really talk. We are tired and the fancy reclining poolside chairs are very comfortable and none of the three of us has anything else to say (a rarity). Instead, I let myself get carried away. I think of the mean things we said and the nice things we did, the books we did not read and the boys we did not kiss. The evening last September when we made dinner, fucking up a very easy cake recipe and speaking in a different accent during each course of our meal. The countless hours we spent waiting for things to start, and then not.

These are my closest friends and this is my life but already it isn’t, too.  Because  being  on  the  threshold  of  newnesses  has  a  way  of  altering  the  old  stuff quite a lot.  The cake we baked in September was truly a disaster, and not the endearingly  funny  kind  (we  used  salt  instead  of  sugar  and  forgot  to  turn  the oven off; it was just a mess). I would probably be better off had I read a few of those books. I definitely should’ve done more nice things, nicer things. Getting nostalgic about the real moments only makes them surreal-er. And that’s weird.

How are you feeling?

Pretty bimyou.

The pool is the color of a crayon. It is pretty in the jarring way that fluorescence often is. Soon we will  be discovered by a hotel employee who will be much too kind when he asks us to leave. We will get on a crowded subway that will pull into each of our stations and then out. Tomorrow I will be in a new city where there are fewer people who talk much, much more. The buildings will be shorter, squatter, with more room in between them. The air will bite a little more at night. When the sun next sets on the land of the rising sun we will all be busy elsewhere.

There  will  come  a  time  when  I  am  not  between  places,  not  in  this  bimyou space. I wonder what that will feel like.

***

Duende – Caroline Way

Duende, Spanish, n. (def): 1. a goblin; demon; spirit. 2. charm; magnetism.

The  writer’s  challenge  is  to  translate  the  third  dimension  into  the  second.  A scene, a moment, occurs before his eyes, or in his mind’s eye, and he tries to write it: the curves of shadow, depths of palette, all of the intention behind the twitch of a pinky finger. So much depth of the image will be lost, and painfully so, in words.

So it is a rarity and a delicacy for language-lovers when the role is reversed–when an image fails to give all that a word does. Such is the case with the Spanish duende.  A  Google  Image  search  produces  all  of  the  following:  a  troll-like thing with a bulbous nose, several red sharp-toothed demons, their grey cousins, a  devil  smoking  a  pipe,  a  few  imps  wearing  caps  over  straggly  hair,  some  with no hair, some grinning, some crying, and a pervasive thread of Santa-Claus-style children’s elves. There is no exact “duende: the image.”

But “duende:  the  word”  doesn’t  need  an  image;  it  stands  alone,  folds  upon itself. Double-d: the tongue-tip teases the back of the teeth, first springing off into a cooing ue, then pressing more gently against them for the nd. That last e lets your breath run out. It trickles out into the air. Say it again and again, out loud: duende, duende, duende, du-en-de. Listen afterwards—it lingers. If there is anything I can tell you about duende, it is that it haunts.

My ninth grade Spanish teacher explained to us the folkloric origins of duende. He showed us the strange stock images of demonic fairies and repulsive goblins, and also people crying and cheering in response to a particularly gifted flamenco dancer. I gathered that duende had some aspects of a televangelist. Wrapped in millennia-old  mythology,  casting  a  spell  that  could  bring  vulnerable  audiences to screams and sobs, duende was seductive and mysterious and yet, at its core, performative, even false.

“Alma, / ponte color de naranja. / Alma, / ponte color de amor.”

I  had  read  plenty  of  poetry  in  English.  I  had  appreciated  meter  and  rhyme and  syntax,  but  when  I  read  it  in  Spanish—even  when  I  didn’t  fully  grasp  the vocabulary—I  felt  like  dancing.  Sometimes  fast,  clapping,  laughing  rr;  other times, slow and sad, tearful, cooing o-sounds. And when I read Federico García Lorca in love, I felt like a glutton. I overate. I knew I was too full of his too-rich language, but I couldn’t stop chewing. It tasted too good. As I scratched lines underneath Lorca’s rhymes and marked off the meter with dashes, I felt in turns confused and exhilarated and queasy. My response was unapprised, visceral. It was duende.

And, oddly enough, it was Lorca who introduced duende into modern art in a 1933 lecture, “Play and Theory of the Duende.”

“The duende, then, is a power, not a work. It is a struggle, not a thought,” he said. “I have heard an old maestro of the guitar say, ‘The duende is not in the throat;  the duende  climbs  up  inside  you,  from  the  soles  of  the  feet.’  Meaning this: it is not a question of ability, but of true, living style, of blood, of the most ancient culture, of spontaneous creation.”

Duende  was  my  14-year-old  reaction  to  his  poetry,  longing  and  swollen.  Duende  was  how  I  felt  a  year  later,  when  I  first  saw  the  Andes. Duende  was  the desperation to climb a peak whose name I did not know. Duende is you, turning up the volume when the chorus starts building to the bridge. Duende is, plainly, the call: to write or paint or climb or make love or really just to participate. It is the clawing, any clawing, underneath the skin of our fingers.

***

Tsundoku – Frances Lindemann

Tsundoku, Japanese, n. (1): The act of buying books but not reading them, piling up a stack of unread books.

(2): Her mother used to say that reading could take you anywhere you wanted to go, and at the time it had felt not like a cliché but like a promise. She remembers the nights when she was very little. She would wear a matching set of cotton pajamas  printed  with  pink  elephants,  smelling  of  soap  and  her  mother’s  silky hands. Her mother lay in bed, propped up against the pillows, earrings glinting like fairies. The little girl curled against her, and her freshly showered hair left marks  on  her  mother’s  shirt  like  the  shadows  cast  by  long  grass  in  meadows. They were reading Little Women, or maybe it was Charlotte’s Web. She was falling asleep, even though she didn’t want to, lulled by the warmth of her mother’s body and the vibration of her voice.

Her mother adorned their apartment with books like they were flowers, and to the little girl they were a source of comfort, a way of seeing the world from the confines of her warm bed, like looking out the window down at the people on the street  and  knowing  that  they  cannot  look  back.  Sometimes  at  night  she  would sit against the cool glass of the windowpane and read under a milky moon—or at least, looking back, that is how she sees herself, a very small person with deep, curious eyes and furrowed brows and a paralyzing fear of the dark.

(3):  An  awkward  adolescent  with  too  much  skin  in  all  the  wrong  places,  her glasses  framing  red  spots  across  her  nose,  she  compared  herself  to  the  great writers before her (Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter at 23; Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights at 28) and committed herself to studying them until she, too, was called “great.”

She read with vigor and anger and black pens that stained white pages. Her mother  still  read,  too—though  they  read  separately  now—but  more  slowly  and leisurely  than  her  daughter.  She  allowed  the  books  to  pile  around  her  room  in tall quivering stacks like very old trees. They began to give off the musty scent of knitted stockings and slightly burnt pancakes. Untouched, they sat with eyes closed and faces up, breathing gentle promises into the stuffy air.

(4): Piles of books in an empty room emit the sensation of a foggy day, the kind where you can feel the wet of the air on your skin. Perhaps a whistle will hoot softly in the distance, calling all aboard, and you will be left on the shore to wave farewell. The books lie in disarray, mocking in their deafening silence, nameless and unseeing. Their pages, yellow, disintegrating, dust to dust.

***

Mokita –  Meg Pritchard

Mokita, Kilivila, n. (def): The truth everyone knows but nobody speaks.You are walking down Elm Street when it hits you: you are not a god. It takes a minute for you to recognize the significance of these words. You stop walking and come to rest beside a trash can. You like recycling better. A flier shaped like a paper crane lies by your feet. You remember that you are not a god.

These words surprise you. If holiness is something you swallow with your morn-ing  coffee,  then  why  don’t  your  fingers  bend  steel?  You  touch  the  trash  can  to check  but  no,  you’ve  got  nothing.  You  have  always  been  immortal  because  you knew you were. The consequences of your actions have never threatened the idea. You are holy because you are alive and nothing you have done has changed this.

A squirrel rustles barren branches above you, but you have no control over him. He scratches up and down dry bark. Nothing else moves, except the cosmos, of course, and you’re pretty sure that’s not you anyway.

You are not a god, and this is something you know from the scars on your knees and the question marks at the end of your sentences. Gods don’t use punctuation because they never need to stop or start. You read your paragraphs in your head. Period. Comma. Period. The same shapes pattern your legs; they are the typical pitfalls of common mortality.

You are not a god, and you have never been one. If you were to write it out, the story of your past would be just like the paper crane trying feebly to fly out from under your sneaker: entirely two-dimensional. You printed it out last Thursday. It does not cast a shadow and perhaps that’s a blessing. If you are not a god, maybe one is looking out for you. You can think of worse things than a two-dimensional story. Zoos. Bad haircuts. Forgetting to eat lunch.

There is a rustling above you. Squirrels make you think of steel again and you wonder what gods drink in the morning. It can’t be coffee so it’s probably some-thing  you’ve  never  seen  before.  It’s  watery  and  bitter  and  looks  like  chocolate milk and smells like chamomile and it’s always lukewarm. You are glad you drink coffee. You like skim milk and two sugars and you only ever stir it with a spoon. You appreciate the reliability of the inevitable. Tomorrow morning you know you will not be a god. You will use a steel spoon.

And  you  are  not  a  god  and  you  are  still  not  walking  down  Elm  Street.  You glance  at  the  sky:  still  moving.  You  blink  three  times,  slowly.  Your  knees  are browned with healed commas. You are still surprised, but now at your own ready acceptance. You are not a god and this does not bother you. You are the steel. Your fingers move only themselves, and do they really? A question mark. Exactly.

You pick up the paper crane. It weighs the same as air. You let it fall through your fingers into the trash can.

You think, perhaps I am a god.

Camp Yale is a lot. Like a lot a lot. Here are some things we love, hate, and super hate about it. With our help, you’ll make it through.

Credit: Free Food

Camp Yale is, at its best, a free all-you-can-eat buffet. Actually, it’s like 15 free all-you-can-eat buffets. You and your new classmates will be thrown together at any number of events that have different and important-sounding names but actually mean free food.

I can help you decode your nicely color-blocked and incredibly confusing “Orientation Overview” sheet.
—Master’s Open Houses: mini-everything, but in max-quantity—brownies, pigs-in-blankets, tiny quiches. Load up your small plastic plate and smile awkwardly.

—President’s Reception: an open-air feast—at least six flavors of cupcakes outside of Beinecke.

So yeah, treat Camp Yale like you are a starved lion released into a pack of wildebeest, except maybe less violent (but don’t be afraid to throw an elbow or two if a cupcake’s on the line). This is where you learn that in college free food is gold. Or dead wildebeest, or whatever. So maybe it’s not totally free, since your tuition pays for it, which actually makes it pretty expensive, but it’s not coming out of your pocket and it’s just sitting right in front of you and you can’t focus on what your FroCo is saying because you’re looking at it. Take it. The Freshman 15 is an underestimate, and sorry, but it’s inevitable. So get started.

—Sophie Haigney

D: Formalwear

If you’re anxious about getting your money’s-worth out of your grad suit, fear not. Whether it’s for residential college dinners, assemblies, or mock-tail parties, you’ll be in a blazer so often you’ll think you’re still at riding camp. This would all be great fun if these events didn’t take place mostly outdoors or in unairconditioned Woolsey at the end of August. But actually it wouldn’t be because there’s nothing more disheartening than seeing your future classmates in gold-buttoned jackets and pleated khakis.

—David Rossler

Fail: Froco group meetings

Your FroCo is not a bad person. Actually, he or she is probably a good person and a helpful person who will prove a great resource at some point. At the very least, he or she will provide you with candy or condoms during a time of need, and probably a lot more.

But during camp Yale you will not realize this. Why? FroCo Group meetings. So, it’s 9:00, and you want play a post-dinner game of ultimate frisbee with your BFFFFDFF (best friend for first few days of freshman fall). It’s 10:00 and you want to start drinking with the mens’ lacrosse team, who you hear have a super cool basement in their frat? It’s any time of day and you want to have an Intellectual Discussion because finally you are at Yale with people who want to talk about Real Things? Too bad, you have a FroCo meeting about how to do your laundry.

Cast of characters: about 10 overanxious incoming Yale freshmen, one over- whelmed and outnumbered senior. One of the freshmen will inevitably be The Kid Who Asks Endlessly Specific and Irrelevant Questions like, “I know I want to be an engineering major, electrical not chemical, but I also think I might want to apply for the Journalism Initiative, and I’m shopping two different languages right now, so how do I do my laundry?” I’m not kidding.

This kid will have an antithesis, Jaded Guy or Jaded Girl. He or she probably went to prep school, does a lot of eye-rolling, and always has somewhere infinitely cooler to be (read: drinking with prep school friends in the super cool basement of the lacrosse frat). He or she will make lots of helpful comments that begin with, “Yeah, when I lived away from home before…” and will probably require FroCo intervention after excessive drinking in the basement of the lacrosse frat. Hopefully, you fall somewhere in between. So, grin and bear it, low-grade sweat through the 10 meetings and trust that it gets better. Who knows, you might even make a FGF (FroCo Group Friend). Emphasis on might.

—Sophie Haigney

Credit: Exploration

College is a time for exploring your boundaries. Socially, academically, sexually, and even geographically! You can impress a group of fellow freshmen by showing them the library you’ve discovered or go on an evening adventure (wink wink) as a fun bonding experience (wink wink) with that cutie in your FroCo group (wink wink—no, actually, don’t do that).

You can start your self-expansion in your cozy double: unless you are a wizard or an old person disguised as a teenager, your new home is probably the oldest building you’ve ever lived in. There are fire escapes, secret doorways, and stairs leading to rooftop access. Climb ’em! Further afield, visit the farmer’s market in Wooster Square, trek to the Yale Farm at the top of Science Hill, and go to East Rock Park. Long walks and hot weather: Birkenstock wearers, this is where you shine.

—Claire Goldsmith

D: Handshakes

There’s not enough dining hall Purell in the world to cleanse you of the Camp Yale handshakes, and that’s only the beginning. From now on, every time you meet a new person, you will both stick out your hands, grasp ‘em, and probably say, “Nice to meet you.” Which is great! So friendly, so professional, so charmingly sophisticated. When you call your mom and mention this, she will get a little choked up and say something about how Yale is already turning out to be a magical place, sweetie, and you’re becoming an adult. But does shaking hands with another 18-year-old mean you’re both adults or is it all an elaborate charade to mask our impostor syndrome? Why expose yourself to so many germs? Is all that enthusiasm genuine or manufactured as part of a complex experiment (the Truman Show: College Edition) ? Just some things to think about next time you’re faced with a new set of digits.

—Claire Goldsmith

Fail: Applications

Sorry, 2019. You thought it ended with the acceptance letter, but the “application process” is alive and well here in New Haven. Many of those extracurriculars you excitedly signed up for will ask you to apply for membership or positions, whether as a self-important barrier to entry or some sort of weird practice for life as an adult (see D, above) or maybe for something actually useful. Just like college applications, some are serious, some are painless, and some are zany. Over the summer, I received an application asking me to write an acrostic poem with the letters of my first name. Here it is.

Clearly, someone

Likes

Amateur poetry

In a very different

Respect than I do.

Egads!

—Claire Goldsmith

Keep reading here!

You’re about to spend a ton of time in libraries, but the good news is that Yale’s got some of the nicest libraries out there. Before classes start, go explore a little. Take pictures of the high vaulted ceilings before anyone’s there studying to judge you. Enjoy that architecture before you develop lots of bad associations. Once things are in full swing, we’ve got some advice on where to go for what.

Best library to watch Game of Thrones in:

If you’re at the point where you can’t make the trip back to your room before you find out how the Dothrakis will receive Danaerys, then I’m not totally sure it really matters anymore which library you’re in. But for the sake of argument, I would avoid the college libraries, because they’re a little too small and intimate for comfort. And even the bigger, more anonymous libraries like Bass or Sterling aren’t really ideal because, let’s be honest, those places are really more social scenes than they are serious academic environments. What you really want is one of the more obscure libraries that only the most savvy GoT enthusiasts will frequent. Take, for example, the Classics Library on the top floor of Phelps. I promise you there won’t be anyone in there except maybe for the odd grad student who, from the smell of it, probably hasn’t left there in a week. And really, who cares what he/she thinks anyway? But if you’re really a die-hard GoT fan, you’ll say fuck it to all the haters and turn that shit on your laptop right in the middle of A&A. Say it loud, say it proud, ammirite Danaerys?

–Alessandra Roubini

Best library to pull an all-nighter in:

To be honest, your options here are pretty limited. Yale loves to boast about how hard-working its students are, but not enough that it will pay to keep the main library open past 2 a.m. on weeknights (Sterling, that one that looks like a church, closes before midnight…). So if you’re looking to pound that 5-Hour Energy till daybreak, you’re probably going to have to do it in your residential college library. The upside is that the residential college staff are so nice, that when they come in in the morning to vacuum to find you passed out drooling on one of the couches, they’ll be super chill about it (no actually though, take it from someone who’s been there, don’t do that, it’s mad embarrassing).

–Alessandra Roubini

Best library to FaceTime your mom in:

The specific reason for the call is immaterial. Maybe it’s 2 a.m. and you want her to look over a final draft of your English 120 essay about elk migration (why did you write about that?). Maybe you just spilled Coke on your Nantucket Reds and you’re just positive that if you don’t talk to her immediately the Reds are going in the trash when you get back to your dorm. NOT THE REDS. Maybe you just miss your mom and you wanna see her face as a distraction from Orgo. (This last one would be my reason for the FaceTime call, although I would never be looking for a distraction from a class that I would never be taking…)

Your best bet is the Stacks in Sterling—the seemingly infinite and infinitely empty building that houses the majority of the millions upon millions of books in Yale’s library system. Sneak up there while you’re writing a paper in Bass, or in Starr, or in the Music Library, and take a little spin. You’ll get lost immediately. There’s where you’ll find a nice quiet spot to vent to your mom about your roommate or that rash on the back of your knee or how your ex-girlfriend/boyfriend won’t stop posting pictures on Facebook and (s)he’s just having the best fucking time ever!

…Whatever the reason for the call, the Stacks is your spot.

–Kohler Bruno

Best library to fall asleep in:

Trumbull. There’s a dope leather couch.

Best library for people watching:

Bass after 12 a.m. Just make sure you remember to look down at your books from time to time.

Keep reading here!

The Wind Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami

Chill cover. Nice title. We judge books by their covers. But also Haruki Murakami is a contemporary best seller. His work is known for being surreal and for capturing existential themes of human existence and all that lonely sort of stuff. Although he is Japanese, his fiction seems definitively American in style. He may well be the voice of advice for our generation, and this is one of his better-known books. It is worth a read.

Sakuteiki thought to be written by Tachibana Toshitsuna
The Sakuteiki is “most likely the oldest garden planning text in the world.” –Wikipedia. It was written in the 11th century, and to be quite honest, it’s super
confusing. We know about rock n’ roll, but in this book rocks pretty much talk. According to this manual, placing stones is the most important part of gardening. Get your stones in order this summer.

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
We don’t know what all the hype is about, but it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, so that’s something. We plan to read it this summer. You should too.

The novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky
We are reading all the novels on the syllabus for LITR 245 this summer, because we were supposed to read them this spring…

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
There are two kinds of people in this world: those who know the jest, and those who don’t. We don’t know yet. We want to know. We suspect it may have to do with the book’s wacky parabolic structure, or its endnotes, or its references to film etc. But we don’t know yet, and we are going to know, after we read it for four months this summer. It’s 1079 pages.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
This guide is ALMOST as important as the Sakuteiki, because we will have to evacuate Earth pretty soon, leaving our rock gardens behind. The Hitchhiker’s Guide is a science fiction comedy, and it is pretty accurate in terms of its portrayal of the space-time continuum and general relativity, etc. All cool things.

This is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz
This book is about a compulsive cheater trying to find love. It’s supposedly better than The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (which we have read). In any case, Junot Diaz is an important contemporary author. His writing is also super fun to read, which is perfect for the summer.