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By George Murphy Saturday and we are lost in a sea of cherry-billows,  alone together.   We lie down, reach our roots deep, and pour ourselves into empty space.  Soundless, bodiless, and then— dazzling from blue to gold, the sun!  Everything leaves, pulls away,  But you’re still returning year by year Finding yourself in bloom once again,  as you sink into the earth.  I wish you could see yourself unfurling The way I do. Your scars wind down  to the core of the world, and suddenly burst green— The tilt of the planet cannot faze you your roots hold firm.  When you exhale,  The shadow of the moon is on your lips. You have done it again— are a reflection of a sunbeam,  a flower and a girl.

Or, how I learned to stop worrying and love the pub. By Josh Kazali In many ways, England is an unlikely candidate for Americans studying abroad in Europe. It doesn’t boast the lively nightlife of Berlin or Barcelona; it lacks the ancient ruins of Athens or Rome; the cuisine certainly doesn’t hold a candle to Parisian croissants or Florentine pastas; and for weather, you’d frankly be better off anywhere else on God’s green earth. But Great Britain still boasts one shining cultural triumph, something wholly unique among its European compatriots: the humble public house.  If you spend enough time around wayward Britons at Columbia (or, in my case, date one), it’s only a matter of time before they begin to wax poetic about their local pub. Surrounded by classy cocktail joints, seedy dive bars, crowded student spots, and everything in between, it’s difficult to imagine the city lacking a watering hole of any kind. Myself, I was always rather skeptical of the sanctity surrounding the pub. After all, a pint is a pint is a pint—isn’t the pub just another place to get one? Yet, with an affinity for British literature and historic drinking venues, I landed at Heathrow Airport ready to see what all the fuss was about.   The Campaign for Real Ale (also known as CAMRA, a powerful organization that shows just how seriously the British take their brew) remarks that a pub needs only two things: It must “be open to and welcome the general public” and “allow drinking on the premises.” For a relatively small city, Cambridge has these in spades, places decked in old wood, ripe with the smell of yeast, with names like “the Anchor,” “the Eagle,” “the Pickerel,” and my personal favorite, “the Panton Arms.”  The Panton Arms exemplifies the pub in all the ways I grew to love, and I immediately gravitated to my local: It’s reliable, a five-minute walk from my shabby room in South Cambridge. It’s cozy, with a warm indoors and a spacious patio (for the few days during the English spring that one wants to enjoy outdoors). It is intimate, and on Thursdays a group of older musicians gathers to play Irish folk music, not performing for us so much as each other and the pints of Guinness they down. There’s a magical atmosphere in great pubs like the Panton that makes you feel deeply comfortable, content to stay sunk in the cushioned couches for as long as you need. If this is what every pub is like, perhaps England has a rightful claim to being Shakespeare’s “other Eden.”  Americans, I think, enjoy and admire pubs like the Panton Arms on their vacations to the sceptre’d isle. To stop here, however, paints an incomplete portrait of the pub. To see the rest, you’ll want to stay up later—past 11 p.m., when most pubs in England close—and walk up the high street to a place called “the Regal.” The Regal is a pub owned by J D Wetherspoon, a conglomerate colloquially known as “Spoons.” And if the Panton exhibits the pub for what it can aspire to be, Spoons exhibits what the pub is —its truthful and occasionally unflattering reflection. . . .   First, there is no J D Wetherspoon. The English company is a series of chain pubs that borrows its name from a character from the ’70s American television series, The Dukes of Hazzard —a bizarreness which befits Spoons. They buy big, strange, unused spaces, like banks, opera houses, or in the case of the Regal, cinemas, and convert them into vast and outlandish pubs. The Regal has two stories and could surely fit over 400 people. On weekend nights before Cambridge students flock to one of the few clubs in town, I suspect it frequently does. It is grand in the same way that a Las Vegas casino is grand, with garish patterned carpet and massive chandeliers, bathing the entire place in a flat, pale glow. It is sticky from pitchers of shockingly colored cocktails, and a little smelly from plates of greasy food. Drinks here are cheap, sometimes as low as £2 at the Regal (pretty good for post–Brexit times), and people imbibe accordingly (in the King’s English, they get properly pissed). It is, in its way, a church—a comparison strengthened by the fact that one Spoons in Scotland is literally a converted chapel. The Regal is profoundly unkempt, uncouth, and ungraceful, and yet people just go. Students, retirees, in some cases, families. You will go, too. You will drink the neon cocktails (or, in my case, an alarmingly cheap lemony concoction known as “Hooch” that some rowers recommended). You will use the palatial bathroom. And in spite of the splitting headache you will have the next morning, when someone texts you “Spoons?” that night, you will invariably, unflinchingly, happily go again. It is this loyalty to the pub that most fascinates me. Wetherspoons is owned by Tim Martin, a controversial English businessman with a shock of gray hair (one YouTube commenter notes his passing resemblance to Steve Bannon). Besides owning the popular pub chain, Martin became a public figure for his fierce advocacy for Brexit, donating £200,000 in 2016 to the Vote Leave campaign. His statements have led some to call for boycotts. Yet, because of its essential place in English culture, or if you’re more cynical, because of the merciless undercutting of Wetherspoons pricing, Spoons prevails in its ubiquity. This, too, is what the pub is: a place that you return to time and time again, if not out of desire, out of habit. The deep groove the pub wears into the English psyche is something my American mind strained to grasp, and yet I desperately wanted to understand. I needed an expert. . . . Fortunately, in my neck of North London happened to live Jimmy McIntosh, a copywriter who moonlights as a pub aficionado. Under the moniker @londondeadpubs, McIntosh has cataloged and mapped over 4,000 locations throughout London that have been shuttered, closed, or burned down in the city’s centuries-long affair with the pub. His commitment to the project borders on the obsessive: “My girlfriend’s like, ‘You wanna come watch The Wire ?’ I’m like, ‘No, I gotta map these pubs.’” More recently, McIntosh has dipped into reviewing pubs around London on his social media accounts, as well as writing for The Fence  as the magazine’s “pints correspondent.”   I met McIntosh at the Coronet, a former Spoons which now is a mostly vacant, still-vast pub on Holloway Road in North Islington. By the time I arrived, he had already downed the better half of a pint of San Miguel. He has a sixth sense for the innate quality of a pub, something that he terms the DPF—the Dead Pub Factor—in his videos. I eagerly asked him how he quantifies this mystical je ne sais quoi , to which he responded frankly: “Do you want to spend a whole afternoon in this place getting slowly pissed with your mates? Yes or no?”  I could have listened to McIntosh talk about pubs for hours. He told me of his love of tacky ’70s carpeting, admiration for New York’s dive bars, and distaste for Millenial exposed-brick-and-pipe refurbishment. He emphasized the role of the pub as a common ground for English life. “You have your house, you have your office, you need somewhere else to exist,” he told me, describing the pub as a crucial third space. “I got married!—Let’s go to the pub! My dad died—let’s go to the pub,” he said. “It’s the backdrop to which the theaters of our lives play out.” McIntosh slips into poetry when speaking about pubs with remarkable ease, a flair for the romantic that he extended to our conversation about Wetherspoons. He readily admitted Tim Martin’s flawed persona (“a real cantankerous cunt, looks like a cartoon shotgun has gone off on his face”). But he also argued that in spite of his issues with the massive corporate conglomerate, to condemn the people who depend on Spoons to gather, commune, and interact is to misdirect that frustration. “Ultimately, if you’re bringing people together in this place, it’s their lifeline.”  In that sense, perhaps Spoons exists as the perfect example of a third space, one that has been entirely redefined by its patrons. “They’re cathedrals of memory,” McIntosh said, gazing wistfully into his pint. “Some of the best nights of my life have been in Wetherspoons pubs—some of the first snogs I’ve ever had, wakes I’ve been to for friends who’ve died have been in Wetherspoons. Everything happens in Wetherspoons, more broadly, pubs in general.”  . . .  I think I see where McIntosh is coming from. For him, and many other Brits, the pub is a centrifugal site, a place where the often fraught nature of English identity can find some semblance of equilibrium. For that, it is sacred. As we finished our interview and headed for one more drink at McIntosh’s favorite pub (which I will not disclose out of respect for the relationship between an Englishman and his local), I wondered, not for the first time: Why can’t we have this in New York? Is it our lingering sense of puritanism, or the dry years of Prohibition, or simply an American sense of defiance that precludes pub culture from harboring on our Yankee shores? The pub expects nothing of you. If you have a couple of pounds to buy a drink, you are a member of a community. As CAMRA says, pubs must first and foremost be “be open to and welcome the general public.” This openness allows English pubs to transcend their definition and blossom into something endlessly unique and significant, from the intimacy of the Panton Arms to the hedonism of Wetherspoons.  If you have friends who have studied abroad, or have studied abroad yourself, you have no doubt heard the lessons of foreign travel ad nauseam . You have heard, and are already growing tired of, the semesterly Parisians cloying for wine and cigarettes, the Berliners moaning about New York’s techno scene, the Florentines decrying the price of an Aperol spritz in Manhattan. Though the pub may not be as sexy as the clubs of Barcelona, the ruins of Rome, or the canals of Amsterdam, I see why Londoners join their ranks, longing for what they briefly enjoyed in their time away from the Upper West Side.  The pub is a kind of miraculous togetherness with only a bit of lager to grease the wheels. It is a lesson in camaraderie and commiseration, in claiming space—something which Columbia has in such little quantity—and using it to build memories, start conversations, or just be alone. It’s this philosophy which distinguishes the pub from your everyday American bar, a gospel whose praises I intend to sing throughout Morningside Heights. For now, though, I’ll have to find somewhere else to drown my sorrows.

Or of the self.  By Kate Sibery Disclaimer: All translations in this piece (except for book titles) were done by the writer. “Dans ce livre je n’invente rien, et j’assume complètement la notion d’autofiction. Mais, en même temps, il s’agit d’un roman, dans lequel tout est vrai, et tout est faux également.” - Cécile Balavoine, “J’ai compris l’autofiction le jour où je suis moi même devenue personnage,” RadioFrance , 2023 (In this book I’m not inventing anything, and I completely assume the notion of autofiction. But, at the same time, it’s a novel, in which everything is true, and everything is equally false.) It was in a 2023 interview with RadioFrance  that French novelist and French language professor at Columbia University in Paris Cécile Balavoine declared her unwavering adherence to autofictional writing. As a genre, autofiction proves difficult to define. In the French tradition of literary categorization, autofiction is a rendering of the self that relies on certain facts of the author’s lived experience while also employing fictional conventions.  “Everything is true, and everything is equally false.”   When I asked Balavoine what it meant for her to identify as a writer of autofiction, she cut in just as my words tapered off: “After my first novel came out, I do remember some people coming up to me and even to my family, my friends and asking … ‘So when are you going to write a real novel?’” Baked into that line of interrogation is some sense that writing autofiction requires no invention, no imagination—that the genre is somehow easier to write. But for Balavoine, although the facts of the lived experience are there, memory can be a fickle thing, and the task of using language to build the self and the atmosphere—what she calls “the little music of the novel”—persists. “I don’t think that autofiction is less than pure fiction that you have invented; you put yourself in danger, you are going to the bone because you really reveal what you have in the stomach, your guts, and when you do that you confront yourself. You have to find the right words, the right sentences, the right rhythm, the right atmosphere to say it as best as you can, and to translate it for your readers as best as you can,” she said.  The first time I encountered a work of autofiction—or what I thought was a work of autofiction—was when I read L’événement (2000) ( The Happening ) by Annie Ernaux in October 2022, a few days before seeing her speak at Barnard, and a few days after she won the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature. In a little under 150 pages, the book recounts the narrator’s experience as a young student attempting to obtain an abortion in 1960s France, twelve years before the procedure was legalized. The book makes no room for sentimentality; it does not force itself to tune into the musical quality so pervasive in novelistic writing but rather makes a sustained cutting motion, dissecting the experience through a language that refuses to adopt what Ernaux calls “la poésie du souvenir” ( the poetry of memory ). Despite her methodical reconstruction of past events and acknowledgment that she is writing about her own life, Ernaux emphatically rejects the labeling of her work as autofiction. As Sam Sacks, writer of the Fiction Chronicle at The Wall Street Journal , said to me, “Annie Ernaux writes about herself, but she writes about herself as though she is not herself, but sort of observing herself as an anthropologist of this character who is Annie Ernaux.”  It’s what Balavoine described as a confrontation with the self through a fictional mode that makes autofiction—or at least works with an autofictional sensibility—so fascinating to me. Since early December of last year, I’ve been playing with this consideration of how writers, specifically contemporary French writers, confront themselves before an audience of readers. I don’t normally read much contemporary fiction. However, every other Wednesday evening between December and April, I made my way to the long dining table in the kitchen of Columbia’s Maison Française, where I joined a group of 17 or so undergraduate and graduate students to discuss works of contemporary French literature. It was at that table that I became obsessed with how French authors render the figure of the self. The group, known as the Groupe Goncourt, gathers to read and discuss a selection of works of contemporary French literature nominated in the previous year for the nation’s most prestigious literary prize, Le Prix Goncourt. Simulating the official Prix, Columbia’s Groupe Goncourt and its counterparts from 10 other participating universities each vote for their chosen work to be considered for the Choix Goncourt des États-Unis (U.S. Goncourt Prize). In late April at the Villa Albertine, a French bookstore and cultural center on the Upper East Side, delegates from each university meet to defend their respective group’s book choice before bringing it to a vote and toasting their new winner with a flute of champagne.  Led by an adjunct professor in Columbia’s French department, Dr. Laurence Marie, and participating for the second year in a row, Columbia’s Groupe Goncourt read six of the books nominated for the 2023 prize, which was awarded in early November of the same year. The reading list included Triste Tigre  by Neige Sinno, Sarah, Susanne et l’écrivain  by Éric Reindhart, Humus  by Gaspard Koenig, Proust, roman familial  by Laure Murat, Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s L’échiquier , and the official prize-winning novel, Veiller sur elle  by Jean Baptiste Andrea. Each meeting began with a ceremonial go-around during which everyone shared their thoughts on the week’s reading. I always wanted to go toward the end of the go-around—that way I would have enough time to rehearse in my head what I planned to say, and maybe pick up some new word or turn of phrase from the enviably fluid and expressive French spoken by the native speakers of the group.  The book that won the official Prix Goncourt was lauded by some members of the selection jury for its traditionally novelistic qualities. Set primarily in Italy during the rise of fascism Veiller sur elle  traces the life of Mimo, a young and talented sculptor carrying the weight of a tortured love for his childhood best friend, Viola. For many jury members, the book is, to use Balavoine’s phrase, “a real novel.” In a Huffington Post  article, long-time Goncourt jury member Françoise Chandernagor praised the fact that this year’s winner was “un vrai roman” ( a real novel ), adding, “Ça manque un peu. Aujourd’hui, les gens ont tendance à raconter leur vie,” ( This has been missing. Today, people have a tendency to recount their lives ). Implicit in Chandernagor’s final comment is the same pejorative view of autofiction of which Balavoine spoke, rooted in the notion that writing directly and openly about one’s own life requires less imagination, and that the final product will somehow be less “literary.” Chandernagor isn’t alone in the sentiment, but her comments speak to a persistent divide in the Académie Goncourt between those who favor the more traditional novel and those who are open to more experimental novelistic forms. The debate was particularly heated in the selection process for the 2022 prize. The Jury chose the winning book, Vivre vite by Brigitte Giraud, a work of autofiction, after 14 rounds of deliberation. And still, one jury member insisted that Giraud’s novel was only a “petite autobiographie” ( a little autobiography ). I haven’t read Vivre vite , but I think diminishing the novel to the status of a little autobiography reflects a desire to diminish works of autofiction and to ignore the complexity of writing from memory, and of the self as a literary subject. The terms “autobiography” and even “memoir” don’t adequately seize and wrench open the space that the passage of time and the slippery nature of memory create between a writer’s self and a writer’s subject, although the two subjects are on the surface one and the same.  We voted in early April, ranking our choices from one to four, and so selected Sinno’s Triste Tigre , which went on to win the overall U.S. Goncourt Prize a few weeks later, as our winner. In my personal ranking, Triste Tigre  fell second to Reindhart’s Sarah, Susanne et l’écrivain , largely because I became obsessed with the latter’s narrative structure. The book is written as a sort of triptych dialogue between the author, Sarah, and Sarah’s literary double, Susanne, over the course of which Sarah recounts the unraveling of her marriage and family while the figure of the author translates it into the fictional narrative of Susanne. Sinno’s book, by contrast, is pointedly not a novel, but rather a hybrid of many genres of writing that Sinno harnesses in an effort to bring readers inside her head as she studies herself—recounting and disassembling the experience and aftermath of being sexually abused by her stepfather as a child. While Sinno refuses to place the book within the bounds of any one genre of writing (many regarding it as “ inclassable ”), there were moments while reading during which I felt the text knocking up against the amorphous body of literature that calls itself autofiction. Like Ernaux, Sinno persistently muddles the “Je” of her book, at times holding it, and subsequently the reader, so deep within her mind that my impulse to read it as an autofiction is heightened. But she loves to break things too, distorting the sense of intimacy between herself and the reader just as quickly as it was established; as she writes in Triste Tigre , “Je suis celle à qui c’est arrivé. Qui est le je qui parle ici?” ( I am the one this happened to. Who is the “I” speaking here? ).  What I find compelling in works of autofiction, though some authors—such as Ernaux and Sinno—reject that terminology, is the pointed divergence between author, narrator, and character. Writing about the self is effectively an act of translation; memories, self-conception, and the words themselves all coalesce to create a version of the self unique to the page. It’s a selfish interest, I admit. I often treat myself as the subject of whatever I’m writing and struggle with the inevitable divergence between the “I” that is thinking (writing in my head really) and the “I” that I commit to the page. In a 2021 interview with the The New Yorker , Lois Lowry was asked whether dreams and memories reveal truth or are stories that we tell ourselves. In her answer, she talks about watching an old videotape of a birthday party she attended as a kid, saying that it was funny to watch because, in her memory, she was always standing on the outskirts, observing everyone else play. But then she saw herself in the video running around, playing with the rest of the kids. Writing about myself, I’m both the kid running around, losing myself in play, and the one on the periphery, watching.  Perhaps this is all my way of saying that the complexity of rendering the self through writing is a factor of distance, at least in part. Ernaux does not consider herself a writer of autofiction, classifying many of her works as “auto-socio-biographies,” because she perches herself at a distance. And because her “I” is an inherently impersonal one—simply a means of seizing the greater sociological, historical, and familial contexts within which she exists. I understand Ernaux’s project, but find it difficult to believe that the core of the self—one’s center of emotion and feeling—doesn’t somehow make its home in that forever exhilarating and terrifying declaration, “I.”

Columbia athletes’ path to the 2024 Paris Olympics By Shreya Khullar Everyone is silent. There is jostling, the brisk squeaking of shoes, and then, the crowd erupts. I squint my eyes at my laptop screen to see what the uproar is about. I rewind the video ten seconds to watch the sequence again. Two opponents in white gear are facing off. The swords between them are glinting silver threads as they lunge then parry against each other. Cheering breaks out. It’s the 2024 Paris Olympics, and Jackie Dubrovich, CC ’16, has just scored a point for Team USA in the Women’s Foil. They would go on to win the gold. As I continued to click through videos, one thing became very clear: In this arena, the slightest turn of a foot, the briefest lapse of judgment, determines an athlete’s fate. When I, and other casual Olympic viewers, watch video clips or post-competition interviews, we see the winners on the podium ecstatic with joy or sobbing with relief, but what we don’t see are the hours of toil behind the medals.  Speaking on training regimens, Dubrovich detailed aspects of the Olympic preparation process including consulting sports psychologists, analyzing video recordings, and abiding by nutrition plans, all in addition to five-hour-a-day training schedules, while Charlotte Buck, CC ’18, two-time Olympian, mentioned the difficulties of balancing 6 a.m. rowing practices while being a pre-med student. I became lost in the chronicle of Bogdan Hamilton, CC ’26, Olympic fencer, who traveled from Montreal to Lima then back to Montreal, and then finally to Paris in a series of coaching sessions and competitions, and when Evita Griskenas, CC ’24, two-time Olympic rhythmic gymnast, recounted her routine flight from New York to Chicago every week to train, I found her description of it as “a little bit crazy” to be a little bit of an understatement. Every athlete expounded on a truth that, while most people acknowledge, they never fully understand the weight of: Being an Olympian requires an incalculable amount of dedication.  “When you make a decision to do something as big as the Olympics, you just orient your life completely towards that,” Dubrovich said, “The athletes that you see competing, they structure their lives in these four year blocks.” In addition to physically demanding training, the roller coaster of emotions that comes with competing on the international stage can be just as challenging to navigate. “You pour your soul into something and you don’t know if you’re gonna come out and be happy,” she continued. “And that’s a very raw and vulnerable feeling.” The only people who truly grasp the difficulties that come with competing at this caliber are other Olympians. Many of the athletes mentioned the spirit of camaraderie in the Olympic village born from this mutual understanding. “They knew that everyone was just there to have a good experience,” said Hamilton, recounting a story of how fencers competing for China asked to trade pins even though they would be opponents on the piste a few hours later.   This feeling of friendship despite the stakes of the competition was both international and inter-sport. “I’ve been joking that the hottest club in the village was the Team USA recovery room,” said Buck. “I got to watch the men’s gymnastic team final with Simone Biles and Jordan Chiles. I got to watch the men’s rugby final with the whole women’s rugby team, including Ilona Maher. We got to watch the women’s rugby final with the whole track team. Tara Davis was there. And truly everyone is as nice as you would expect them to be online.”  In the moment of competition, however, you are alone—it is just you and your training. Everything has been practiced until movements become unconscious, reflexive. On the day when everything is on the line, you have to “trust the training,” as Grisekenas put it.  The goal of Olympic athletes is to push the limits of the human body. These athletes understand that great sacrifice is a necessary aspect of achieving this ambition. So, they show up again and again to train, to compete, and to perform. Along with knowing what it takes to get there, they know what it feels like to come out the other end. “Indescribable,” Dubrovich said on winning gold. “Surreal.”

Shafik’s resignation and the role of the University President. By Chris Brown “If [administrators] are really concerned with discovering who is doing his utmost to destroy this academically-promising, backwardly structured University, they ought to look long and hard at themselves,” read a 1968 editorial in the Spectator . The article was published immediately following the “Spring Revolution” of that April, when Columbia erupted into protest over civil rights issues and before President Grayson Kirk’s resignation.  With Minouche Shafik’s resignation from her brief, controversial stint as Columbia’s president, the University’s highest office once again provokes heated discussion. Shafik boasts the second shortest tenure in the University’s history (trailing only Charles Henry Wharton, who never showed up to his post in 1801). But, as we return to a 1968-esque scene, we are left wondering: What should the president’s relationship with students be? A student’s view of the university is necessarily self-centered. Of the trinity that makes up daily life—the students, the faculty, and the administration—we see ourselves as the heart of the school. Without us, there is no university. Yet we also sit lowest on the totem pole of academic life: relying on an implicit trust that our professors and the administration will facilitate our learning in a fair and safe environment. But while professors can disappear after classes are done for the day, administration is never far out of sight. The rarely-entered Low Library at the heart of campus is a constant reminder of that presence. And though most students’ experience with their president bookends their college career—as freshmen at Convocation and at Commencement four years later—he or she is, in fact, always in view. Anyone eating at Fac House or walking on Morningside Drive is in eyesight of the President’s House, located right on campus. But despite their presence, they are impersonal and faceless; we have relationships with professors, rarely do we have them with administration. But who our neighbor is, we have little choice in deciding. It is the Board of Trustees, the University’s behind-closed-doors decision-makers, who choose the president. When searching for someone to replace President Lee Bollinger after his retirement, the board publicly described their ideal candidate: someone with “a vision for the University” who “is known for important advances in their field of study.” Simultaneously, they sought someone to “represent the University impeccably” and “be a passionate and effective fundraiser.”  Which brings us back to President Shafik. Chosen by the Board and implanted among us, her appointment prompted the typical reaction to administrative decisions: jokes and quiet indifference. But she brought a clean slate, and students gave her the benefit of the doubt. Her first semester, though rocky, did not seem to indicate that a record-speed resignation was looming. But in the spring, amidst a student body that truly erupted for the first time in 40 years, our new neighbor left with nobody satisfied. Columbia and her presidents are no strangers to student criticism and protest. Bollinger saw multiple major protests during his two-decade-long tenure, including an eight-day occupation of Low Library and multiple sit-ins. Eisenhower, during his five-year tenure before accepting the Presidency of the United States, was frequently called “absentee” due to his work in Washington and his time spent golfing in Georgia. But neither President ever faced pressure to resign like Shafik.  Kirk is her closest analog, ending his tenure after the Spring Revolution despite insisting that he would remain. He was also the last President before Shafik to have summoned the New York Police Department to campus. Unlike Shafik, however, Kirk had spent fifteen years at his post before the fateful events of 1968. And rather than resign, he used the opportunity to announce his retirement. So what made Shafik’s tenure different and untenable? Put simply, she had lost the trust; both the students and Board felt that she could no longer perform the job.  When she first ordered the NYPD onto campus in April, there was a palpable feeling of betrayal among the students. Thousands watched as the student protesters were arrested. The academic bubble had popped. No longer was discord at Columbia an internal issue; it had been opened up to the world. Neighborly trust was shattered. Columbia was in the national news; politicians arrived on campus while students were locked out. Shafik’s emails were met with dread. The president had positioned herself in conflict with her students. Where before the Office of the President had been an afterthought, it was now an object of resentment.  This was how the school year ended. Seniors were denied a full graduation, which had been an administrative justification throughout the entire conflict. Those of us who weren’t seniors finished up our classes (largely online) and were sent back home. But the scars on campus and the collective psyche remained. Maybe we were misguided to envision the resident of the President’s Mansion as having our best interests in mind. It is not too much to ask, however, that alongside her fundraising ability and vision, the president of our University should do no harm to her students. As we inaugurate another school year and a new president, perhaps the administration and highest office will return to their place: back of mind. As we move on, it’s worth remembering words from nearly 60 years ago. Going into the fall of 1968, Jerry Avorn, CC ’69, wrote on the front page of Spectator : “In a community in which the process of change has become the status quo, it is reassuring to see that a few constants are left. The uneasy smile, the stiff freshly-bought suits, the clinging overdressed mothers, the look of optimistic awe–despite the Spring Revolution, these eternal traditions of Freshman week returned to campus yesterday, innocent, naive, and unblemished.” Though few will be wearing suits, it is important to retain and nurture some of that optimistic awe. Love thy neighbor.

By Remi Seamon Meanwhile, Siberia Long weeks full of swallowing and goodbyes, full of lining up next to caskets to receive strange kisses on the cheek full of returning to watch the camels in Siberia on the television who can smell water 30 miles away… and even after switching it off, and taking our selves to bed the camels keep galloping somewhere through the desert, looking for water —if I’m being honest  they obsess me more than pickles or men and I think of them more than feminism or February 24th  the day my grandfather died and somewhere the camels quietly carry on pulling ice from the frozen stems of yellow Siberian grass which melts in their hot, red mouths and trickles down their wooly throats and keeps them alive. Arc It’s not that hard to write a poem when you’re full of wine and light- footed animals, and it’s past three and someone’s yelling on the phone but you’re on your back staring at the ceiling counting cracks… not everything’s a movie. Sometimes men have tattoos on the back of their neck for no reason and no one kills Jennifer Coolidge, she just dies and you can’t always see the moon not because the government makes you pay now but because there are clouds though maybe that too. You can’t always change things and Jesus can’t save the whales but you can hear the cool water slapping against the sides of the boat. The TV I watched you through the TV turning stones over with your shoe. You were someone I loved, badly cast in a suit. You were forced to grow a beard longer than the road that leads to the place you were never born… I pour tea for us and drink it by myself. It’s the color of policies and the taste of love that someone left on the stove until it spilt, and gave us third degree burns. The TV is a box that holds love like wind. Your voices reaches me through it your voice, searching for the end of the poem — a child looking for a hand or the poem looking back at itself — there you are, being watched, peeling an orange, there I am, drinking my tea burning my love on my tongue wanting everyone safe and dead and televised.

On language, our planet, and the chatbots. By Alice Tecotzky Watching Lydia Liu and Anupama Rao converse is like watching two bees zip through a garden. Their words zig-zag between one another, landing on ideas gently in an unchoreographed partnership. As Liu speaks, Rao nods along with varying degrees of vigor. When Rao talks, Liu smiles, quietly and to herself. Spending time with these two professors is like witnessing a secret language of collaboration, one that sustained them while co-editing Global Language Justice .  Released in November 2023, Global Language Justice  combines work from scholars, poets, and artists across disciplines. The contributors explore the links between linguistic and ecological loss, language justice in the digital sphere, linguistic adaptation among Indigenous communities, and spatial mapping. Liu is Columbia’s Wun Tsun Tam Professor in the Humanities, and Rao a professor in Barnard’s history and Columbia’s Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies departments. Together, they recruited thinkers from across the country to define justice in a new conceptual mode. Though the contributors write of destruction—ecological, linguistic, sociopolitical—they do not operate in the vocabulary of mere death. Language is living and life-affirming, sustained by and sustaining communities.   In their introduction, Liu and Rao explain that the book investigates “the lifeworld of languages—always in the plural—as being intrinsic to the larger ecological, political, and socioeconomic processes that cut across developed and developing societies.” Sitting in a spacious office in Kent Hall, Liu and Rao talked to me about vitality in their book, their partnership, and their own linguistic lifeworlds. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. … The Blue and White :   I want to start by talking about the two of you: how you got connected and met, and what the nature of your relationship is. Anupama Rao: Professor Liu and I worked together as colleagues and compatriots because she was the director of the Institute of Comparative Literature and Society. I was Associate Director. This was nine years ago. Lydia invited me to be Associate Director and shortly thereafter, we applied for a Mellon Sawyer grant, which allows you to put together a year-long seminar around a theme. The idea was to think about a kind of new conceptual space around something called “global language justice,” one that went beyond a simplistic sense of opening up access to think about the ways in which our global moment—climate crisis, catastrophe—was coming together with a moment in which you were seeing the extinction of languages. And also the ways in which a global English was snuffing out the plenitude and singularity of language worlds. We applied for the grant, we got it, and we ran a seminar over two years.  Lydia Liu: We were not interested in the usual approach to language. We make it very clear in the introduction that we’re not going to take language as an instrument for communication. We were looking for other ways to think about the relationship between language and ecology. And this was in the context of the disappearance of so many languages. People pay a lot of attention to climate change, to immigration, to all of these socioeconomic factors that affect our life. But language seems to be invisible in that whole process. We wanted to make this problem visible. AR:  As Lydia was saying, we wanted to stay away from the catastrophic model of, “All is gone, this is extinction, nothing can be done” on the one side. And on the other, a happy, “Let’s all think through ways we can communicate.” We wanted to animate and activate both sides of that equation. LL: There were many discoveries we made in this process, because we worked with so many people, scholars, artists, activists coming from different languages. So we were also interested in learning about their stories. B&W :   I want to ask a little bit more about how you found the contributors and connected with them, and how your relationship with them evolved. What was the nature of your communication? What was the language you all shared with one another? LL:  A good number of the contributors and interlocutors come from Columbia University. They’re colleagues. We had all kinds of collaborations, including co-teaching. It was a process of discovery. Before doing this, we didn’t know that there are more than 700 languages spoken in New York City. It's astonishing! AR: And that alerted us, because it speaks to the adjacency between languages. There’s both a kind of indifference, but there’s also a proximity to them. And that creates new possibilities of translingualism. The people we brought in started alerting us to people that we should be paying attention to. Initially we did think quite carefully about there being an arc. You could almost say you had poetry and law, and then in between that we had people doing digital mapping, people thinking through things like border and asylum rights. Both of us also work outside of the North Atlantic, so we were quite attentive to the global purchase. This is not a story where we should be sitting and thinking from the perspective of Europe and the United States. B&W : Talking about that shape in the book, something I appreciated was when essays would reference each other. I’m curious about how people communicated with each other once you brought them into the project? LL: It was during the pandemic when we were ready to actually put the book together. But before that we had many workshops, so people knew each other. And of course, that’s the role of the editor. We made them read each others’ work and asked them specifically to look at the convergence of their interests.  AR: We did bring things together, and because it was a tough set of conversations we also needed people who are very generous and able to step outside of their own space. I think we found people like that.  B&W : I think of the book as multilingual itself in how it considers many ways we might create linguistic justice. Could you expand a little bit more on your idea that the ecological devastation we’re facing lines up with the silent disappearance of so many languages, particularly for Indigenous communities? LL: The poets are the ones who are most sensitive to these issues. For instance, in Mohammad Bennis’ poem. He is a Moroccan poet. He talks about speaking and breathing and death. Quite a few poets talk about death. Speaking is primarily about breathing. If you stop breathing, you die. If you extend that to an entire language community, you sort of know what’s happening. And that’s why we included the poets, because they are the most sensitive group of people who really can link language to ecology.  AR: That’s one element of what we tried to do. I like very much what Lydia said, that there’s a kind of sensitivity. There’s also a kind of elliptical nature to poetic language, which allows you to inhabit that experience in a very different way. For instance, there’s Abhay Xaxa, who is an Indigenous poet who passed away at a very young age. He has an interesting poem called “I Am Not Your Data.” LL: Xaxa was also an Indigenous activist speaking about Indigenous demands for land. So the question of land is very, very central to our concern.  AR: It’s a real question of spatial inequality. Land is about a kind of grounding identity, a kind of belonging and its relationship to language. And that’s why using things like mapping and visualization became a powerful way for us to think about proximity, adjacency, and far-ness. LL: Let me give you four lines from Xaxa’s poem: “I am not your data, nor am I your blank vote / I am not your project, or any exotic museum object, / I am not the soul waiting to be harvested, / Nor am I the lab where your theories are tested.” B&W : That theme of not being reduced to a data point, or a theory, or a census label was striking to me in Wesley Leonard’s essay talking about his Miami tribe.  AR: He was a late discovery for us. We found what he was doing so interesting. This is not about the ethnography of preserving Native American languages. He rejects all of that. B&W : I’m curious about his message of linguistic resilience and his push against viewing Indigenous languages as stagnant. How might that relate to ecological devastation? Can we apply a similar method or way of thinking about resilience and adaptivity to regenerating our planet? LL: [Leonard] is pushing back against that preservationist approach to Indigenous languages. But what’s so interesting is that we’re really dealing with the uprooting and displacement of indigenous Native Americans. That is an historical fact. The next question is: After people are displaced, what happens to the community? The languages are gone and anthropologists would go— AR:  —would go and put the puzzle together. But not in terms of living languages. LL: That’s right. That’s the life and death of language that we’re talking about. Leonard came up to complicate this whole situation.  AR: And there’s no authenticity. It’s not as though people don’t have access to a computer, or access to ways of revivifying languages in the conditions in which they find themselves. It’s very political.  LL: I think he makes a very good point. When you think about English, it has absorbed so many foreign languages and vocabularies. Why is it not possible for an indigenous language also to absorb English and French, like in the case of Miami? This is a double standard. We can tolerate the multilingual makeup of English, but we are demanding purity of Indigenous languages.  B&W :  I want to switch gears a bit to talk about the essays on Unicode (the international linguistic standard that supports searching, texting, emailing, etc.) and equitable access to digital technologies. Those pieces were written by contributors, but how do you two think about the ways in which modern technology either enables or hinders global language justice?  LL: We’re not just making a point about the importance of technology for the goal of preserving communication or to ensure that certain languages will survive. We were also thinking about the confusion that people usually have about technology, and we wanted to clarify that in our work. That is, are we talking about a script? Or a writing system? Or language as an object of linguistic  study? Or are we talking about speech? These are different things.  B&W : I’m curious if you have thought at all about how AI might factor into this. The chatbots are called large language models. What implications might AI models have for linguistic justice, if any? LL: AI models, like chatbots, rely on the size of the data. More “high-resource languages,” in computer terms, would have an advantage in the number of documents people post on the internet, for example. The variety of data, the sheer amount of data—you can’t compare that to the data resource available for English.  AR: Part of the AI model is also the frequency of use. It becomes better the more you train it. That kind of interactivity also forecloses the unexpected, the unintended, the error. But much of the world that we’re working in and thinking about is in that space.  LL: If you want me to predict, these large language models will further jeopardize languages that do not have enough resources to train the models. English and a number of major languages will have an advantage. So that will discourage young people from using their own languages.  B&W : I’m really interested in the question you raise about poetry and the affective space of language and sound, so I want to bring it back to New York. I’m a native New Yorker and I think a lot about the sounds of this city. What is the quintessential New York City language to you? I don’t mean something like English, or Spanish, or Baïnounk, but more the smells, the feelings, the noises that make up your language of New York.  LL: If you go on the subway, you hear the languages and you really don’t know what people are speaking. And that’s New York. You don’t have to take linguistics to understand how vital language is for social life. How do you count languages? Within linguistics, there has been an ongoing debate about named languages. The languages that are not named—what do you do with them? Are they not languages? We’re also interested in theoretical questions. The census data leads to larger issues. B&W : To finish off, I have a question that distills language down in a way that’s, perhaps, totally contradictory to this book. Have you thought about translation? Making this book available in a number of written languages or oral languages? AR: Speaking of limited resources! I guess we are all carriers of this message now because we have so many people who got kind of transformed through working on the book, but also just coming to our workshops. So maybe we’re all kind of carrying that message. The translation is tough. LL: It came out just a few months ago.  AR:  Right. It took us a long time to put this together. And now to think about this. Hopefully there’s a co-sharer who says, “Hey, I want to do this!” We could think about disaggregating [the essays]. A lot of people who are practitioners and are actually teaching in community college classrooms or classrooms where they’re experiencing a lot of multilinguality have found this radical and powerful. They found that it had some really great pedagogical purpose, in addition to being theoretically interesting. B&W :  Do you feel hopeful? Whether about the planet, or languages, or those two things combined? It’s hard for me to feel hopeful sometimes—do you see glimmers of hope, sometimes, somewhere? AR:  Oh, for sure. I think our students are on fire. Being in an activated classroom in the way that Lydia was describing—there’s a lot of hopefulness. The world is in a dark place, in a really dark place. My general tendency is to walk the dark side and think that we need to figure out some really big ways to bring about major structural changes. But I think something like this, that is also very grounded and practical, is about making and doing in the moment that you’re in. LL: It’s not possible to predict. But there are so many organizations, institutions, and individuals who demand justice. And that is hope.

A history of the zine. By Jorja Garcia A few weeks ago, in order to procrastinate a Contemporary Civilization assignment, I spent yet another night engrossed in the multitude of zines, manifestos, and mini-comics at the Barnard Zine Library. Located on the second floor of Milstein, the library uniquely propels student voices, garnering its famous reputation as “ The Barnard Baddie of Libraries .” I certainly felt like a Barnard Baddie as I scraped together my own zine from miscellaneous magazines and scrap paper, using glue and tiny scissors from the library’s free collage corner. I was introduced to the Zine Library during my first month of college, when I attended a workshop led by comic artist Sarah Shay Mirk. I received a free copy of Mirk’s How the pandemic made me rethink gender  and created a zine myself. This zine, a commemoration of relationships from my hometown of Oxnard, California, only exists in my camera roll now. However, its significance to me—a reminder of my roots even as I attend school 3,000 miles away—remains just as strong. I had made zines before, but this one sprung my relationship with the medium in the context of Barnumbia: a place where I have learned the importance of pursuing ideas not already congruent with the institution’s. … Creating a zine can be a daily exercise, like letter writing to yourself, a friend, a stranger; or, it can be a once-in-a-while stress reliever, a reaction to an observation at a bar or a campus library. Zines can capture ideas both bite-sized and fully fledged. On Instagram, Lafat Bordieu uses the zine to extract new meanings from seemingly meaningless cosas que me encontré en la calle  (things I found on the street). Ellen O’Grady, meanwhile, highlights the poetry of Palestinian writer Mahmoud Darwish in their illustrated zine version of his poem “ The Prison Cell .” Zines can transcend the individual and the current, entering conversations central to humanity.   The form of a zine—one that literally cuts the conventional magazine in half—allows for lower stakes and decreased institutional oversight. Unlike this very piece, for example, which will undergo a series of edits before publication, zines welcome that which is in progress, unkempt, and often unaccepted elsewhere.  The first hands to assemble these self-published scribbles were science fiction fans raving about their favorite heroes in “fanzines” of the 1930s and 1940s. Since then, the underground rock and punk scenes of the 1960s to the ’90s have helped cultivate the DIY counterculture aesthetic associated with zines today.  At little to no cost, due to self-publishing and an eagerness for dissemination, zines evolved to thread connections among communities thrown into the dust and swept across the streets. As an alternative to the elite and confining perspectives of large publications, zines became a mode of tracing the origins and ongoings of counterculture movements, including their oft-marginalized communities. Zines like Search and Destroy  in San Francisco and Punk Planet  in Chicago traced local punk scenes. The Sex Pistols produced their own zine titled Anarchy in the U . K .  Riot grrrl bands like Bikini Kill  and Le Tigre made their own zines to spread their disruptive confidence. Shotgun Seamstress  highlighted underrepresented Black-punk voices, while Disease Pariah News  disseminated important information during the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Similarly, Joey Terrill’s   Chicos Modernos  served as a vital educational resource on AIDS for Chicano and Spanish-speaking populations in Los Angeles.  But as countercultures like punk gained traction, zines also sometimes gave punk a taste of its own medicine, critiquing its lingering facade. Perhaps it is fitting to call punk a white sepulcher, as the racism and sexism bubbling within did not go unnoticed by zinesters like Mimi Thi Nguyen.   Having formerly frequented largely white punk rock moshes, Nguyen pushed against the staggering whiteness in the underground with her 1977 zine Evolution of a Race Riot .   Published in Berkeley, California, it contains entries from women and people of color recounting their experience in the overwhelmingly white and male punk scenes across North America. Their stories capture their isolating interactions and the subsequent anger and frustration with being, for example, the only Asian, Black, or Latino person in a space. When such scenes fell short as safe spaces for racial minorities, zines offered an alternative arena.  A critique of punk’s whiteness is important to punk and, by extension, the zine’s very essence: As Kevin Jagernauth says in Evolution of A Race Riot,  punk remains “something that we [people of color] can identify with and abandoning that would be like abandoning ourselves.” Here, the zine becomes a tool for reinstating the presence of marginalized communities and demanding new spaces through candid conversations of intersectionality within the punk scene and beyond. Nguyen and her collaborators kickstarted a coalition for those with marginalized identities to support themselves and future generations of punks. They demonstrate the desire for humans to collaborate and amplify their own existence as a form of resistance and an effort towards reclamation. If anything, zines demonstrate the necessity for people to write their own stories, and, most importantly, to be heard by one other.   I encountered Nguyen’s zine during one of my procrastination sessions in the Barnard Zine Library. The Library is a portal of pages exclusively written by women, trans, and nonbinary people. Its ever-growing collection integrates new voices from Morningside Heights and beyond. The zine lovers (like myself) create community by adding their own zines to the collection, holding workshops, and running the unofficial Barnard Zine Collective . The library even holds free events like an annual Scholaztic Zine Fair  in late April. As one sifts through a plethora of pages, magazine clippings, receipts, colored pens, and even lipstick prints, the Zine Library recalls worlds of intimate histories otherwise left in the attic. Jenna Freedman, the library’s director, notes that it has received donations of well-kept-and-cared-for boxes filled with zines and other archival materials. This personal touch makes zines all the more cherishable. As if an old sweater, jewelry box, or quilted blanket were all packed into its creases. While sifting through these boxes, I’ve noticed the frequent use of “I” and “we,” another indicator of the form’s personable affect.   In our conversation, Freedman explained that the use of direct address is crucial in constructing zine introductions, one of the zine’s most essential aspects. Freedman, who has been a part of zine, punk, and feminist spheres since the ’90s, said that in her own zine-making process, she typically writes the reader’s address last. As an opportunity for a powerfully intimate first connection with the reader, it makes sense that zinesters handle the introduction with so much care. While some are simply written like a letter with a classic “Dear __,” others are packed with fervor. For example, in BE YR OWN PUNK  by Margot Terc, the introduction reads: “There’s so much set up against us. And yet. We survive, we thrive, we always make it work. That is the punkest thing I know.” Introductions invite readers into the conversation. In Freedman’s words, “A zine should inspire you to make your own.”   Freedman made the initial proposal for the Zine Library in 2003, but today remarks, “I don’t matter, honestly.” This statement, though perhaps overly humble, nonetheless speaks to the way that the Zine Library makes room for plenty of student-led programming, taking its visitors where they want to go. Grace Li, BC ’‘24, for example, taught us how to make cyanotypes in the Library this past September. Even the space’s theme of the month, “ We’ve got a zine for that ,” is concerned with students’ needs. In January, the theme was “ protest ” zines amid the suspensions  of the Columbia chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, resulting in zines such as For Laura . For Laura  is an anonymous work resembling a burn book that expressed widespread dissent for Barnard College President Laura Rosenbury’s censorship of pro-Palestinian voices  and promoted the boycott of her presidential inauguration. (Zines like these often lie under the television in the Zine Library for free.) Reflecting on the Zine Library’s role in student intervention, Freedman only hopes that zines can “continue to be whatever students need them to be, aesthetically and emotionally.” The Library remains a zone at Barnumbia where students can actively search for uncensored and intensely pertinent stories; it aches for your involvement because it can’t continue to exist without you.   Though many of the zines in the Library can function as valuable tools for research, a duality exists in the collection: Some zines are deliberately intertwined with academic dialogues and others (thankfully) not so much. “Sure,” Freedman explained, zines “are a unique pedagogical tool that connects emotionally with a reader.” However, the essence of a zine is rooted in ideals of punk such as a “messy care-space” and “craft.” For Freedman, when reappropriated as a class assignment, the self-initiative that makes zines a destabilizing force in academia may be lost.  Nonetheless, Freedman’s role involves instructing students and faculty how to use zines in the classroom. Certainly for myself, making a zine is more enticing than penning a 10-page paper in classes like Introduction to Sexuality Studies. When I took this course last semester, we looked at zines as primary sources of queer theory and were encouraged to create one as a final project. Many of these final projects, including my own, reconsidered the academic language of authors like Michel Foucault and Jay Prosser.  On the other hand, there is an argument that casts doubt on the idea of the academic zine as a productive tool for cultivating critically new voices. Indeed, zines are useful because of the space they can give to new, less established ideas. An assignment that requires students to rehash decades-old paradigms through the zine may very well be undermining the medium’s essence. A zine should at least attempt to criticize, make fun of, or even mock the language of academia at hand, just as Nguyen criticized punk. In Professor Branden Joseph’s class Zines by Artists, students are asked to explore how “a zine can adopt and interrogate  the voice of an expert.” The way that a zine is used can display whether a course actually pushes you to think beyond current institutional boundaries as opposed to simple regurgitation. In the end, as Freedman explained, “If you’re not making [a zine] for yourself, it’s not really a zine.” Just as zines continue to permeate pedagogy and academia, they are also gaining traction in museum collections, like the Brooklyn Museum’s recent exhibition “ Copy Machine Manifestos: Zines by Artists .” This exhibition, now closed, was co-curated by Joseph. The Brooklyn Museum’s Library and Archives also house plenty of zines that remain open to the public.  Upon entering the exhibit last month, I was inundated with zines alongside other paintings, videos, and photography. My eyes darted across the room as I finally saw, in person, zines I’d only ever known through a screen. However, I simultaneously felt a significant distance from them. Enclosed behind glass cases, I was unable to actually touch, let alone flip through, the works. It turns out the zines were still out of my reach. The experience reminded me of the downsides of bringing these zines into the curatorial scene, even as they become accessible to a wider audience. A crucial feature of the consumption of zines, their ability to be held, was now restricted by the necessity of preservation. But zines are not valuable due to the quality of paper they are printed on: It’s about the physical act of holding something in your hands. It’s about feeling the creases, scribbles, and happy accidents that make a work all the more human.  …   The publication accompanying the exhibit features an essay by Professor Julia Bryan-Wilson titled “Cool Older Siblings: Queer Zines as Queer Theory.” In the essay, which considers how older siblings can use zines to help their younger siblings develop relationships with feminism, queerness, and sex, Wilson presents a suspicion: “I’ll admit my discomfort with the idea of a museum exhibition of zines. Because the zine is always a super-local and anti-institutional phenomenon, and because it seems nonsensical to try to create a timeline or overview of a movement so vast and unruly. Zines are akin to scribbles on drawing pads shown to friends, or mixtapes given to lovers, or marginalia in books scattered throughout the world’s libraries. How can anyone possibly claim to have surveyed even a sliver of what is out there?” Wilson’s point applies not just to the zine exhibition, but also to this essay.  Wilson gets at perhaps the defining feature of zines: They are, by design, anti-institutional. They are not rigid, and they are not one thing. They don’t linger. They jump around, go from hand to hand, and play hide-and-seek so you can’t chain them down. You have to want  a zine, go out and find one, make another yourself, and await them in the corners of small businesses, local bookstores, coffee shops, and record shops. You have to hand them out to friends, get postage for long-distance ones, and give them out to strangers. At first glance, a zine is simply pieces of paper scribbled on and stuck together. The cheap printer paper is easy to tear apart or drown in mud. Nonetheless, zines are created with care. They are unique because they are as ephemeral as each second that passes by, yet shine as infinite and bright as the stars. They capture the beginnings of miscellaneous and creative thoughts that expand into new vortexes of individual personhood all the way to broader humankind; fundamentally, they capture the irresistible itch to create and be heard. So go steal some printer paper. Fold it once hot-dog style and then twice like a hamburger. Fold another hamburger. Unfold the page and form a mouth by cutting along the two middle short edges of the rectangles. Fold it into a booklet (you’ll figure it out). Write about the raccoon you saw in Riverside Park that reminds you of your pet from back home. Write about the rat that made it up to the top floor of McBain. Write about how Columbia’s gate closures make you feel angry and trapped. Cut out and add some images from a magazine. Include a doodle if you feel confident in your artistic ability. Include one even if you don’t. Now you’ve got a zine.

On protests, community, and faith. By Henry Astor All names have been changed . In the early days of my study abroad, I found myself in the Jewish Ghetto in Venice. It was one of those days where you remember exactly where you were, what you were doing, what the weather was like, who you were with. The island-city was sweltering, lugging through the last of an atypically long summer, even for mild-tempered Italy. I had risen early that morning to catch the train from Bologna with my roommate Matt, stumbling our way to the station so clumsily that he forgot to pay the bus fare and was swiftly ticketed by a no-nonsense cop.  While Venice’s better-known sites, like Saint Mark’s Basilica and the Ponte Rialto, were as crushed as ever with tourists in the waning high season, the Ghetto was empty. I passed through the hole in the wall that marks the Ghetto’s boundary—a semi-permeable membrane sieving the silent quarter from the throngs without. How fitting, I thought, to pay a visit to the Ur-Ghetto at the time the world’s largest, Gaza, was desperately struggling to be one no more, imagining if it could shred its own membrane and obey the laws of diffusion. Instead, despite the millions of screams so piercing you could practically hear them from across the Mediterranean, silence: one that would reverberate within me for many days thereafter.      4,000 miles from home, in a country with barely enough Jews to fill my hometown, I was as far away from Judaism as I had ever been in my life. I knew this already; in choosing to study in Italy, I was after not my father’s Ashkenazi Jewish roots—prominent in all aspects about me—but my mother’s Italian ones, more heavily obscured by the cultural sandblast of middle American assimilation. No invectives like basta or cretino in our home, but plenty of chazerai and schmuck. I knew that this country, although it had nourished my forebears to life at some point in the fading past, was effectively a wilderness to me. With barely a word of Italian on my lips in that burning epilogue of summer, I was stumbling through this place with the only other American I knew, all the way to the Jewish Ghetto of Venice, where I was struggling to find some reminder of who I was. Wandering amongst the quiet, boarded-up synagogues and former homes of notables, I couldn’t help but feel as empty as the Ghetto.    … Venice is beset by the ghosts of Crusaders and the chunky New Balance sneakers of the tourists who trample over them, pounding the island inch by inch back into the Adriatic. It is beautiful, but it is dead. Bologna is not only alive, it is the beating heart of Italy. All roads lead not to Rome, but to the statue of Neptune in Bologna’s Piazza Maggiore. It is a place on the way to, ensnared in a tangled web of autostrade and high-speed rail lines. South comes north for better jobs. North comes south for sunnier skies. I came from the sidelines, oblique to these converging currents.  Bologna’s relative life is an aggressive, indignant one. Under those bridges and catenary wires and hundreds of miles of graffiti-smattered portici is a sprawling underground. Squatting—“occupying” they call it—is the city’s favorite pastime. Earlier in the semester, I had met Angelica, a graduate student in sociology, who had introduced me to some of her friends in the scene. These included Franco, who leads an autonomia —an autonomous “communist youth organization” whose decentralized structure and disdain for elections mimics similar formations that flourished during Italy’s so-called Years of Lead . In any case, I was honored that Angelica, Franco, and a third friend, Giorgio, thought to invite me to their salon-like discourses on Mediterranean homosociality in the smoky courtyard of the sociology building, if only as a mute observer.  But little things would bring my voice back out. At an outdoor karaoke competition in the neighborhood park, Giorgio taught me the lyrics to songs by Italy’s Billy Joel, Bob Dylan, and Leonard Cohen in one man: the illustrious Lucio Dalla. For the rest of the semester, Dalla would pound my eardrums through every trip across the railroad tracks to the grocery store and every thumping bus ride through the cobblestone streets to my lectures. He was the city, a born and bred Bolognese whose lyrics clung to the ruddy sandstone facades, as much as the sandbags piled under windows when tanks were barreling toward crowds of student autonomists during the uprising of ’77. Giorgio had given me new eyes with which to see the city, had bestowed me with a sense of place. But I still wanted more.  … Outside of these fleeting moments, my mind was consumed entirely by Palestine. A Vaudevillian stagehand was pulling at my neck with a comically long cane, reeling me back to the empty, plucking me out of Italy and into Beit Hanoun and Shuja’iyya, teleporting me back into Morningside Heights as demonstrations on campus exploded across my Twitter timeline. Days disappeared like this, the great void within me filled with nothing but horror and disbelief.   Having circumnavigated Bologna and re-encountered the three autonomists, I soon began to protest with them. At least once a week, Lucio Dalla’s streets were filled with desperate cries for the children of Gaza to live, that not another city should be menaced by tanks and sandbags and bombs. A brass band would play Bella Ciao, the anthem of the antifascist partisans who liberated Italy in the final years of World War II, after which  Mohammad Assaf’s “Ana Dammi Falastini” would blast from a loudspeaker.  Italy, which was then making headlines for its cruelty to migrants disembarking at Lampedusa, was for a fleeting moment showing its best. Septuagenarian veterans of the Years of Lead linked arms with Tunisian mothers. Grubhub couriers marched with university professors. During one protest, a little boy named Samir was separated from his father in the mass of demonstrators. In tears, he sidled up to one of my comrades in the autonomia . She put him on her shoulders, bounced him up and down until the tears subsided, and they began to shout his name until his father came rushing back out of the throng.  At another demonstration, while protesters were stalled on the Ponte Stalingrado, the autonomia opened up the megaphone to the crowd. Zaynab, one of the protest marshals, went up first. A Moroccan-Italian hijabi woman who had come all the way from Parma, she spoke about the takbir , her fear of being cast out of the only country she had known since she was a little girl, her confusion that her declaration of her love of God should somehow earn her the epithet of “terrorist.” Italy was her home, and she would do what it took to stay there, not just in body but in conviction. She refused to let “Muslim” and “Italian” contradict one another.  After some encouragement from my comrades, I took the fore and, in as good Italian as I could muster, revealed my identity as an American Jew, here to simply do my part. Zaynab embraced me afterward. “ Grazie .” What for , I wondered. This had all felt like an incredibly selfish exercise in expiation, all at the risk of my student visa. It took me some time to figure out why she did it: We showed one another that we belonged there.  … Following a call to action in the autonomia ’s WhatsApp group, I found myself participating in the seizure of a campus building in a bid for divestment from Israeli universities and corporations. In this place where solidarity with Palestine had brought us all together, I was at last able to slip out of the inhuman rigidity I had felt since leaving the Ghetto. There was just as much partying as politics in the occupied building. Teach-ins and film screenings were interspersed with pizza, beer, and techno music, plus the occasional fire alarm triggered by someone’s cigarette. University delegates would show up periodically to threaten us with a sgombero – a forced evacuation at the point of a policeman’s baton, the weapon of choice in the bel paese . Organizers stood their ground every time. I chatted at length with Roberto, a fellow history major who had traveled far and wide across the United States and was thrilled to finally have an English speaking partner. Luca, a sociology student, did me one better: he had visited my hometown in Tennessee, and asked if I knew some people in the music scene there. He evidently knew it better than I did.  I also met Lama, one of the organization’s spokespeople. She, too, is at a place in between; her father is from Somalia. She skirts away from self-identifying as Italian, but her voice booming across the Piazza Verdi firmly cements her as one of Bologna’s main characters regardless. She belongs there.  There was also a group of guys who seemed to be there mostly because they liked the smell of spray paint and the sound of techno. “Communism is a full-time job,” one of them told me. “Gotta kick back a little or else you’ll go crazy.”  Franco was always the most excited to see me. I would call him the uncle of the group—he was about 6 foot 4, a grad student built like a steelworker. He and Lama were a funny pair, the two always designated to speak with any passerby or university representative. He never liked the epithet, though. “You all make this organization what it is,” he remarked in the middle of what was probably our 10th protest. Here with this rag-tag crew of chainsmoking punks, surrounded by moms and dads and kids and old folks from every corner of the Mediterranean and beyond, I had found my tribe. Arabic flowed into Italian which flowed into English senza sosta . The echoes of my self-reflections in the empty Ghetto had been replaced with the calls of a community I was proud to be a part of.  … Before that same protest, the organizers had given out at least a hundred Palestinian flags. I’ve kept mine. The most beautiful colors in the world , I couldn’t stop thinking. The colors of a home so precious that many who’ve never seen it are putting everything down for it.  It was late November, one of the last pleasant afternoons before the sun began disappearing ahead of aperitivo time and before the smog set in. Those of us in the autonomia led some chants and responded to others, all experts by now. At one point, we got stuck in the Via Irnerio just before the Piazza VIII Agosto, named after the 1848 battle when the Bolognese beat back the troops of the Austrian occupation. Perhaps it was an intentional 15-minute rest, or maybe the police hadn’t moved their barricade up the street yet. In this uncertain pause, I heard a small voice, like a bird before dawn, crying out over the din of impatient chatter. It took a moment to find its source: a young boy, head wrapped in a keffiyeh, perched on the shoulders of a sister or aunt and surrounded by his family. Cessate il fuoco!  Ceasefire now!  Giù le mani dai bambini!  Hands off the children!   Soon the whole march was at his command. Israele fascista, stato terrorista!  They were words a child his age should never have to know, but we followed him loyally. “Free, free Palestine!” in English. Each time it seemed like he might stop, his well of energy proved endless. I thought about the chorus to my favorite Lucio Dalla song, a letter to a friend jailed during the repressions of the mid-70s. Vedi, caro amico Cosa si deve inventare Per poter riderci sopra Per continuare a sperare? E se quest'anno poi passasse in un istante Vedi, amico mio Come diventa importante Che in questo istante ci sia anch'io? — Lucio Dalla, “L’anno che verrà,”, 1979.  “Do you see, dear friend // what we must invent // to be able to laugh it off // to keep our hopes up? // And if this year were to then pass by in an instant // do you see, my friend // how important it is // that I be here in this instant too?”  The march began to move.

On masterpieces and gender politics. By Shreya Khullar A few weeks into Art Humanities, I felt the urge to preempt my questions with a dreaded caveat: “Don't worry, I’m a feminist.” After several classes simmering with buildup, this uncomfortable feeling culminated in one particularly uneasy occurrence. It was a hazy February afternoon when the post-lunch drawl was settling in, and my professor was running through his usual slideshow. Then, two images were presented to the class side by side. On the left: Michelangelo’s David, a 17-foot-tall marble statue whose fiery gaze seems to be embedded into the marrow of Western art consciousness. On the right: the 4.2 x 2.3 cm Carved Cherry Stone Pendant  by Properzia de’ Rossi, a delicately engraved piece I had never encountered before. When asked to name something that differentiated de’ Rossi’s work from Michelangelo’s, I raised my hand and in an annoyed (and perhaps slightly misguided) fashion said, “Well, it’s not as good.”  To me, the question itself was a misfire. How does one compare an icon of Western art to something that seems like little more than a household trinket? Why should we be juxtaposing men and women Renaissance artists in the first place? Was it not a disservice to the feminist movement to place these images side by side to illustrate the rather obvious point that women in the 16th century didn’t have access to 12,000 pounds of marble?  The aim of the exercise, my professor later revealed, was to help us think through Linda Nochlin’s seminal 1971 essay, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” When I first encountered this article, it struck me with almost religious force. Nochlin’s perceptive examination of the condition of women artists leads her to argue that it was institutions and education—including  “everything that happens to us from the moment we enter this world of meaningful symbols, signs and signals”—that has prevented women from achieving the same levels of artistic greatness as men. She explains that the instinctual, incorrect response to the “woman question” was to “dig up examples of worthy or insufficiently appreciated women artists throughout history” in an attempt to rediscover deserving, but undervalued “minor masters.” In other words, to attempt to rewrite the Western canon by inserting women. Another misstep by feminists, Nochlin writes, would be to assert that since women were clearly not presented with the same opportunities there should be a different standard of “greatness” for women’s art than for men’s. Nochlin’s perspective began to color my vision of the entire course, and the incongruities between her position and the Art Humanities curriculum are staggering. What was the study of Luisa Roldán if not the insertion of an underappreciated “minor master” into a canon that has historically excluded her? What was the pairing of Sofonisba Anguissola with the household names Michelangelo and Raphael if not the creation of a new set of standards that would allow her to be represented? With the semester inching toward a close and my curiosity only growing, I began to form my own version of the so-called “women question,” albeit one whose disputation takes place on a much more micro scale: What are women doing in the curriculum of Masterpieces of Western Art?  The course itself seems to be confused about its philosophy. Some view Art Hum as a history class, others as a foundation for students to develop their own artistic preferences, and still others as a course on visual literacy. When speaking with professors in the department, each term within the title “Masterpieces of Western Art” was thrown into question. “We were discussing even last week how the Core, in general, is getting rid of the designation of masterpieces,” says Professor Zoë Strother, Program Chair for Art Humanities. She believes the term has been weaponized in order to prevent women artists—and other artists working from the margins—from being incorporated into art history courses. This sentiment seems to prevail across the discipline and is one echoed by Griselda Pollock, renowned art historian and fierce critic of Nochlin, along with several professors in the department. “ I think there's a general sense that that concept has outlived its usefulness,” Strother continued. “Masterpiece,” and its often paired term “genius,” are constructs many faculty believe are doing more harm than good due to their centrality within the curriculum. The solution? Democratize the study of art history by removing the term “masterpiece” from the course’s framework.   As discourse continued throughout the semester, it became clear the question of women was inextricably linked to the broader question of the validity of the word “masterpiece.” The term itself invokes exclusion. It places certain works of art on a pedestal, deeming them categorically superior to others. By rendering that term null, it would open up the study of art in a way that doesn’t reinforce all the hierarchies and power structures embedded in the word.   Yet, the foundation of this renegotiation of terms is constantly under scrutiny. In 2018, long-time frustration with Art Humanities and pressures from the political landscape at the time converged and came to a head. Columbia’s graduate students were on strike, Black Lives Matter protests were materializing across the country, and the aftermath of the #MeToo movement had opened up a range of feminist questions within universities. The following year, there was a comprehensive curriculum upheaval for the first time since the course’s addition to the Core in 1947. Professor Noam Elcott, CC’ 00, was at the forefront of these changes after volunteering to take on the role of chair in 2018 with the explicit mandate of reforming the curriculum along the lines of gender and race. “People on the more conservative end were dismissive of efforts to diversify the curriculum and, to say it bluntly, questioned whether the works and artists we were looking at warranted the designation ‘masterpiece.’ … On the more progressive side, there were calls for doing away with the Western focus altogether,” Elcott remarked. While the motion to remove the term “Western” from the course title was outside the purview of Art Hum coordinators, several changes were made. Five years ago, the most salient demand was to introduce women into the course. Now, Art Humanities has more women represented than any other branch of the Core. Seven of the 21 artists taught in the curriculum are women, when previously Art Humanities was an entirely male-focused course.  While increasing the number of women artists taught in Art Hum was undoubtedly an achievement, a new swath of problems is now bubbling to the surface. The course is currently structured in a way that breeds comparison. Each of the 10 units only highlights two to four artists, and the inclusion of women within these small groupings makes it almost impossible not to pick out what differentiates their work from the rest. While this is occasionally insightful (for example, the addition of women provided insight into the home-sphere, something all humans engage with but is rarely represented in art except in works by women), in my experience class discussions were geared towards constant remarks on women’s lack of education and resources, something hardly revelatory or productive.  Moreover, wanting to negate the idea of geniuses and masterpieces while simultaneously incorporating women into the curriculum creates a glaring contradiction. If we separated art from artists’ biographies (biographies which led to the myth of the “genius,” the creator of “masterpieces”), then we would, in theory, view art as entirely independent from the identity of the artist. Yet, isn’t the incorporation of women specifically because of their identity doing exactly the opposite? While the term “masterpieces” appears to be universally frowned upon as a framework for the course, professors are increasingly vexed about whether masterpieces exist in the first place.  Like most Core classes, professors have their own, often jarringly divergent, approaches to the topic. To Professor Ioannis Mylonopoulos, all art must be understood within its historical confines. “We are not art critics. We are art historians,” he said. This sentiment is echoed by many professors in the department. “The idea that there's a timeless, universal group of objects is not something that many people can buy into anymore. So every canon is going to be historically situated,” Strother remarked. When asked whether art can be studied outside of its temporal context, the answer was a resounding no. Upon first reception, this idea rattled me. It seems that the rejection of the term “masterpiece” implies a rejection of aesthetic standards altogether. The logic is as follows: masterpieces are works of art that transcend their historical context, but since no art can be studied atemporally, the concept of a masterpiece ceases to exist. Therefore, all art becomes worthy of study as anthropological objects, and critiques of art can no longer be made on aesthetic grounds. Any judgment passed then becomes a mere matter of “taste.”  Was my entire perspective on art based on a misconception? Are there no standards for art that cut across temporal and geographical boundaries? Must everything be historicised, rationalized, and contextualized into oblivion? These questions swirled within me like a storm. Intuitively, it felt wrong. What else, if not art, is capable of capturing something so essential to the human condition that it is meaningful regardless of the gender, race, nationality, or any other identity category, of the person viewing it? This internal whirlwind was only tempered when Professor Elcott explained to me that, in his opinion, constant historicization was only the “easy answer” to the question of whether art can capture the transcendent aspects of the human experience: “There are elements of human experience that transcend time and place. There are elements of experience that transcend species. So what humans find beautiful is not consistent across time and space, but it's also not completely circumscribed by time and space. The people considered beautiful within their own culture tend to be considered beautiful by people outside that culture as well. And many of the works considered beautiful within a culture are recognized as beautiful outside that culture. Now, beauty is only one element within aesthetic experience and only one aspiration of art. And not necessarily the most important. But as Kant and many philosophers have recognized, these are not entirely culturally specific. And if you ask me, ‘Can art and artworks transcend its time and place and speak across generations and cultures?’, the answer is yes… I think we deceive ourselves and do ourselves a double disservice by pretending otherwise. I think that we misunderstand the capacities of art and we limit the possibilities of reaching across time and across cultures to make deep, aesthetic, intellectual, and ethical connections.” So, why has it been so hard to let go of the idea of a masterpiece?  My entire artistic education—whether it be the visual arts or my own area of study, literature—has been predicated on the belief that certain objects can illuminate something essential about the human condition, that objects that defy the boundaries of historical context and geographical divisions both exist and deserve to be studied. There would be a great irony, as Professor Elcott said to me, in revoking the word “masterpieces” right at the moment when women are deemed capable of achieving all the greatness that the word entails. Despite the countless setbacks women artists have faced, they have still managed to produce great art, because human beings are fiercely, endlessly creative. Even when an entire sect of humanity is constantly repressed in terms of resources and undermined in terms of skill, there are some “masterpieces,” although much fewer, that still have a way of making it to the surface. Perhaps it is this, along with my belief that the “golden nugget” of artistic genius can reside within human beings if we only excavate it out of ourselves, that keeps the allure of the masterpiece pulsing. No matter how romantic, childlike, or fantastical, the dream that a masterpiece could reside within anyone has become far too precious to me to be stamped out.

Seeking portraits of the South Asian diaspora. By Sayuri Govender To me, diaspora has always felt like this: Half your mind is in your current space, critical of the loud American culture that melts away your parents’ accent and replaces it with a dream. The other half is somewhere else, in a familiar yet unknown home, a technicolor past that doesn’t quite belong to you. Sometimes, in a quiet moment, you wish you were there.  Over spring break, my sister and I visited my grandparents in Tampa. On the first night, struck by the decades of memories that filled their home, we asked to see the overfilled family photo books stacked on the bottom shelves of their prayer room. We flipped through hundreds of pictures of our mother and her brothers from when they were children in South Africa to when they were teenagers and adults in New York, where they lived after emigrating in the late ’80s. I kept seeing my face reflected in their smiles.  My family’s history in India, South Africa, and the United States wraps me in a double diaspora. As one of the first born in this country, my Indian identity is complicated by the vastly different regions my family has called home. Since coming to Barnard, I have found myself hesitant to participate in South Asian affinity groups, a product of an inherited insecurity that “They don't see South Africans as Indian enough.” But what does “Indian enough” even mean?  I place my Diwali diyas around my dorm room each fall, wear jhumkas  to class almost every day, and share homemade Indian spices with my roommates. I proudly express Indian traditions in a refusal to be engulfed by American norms, slowly uncovering what my Indian identity means to me. Across the U.S., millions of South Asians share this struggle to carve a space for themselves. At Columbia’s Lenfest Center of the Arts, the recent exhibit “Looking for Ourselves: Gauri Gill’s The Americans, 2000–2007 ” spotlights some of these diverse South Asian American identities.  Held from March 23 to April 7, Looking for Ourselves  seeks to evoke the same sensation as looking through the family photo album for aspects of oneself. Through the lens of New Delhi–based photographer Gauri Gill, her photographs showcase undocumented South Asians running a motel, queer Desis hosting drag performances, American flags embracing Sikh USPS drivers. There were Halloween parties and pujas , weddings and funerals. Pain, love, luck, and loss. In fewer than 50 profound photographs, the South Asian diaspora is rendered as a spectrum. Walking the rooms of the exhibit, I expected to feel more seen. Instead, I was struck by how unfamiliar the images felt to me—and how exciting that was. Gill uncovers a lineage of struggle, discrimination, and defeat. It is rare for these  stories of the Asian American experience to be put on display, ones that disrupt the model minority myth and expose xenophobia, poverty, and racism. Still, I see remnants of my own family’s photographs, their sanguine faces mirrored back in Gill’s photographs.  Looking for Ourselves  and my own experiences imbue me with an overwhelming desire to understand the vastness of the South Asian American identity. With this same sentiment, students and faculty at Barnard are spearheading the development of the long-awaited Asian Diaspora and Asian American Studies Program. Aiming to bring in a specific course of study that addresses diasporic Asian identities, the ADAAS program promises to use postcolonial, transnational, queer, feminist, and other critical lenses to discuss the Asian diasporic heritage. ADAAS faculty and its student advisory board have recently submitted  their proposal to Barnard’s administration, hoping for the curriculum to be implemented as soon as this coming fall semester.  Kristen Santarin, BC ’24, a member of the ADAAS student advisory board, reflected on the significance of such a program. At elite and predominantly white institutions like Columbia, minority students actively seek cultural communities to stay afloat. Santarin and fellow advisory board members believe they should be able to find support in their academics as well. In her eyes, the ADAAS will provide students with interdisciplinary means to explore the historical and contemporary implications of their identity. Moreover, she sees the program as “a way to inform students about the way that they exist in the world.” Crucially, ADAAS centers a critical analysis of Asian diasporic identities at large, advancing traditional curricula in other ethnic studies majors at Columbia. ADAAS is not just a curriculum, but a “recognition of your existence on this campus,” she says. Through the promise of new programming, and exhibitions like  Looking for Ourselves , I find a burgeoning recognition of my own existence on this campus. In Gill’s photographs of South Asians across the U.S., I see familiarity and mystery at once. This visibility—whether in a photography exhibit at the Lenfest Center, in memories of my family’s early life in the U.S., or in an academic space that spotlights the Asian diaspora—is an empowering and electric force. It is what I have sought, what I have found, and what I hope to continue finding.

By Aliza Yona Abusch-Magder My grandmother, my Oma, has hands I have come to know as a symbol: that feeling of being a ripening fruit on an oakheavy heritage. Her hands wrinkle looser and looser; yet my plumskin is pressed, taught with my senseofself forming, fibrous. That is what her hands mean to me— miraculous glory that is nature existing forever in cycles of tense, condensed, at the root of some sense. She loved the loom— was perennially present at its foot like Penelope— tied to home— tethered by fear-grief of homelessness. For us, she wanted nothing more than wings. So she restored the wings of her childhood folktales, and the pattern was an oral history, so it was imprecise, and she spent thirty years collecting heritage-tree leaf-feathers spread by the wind of time ever-lapsing. And at my bat mitzvah, I received wings of down, sea hay, and horse hair, glued by the blood of the generation that could never become a namesake— fixed dry by death. It took three generations until the blood was viscous, could be made use of, to restore the privileged wings that allow integration without assimilation, so that we may fly home to diaspora.  In this rupture pools blood of my pen— the inky pigment dyes the garment of my lifehood. I color the wool that Oma sews towards a Tallis. Looming. Weaving. One of the Pale of Settlement bitches. A girl wrote me a poem saying we would have shared stale bread in the ghetto— a token of the care kinship comradery of sapphic embrace. In the pantry of her soul, I saw no love in a starved life. My legacy is not loitering in pain. I am not cold, stale— I am warm, beating, keeping-alive.  My namesake, doubly maternal great grandmother, was wartime glamor like Rosie, though her body was the flesh front line and symbol of strength at home. She was starved, and in her red leather purse, next to her matte red lipstick, she kept two cyanide tablets— the other for her infant, my Oma. Living with death made her all the more irresistible because men liked how she needed to be saved and she was pretty enough to be worth saving. But she knew she only ever had herself, both the damsel and the knight. And thus, at twenty-two, she took the reins of her budding life in the winter of fascism. Stories turn cruelty into thread, later woven into fabric, later fashioned into garments of tradition.