4. Morse/Stiles…y u haz no forks?

3. Everyone in Gheav…is too damn high

2. One does not simply…split a Wenzel!

1. –Daddy I wet the bed. –Hold on, let me get the YDN.

Students can now choose Ethnicity, Race, and Migration as their sole concentration of studies. The faculty’s decision is part of a larger trend within the University’s academic policy: approaching the liberal arts not as a mixture of independent disciplines, but as an interdisciplinary study of a single subject.

OUTGOING: Democracy

The New Haven Independent announced that it will temporarily suspend publication of reader comments. According to the Independent’s editor Paul Bass ’82, the discussion had degenerated to the lowest levels of ad hominem nastiness. The news site hopes to open the comments again as soon as the staff develops a strategy to keep the discourse civil.

For Yalies whose annual exposure to football does not last beyond the second half of The Game, this year’s NFL post-season showed just how exciting the gridiron can be. There was something for everyone. Tim Tebow (have you heard about his Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ?) stunned the football world with an overtime win over Pittsburgh, and followed it up the next week against Tom Brady’s Patriots by reverting to the statistical mean in a game Tucker Max dubbed “the GQ model vs. the virgin.” In the conference championship games, Baltimore’s Billy Cundiff missed a gimme 32-yard field goal in the final seconds, once again demonstrating that Bill Belichick has made a deal with the devil.  On Super Bowl Sunday, Eli Manning’s 9-7 Giants bested Brady’s Patriots in thrilling fashion, and on Tuesday “die-hard” Giants fans turned out for the team’s victory parade (“Who’s your favorite player?” “Sanchez!”). Oh yeah, 2012.
Gimme more!

D: Battle of the weeks

True Love Week and Sex Week have been swamping the Yale campus with expert opinions on the nature of intimacy. True Love Week titillated its 15-person audiences with such topics as “Chastity and Human Goods” and “What They Didn’t Teach You in Sex Ed.”  With a budget of $6,000, we had hoped for more entertainment from a group attempting to lure many undergraduates away from their favorite hot, sweaty extracurricular.  We’re beginning to feel like True Love Week is the Princeton of the themed weeks—it just doesn’t matter.

That said, Sex Week events may seem a bit too sexually avant-garde for the average Yalie.  Remember, we didn’t all grow up in Portland. We’ve got some conservatives, too, who might not be psyched by a loud and proud defense of BDSM.  However, we did find Claire Cavanah’s labia hand puppet more informative than the average TA.  If the Sex Week coordinators can get attendance to count as a Biology Lab credit, we’re in.
In the long run, we hope that people realize that both sex and true love should happen more than one week a year, and neither should require
UOFC funding.

F: Night of terror

The YDN reported that on Saturday night, students raided Occupy New Haven and stole some signs in what an Occupier called a “night of terror.”  We want to know which Einstein thought, “Yeah, Yalies stealing from a group that claims to stand for the 99% is in no way going to be misconstrued as the rich stealing from the poor.”  And his buddy who chimed in “Let’s post this on the Internet!  No one will ever find out it was us or associate what we did with the YPU party we’re in!” Come on guys, you’re making the rest of us look bad.

That said—seriously, Occupy? “Night of terror?” What is this, 1942?

–Will Ferraro, Josh Ruck, and Jess Moore

I used to want them. I was always a successful kid, a kid who was going places, and the place Future Sam was bound for would feature a nice house with a big yard, a child or two, and—the linchpin—a wife. The failed loves and thwarted romances piled up as I entered middle and then high school, but the dream life persisted, shiny and static, like the most convincing of mirages.

I did not think to doubt it because no one else seemed to, because adults didn’t not get married and so of course I would as well. And I wouldn’t need to do anything to make it happen, because it was conspiring all around me on my behalf.  Marriage, like puberty before it and death sometime after it, would take care of itself; I would get a marriage certificate as surely as I’d gotten a birth certificate, as surely as I would get high school and college diplomas: one more sheet in the paper trail of a life well lived.

As high school advanced, more loves failed and more romances were thwarted, and I began to harbor distressing suspicions of my difference. They registered as a gnawing pain. No one else seemed to worry about missing the marriage track because they were already on it; I knew that the hookups and movie dates my classmates were stumbling through were inadvertent first steps in the direction I yearned after, and the farther I felt myself drifting away from it the more desperately I clung to its promise.

At 17 I read Autobiography of Red for the first time and felt my world crack open.  In it, Anne Carson retells the myth of Herakles slaying the red monster Geryon as a current-day queer bildungsroman: The young monster Geryon falls in love with the young rebel Herakles, and over the course of the verse novel this love melts into something less stable, less nameable. It makes room for variables, for distance, for other people.  I still felt isolated and crippled with difference—and it would be another couple of years before I identified as anything other than straight—but the lock on the pen had sprung loose.  The gnawing pain finally had a pasture to graze in; horizon wheeled out in every direction.

When I met a boy at the end of my freshman year of college whom I thought I could fall in love with (though we never quite made it that far), that formerly crippling difference reified and demanded to be accounted for—even threatening, for awhile, to bolt back into its pen.  Provided with a new kind of object on which to fix themselves, my desires began to feel materially consequential. Like a protective parent, I was terrified of what would happen when my difference came into contact with a world that seemed to have no place for it, but I was quick to learn how much fugitive variety the rest of that world was harboring. The dream life finally dissolved into air. I began to imagine alternatives.

***

Queer theorist and English scholar Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick wrote a lot of things that have become essential to how I understand myself, but her most important insight might also have been her most basic: People are different from each other.  Our culture works tirelessly to reproduce a single kind of love.  The actors change, and today even the actors’ genders change (a fact that is itself monumental and deserving of applause), but their desires don’t. Or if they do, we are meant to understand that they shouldn’t, because they are inevitably punished for it.  And so that emailed poster with its wedding rings left me ruffled, because I can read it as nothing other than a symptom of the painful and ubiquitous negation that has taken me years to overcome.

I did not go to any of the True Love Week events—the average week is exhausting enough, and it wouldn’t have felt productive to subject myself to them—but on Sunday evening I did make it out to Sex Week’s “Writing Sex” panel.  Both of the queer women on the panel discussed how long it took them to arrive at their sexual identities. One invoked the little girl in the nameless town who might not know she’s a lesbian until she stumbles onto a blog that arms her with that word and guides her to its meaning.  It struck me then how convincingly our cultural artifacts present themselves as mirrors, and how profoundly alone one feels looking into that mirror and not recognizing oneself among the people staring back.

How isolating to be the child who might understand herself as asexual or pansexual or polyamorous if she were only equipped with the words for it. How scary (though also, I hope, how thrilling) to be the child who must invent new words or even languages with which to order an emotional and sexual life more rich and particular than our current vocabulary can accommodate. That child doesn’t need to be shown the wedding rings; she’s bombarded with them every day.

Laws have a teaching effect—they’re not meant simply to codify dominant practices and beliefs, but to guide us towards better behavior, better thinking.  By recognizing marriage and marriage alone as a relationship structure worthy of affirmation and reward (because in addition to social privilege and cultural approval, the legal rewards are numerous and material), our government teaches us to share in that value system.

***

Though I oppose marriage’s very existence as a legal institution, it still pains me to know that many of those same people complicit in its glorification are prejudiced enough to insist on my exclusion from it.  And so I cried—of course I cried—right there on the subway platform that night in June when I learned that the state of New York had legalized same-sex marriage.  Given the unrelenting reports of gay teen suicides over the last couple of years, I do not doubt that more than a few lives were saved by the news.

Because I imagine that every additional state that passes same-sex marriage legislation gives a few more queer children the hope they need to stay alive, I have to support it.  I am haunted by these children, these beautiful children driven to death by their peers’ and their culture’s brutal refusal of their identities, and I think of them daily.

But I also worry that our affirmation of marriage not simply as one kind of acceptable and fulfilling relationship but as an inalienable right precludes too many queer children from imagining their own best futures.  In my opposition to the institution, I imagine these futures with them.

“There is no person without a world,” writes Anne Carson.  The quote is taped to the wall above my desk.  Ironically or not, exploring my particular emotional topography has led me to believe that long-term monogamy may suit my sexual and emotional needs best after all.  When my personal world feels sufficiently charted, I’ll probably settle into something more or less resembling a marriage, though I can’t say with what kind of partner and I won’t ask the government to register it as such.  Still, it gives me great joy to imagine how many other people’s worlds I bump up against in the course of a day, and how dramatically their landscapes might differ from my own.

Two nights ago I caught up with a friend over bacon-egg-and-cheese sandwiches at Gourmet Heaven.  It was 2:30 a.m., and we were complaining about work; among the things I had to complain about was this essay.  When I mentioned that I would be writing about not wanting to get married, his eyebrows furrowed, then softened in concern.  “You don’t? Sam, that’s really sad.”

It occurred to me then that I’d never been happier.

YH: So let’s start from the beginning. How did youtwo meet?
MS: Well I was an undergraduate at Stanford, a senior, and he was a first year graduate student. It was spring break and he was in my apartment building, actually visiting another girl! I came downstairs and stole him away. Is that right?
RS: That’s right. I was really there for another girl! But  by the end of the night, I leaned over and said, “Are you busy tomorrow?” And two months later we were married.

YH: Two months later?
RS: Yes. Can you imagine? That you’d be meeting someone over spring break and be wed by June.
MS: Well for me it was either that or going home for the summer. But also at that time, we weren’t really comfortable living together before marriage. It was different.

YH: So did you come to Yale with the intention of working together or did it just sort of happen?
RS:  We didn’t come with the intention, it just sort of turned out this way. We came in 1974, after I had just received my Ph.D and she was still working on hers. We had just come from some time at Williams. So for the first few years, I was teaching and she was finishing up her Ph.D.
MS: And having our second child. I started teaching here in 1976.

YH: Did you have apprehensions about working together?
RS: No apprehensions. And it wasn’t as if we were both on the tenure track. For instance, there was a woman down the hall who came with her husband to Yale, and the history department wanted to hire both of them. But she was uncomfortable with it and she was put in a different department instead. Some people are apprehensive if they are both in the tenure track and sitting in on the same meetings. But in the end, we did not look forward to a commuting marriage. We’d rather be in the same town, at the same university, even if one of us was only working part time.

YH: So what’s the key to working together successfully? Do you talk about your work at home?
MS: Yes, we really talk shop all the time. I don’t think it’s something you can separate from life at home.
RS: I can’t imagine not having conversations about our days or what we’re doing. It is something we bring back home definitely.
MS: And our fields are also so close.
RS: What always amuses me is how during certain slots of the day I find that we talk a lot about our classes and work. For instance when we walk the dog every morning.
MS: Yes that’s right. In the morning with the dog, we’ll talk about what students we’re seeing later or what books we’re going to discuss. I guess that’s because we have the whole day ahead of us and we like to share things.

YH:  Does what you teach ever overlap?
MS: Yes. I’ve taught a lot of African American Studies classes—so that’s a field we share as teachers.
RS: Or now I’m offering a class on American artists in African American books and we are intentionally spending two weeks on children’s literature, something my wife has a lot of experience in. She has been teaching a seminar on children’s literature for years.
MS: And we’re both also really interested in illustration and the importance images have to works. We also both always teach Huckleberry Finn, though in different contexts.

YH: Do you ever disagree about a text you’re teaching?
MS: Well it is hard to disagree about literature. Hopefully we’ll just enlarge each other’s views and opinions. Though I guess it is possible to be wrong. [Laughs.]

YH: In general do you have similar taste in literature?
MS: Hmm. I’ve actually never really thought about that.
RS: I guess there are areas of reading you pursue, like scientific writing, that I don’t.
MS: Yeah I enjoy reading about science, though I guess that’s not really literature and he does not. Or maybe with popular novels, we diverge and are drawn to different ones. Though I don’t spend much time reading those.

YH: What have you observed about the relationship culture at Yale during your time here?
MS:  I’m not sure I know too much about what’s really going on. Of course I’m aware occasionally when a student is upset and I presume it has to do with his/her personal life. But I guess I would say that it is very different from when we were students. When we were students, people had partners or they didn’t. It was a clear thing you knew about a person. It was almost something that defined them.  It was a very clear dichotomy. My impression now is that it’s not that clear of a divide, it’s often more complicated, but how would I know?
RS: I would also say people seem to be parts of groups now as opposed to couples.
MS: And that’s really a great thing. Students now come from a more collaborative school culture. When we went to school, it was much more cut throat and you were trained to sort of be a lone soldier. Nowadays, people are raised to appreciate doing things in groups, to learn to be a collaborator and a participant in a larger group.
RS: And maybe that is something Yale is looking for as well. You know the admissions process is a long and complicated one and maybe that is something they really look for in the students: the ability to collaborate and work well in the context of groups.

YH: You’re reaching the 45 year mark in just a few months. Any words of advice for sustaining a relationship?
RS: Be good to each other. Support each other. It is not an exaggeration to say we put each other through graduate school.
MS: Be respectful of one another. And know that relationships change over the years. With luck they get better. But a lot of people don’t seem to want that and want to stay in the youthful romantic stage forever. But things change. Life changes you.

—This interview was condensed by the author

Informed by Bausch’s revolutionary vision of modern dance, Wenders destroys the distinction between life and theatre in a provocative, almost two-hour-long explosion of pirouettes and acrobatics. In Pina, dance is no longer simply a performance. Neither is it a mode of expression. It is life itself.

Each dancer’s body, as told by Bausch, is a protean tale, at once soulful and tempestuous, continually transforming. The metamorphoses of the human body become a metaphor for the varying faces of the human condition. And the effect is at once sacral and perverse, rousing and hypnotic—Pina approaches a manifestation of the struggle to find transcendence.

The dance sequences are interspersed with the testimonies of Bausch’s associates. Their voices are heard but only as voiceovers—the camera rests languidly on their silent faces. And throughout, Bausch herself remains a distant, elusive figure, inscrutable till the end. Wenders allows the viewer only glimpses of the famed choreographer, but her presence is pervasive—perhaps most so, tellingly, in close-ups on the faces of her dancers. Ultimately, Wenders’ sensuous tribute to her legacy does not provide an intimate vision of the woman herself, but it does succeed, more appropriately, in perpetuating the enigma that was her life and work.

The bottom floor contains antique pieces—Hamlet and the first through fourth folios peer up at you, their many editions a physical testimony to Shakespeare’s vitality. The second story connects pieces thematically (Shakespeare denial, Shakespeare and Yale) rather than chronologically. Though the juxtaposition of pieces from sundry eras can make it difficult to appreciate the newer items, it reminds us that Shakespeare is, as the exhibition notes, “always more than an academic topic.” Shakespeare is, instead, “a cultural institution.”

My favorite pieces were the palm-sized Pickering plays, and Dickens’ wedding seating chart done exclusively in Shakespeare quotes. Skip the boring section about the Malone vs. Theobald editing debate, and avoid the random Carl von Vechlen photographs of fifties Shakespeare actors. But everything else at “Remembering Shakespeare” really is worthwhile, and there’s a lot of it. It’s refreshing to find masterful wit in something other than a meme, so go. And bring a date.

The Lion’s Roar stays safely within its pleasant ethereal sound on the title track, as well as on “Emmylou” and “Wolf.”  But the album loses its appeal when it compares itself to legendary folk artists. “Blue” is First Aid Kit’s tribute to Joni Mitchell’s song of the same name. Where Mitchell sings, “Blue, here is a shell for you / …There is your song from me,” their lyric, “You’re just a shell of your former you,” is indeed, a shell of an earlier thought. First Aid Kit’s attempt to sink its teeth in deep falls short of its album’s promised roar.

The big band approach (17 members, to be exact) avoids overcrowding by giving each instrument a chance to shine, from bombastic disco strings to frenetic percussion to intergalactic synth—all headed by the honey-voiced Adeline Michele. The album almost never tries to be anything more than a good time (album highlight “Makeover” is a dark exception). Michele is certainly in on the fun, too, easily moving from sexy (“All Through the Night”) to soulful (“Cocaine Blues”). And she’s more than happy to step aside and let the instruments take over, most notably on epic album closer “Karawane.” The slick production gives a sparkle to the authentic sounds, making them sound fresh, not dated. Escort’s debut is the perfect soundtrack to a sophisticated late-night dance party.

The Marriage Plot tells the story of three graduating Brown students in 1982: WASPy literature scholar Madeleine Hanna and her two suitors, the charismatic bi-polar biologist, Leonard Bankhead, and the bookish, religious Mitchell Grammaticus. Eugenides, who himself graduated from Brown in 1982, has shifted his focus from his childhood in the Midwest to his young adulthood. His sense of the time, both intellectually and culturally, is impeccable. The novel is unabashedly intellectual, grounded in the high-theory academia that ran rampant in early 1980s literary criticism—references to Derrida, Foucault, and Barthes are littered throughout the work, and Eugenides’ characters are almost absurdly self-conscious in their engagement with these names.

The entirety of the first section, a sprawling 150 pages, tells the story of a single day in Madeleine’s life, interspersed with the history that led her there. In this section Eugenides shows off his talents as master-storyteller. He achieves a fascinating, multi-layered character and an all-too- real picture of her wealth, intelligence, and resulting ennui. The rest of the novel shifts smoothly between Madeleine and Leonard’s rocky relationship and Mitchell’s international quest for religious enlightenment. These sections are well-realized, with Mitchell’s story receiving a surprisingly subtle and humorous treatment. Madeleine and Leonard’s story can be maudlin, thanks largely to its depiction of manic depression, but it is full of beautiful passages and compelling scenes.

And this technical brilliance is fine, but it masks a fundamental hollowness. Take the title of the book itself. It nominally refers to Madeleine’s senior thesis and eventual professional scholarly concentration—the use of marriage in the Victorian novel. In practice, however, while dozens of pages are devoted to Barthes’ Lover’s Discourse and the study of semiotics, “Victorian literature” is only a monolithic, abstract entity, present as a vague theoretical backing for Madeleine’s eventual romantic dalliances.

Further, Madeleine herself is supposedly a modern woman, secure in her sexuality and professional interests. But Eugenides defines her only in the context of her relationships with Leonard and Mitchell, as an object of their romantic devotion. Madeleine is romanticized in the most literal sense, to the extent that her own agency is questionable. This is not to suggest that Eugenides’ is actively sexist, but rather that Madeleine, like the novel, is hollow at her core.

Similarly, Mitchell’s quest for religious understanding receives only cursory treatment. His motivations often boil down to a yearning for Madeleine that, while accurately capturing the absurdities of youthful infatuation, can never move into anything deeper, or more interesting, because of that honesty. Mitchell is a stereotype of the young wanderer comfortably travelling through Europe and India in the pursuit of spiritual enlightenment. (He’s clearly a stand-in for Eugenides, but thankfully he’s not as self-hating or naïve as most youthful authorial surrogates tend to be.) Regardless, his eventual spiritual and self-discovery are significant only in that they lead to a romantic maturity. Even Leonard, the seldom-heard-from enigma who is defined by his intelligence and manic depression, exists primarily as a foil for Mitchell and an impetus for Madeleine’s actions. Each character is defined through the others, and while this interdependence lends the work a sense of classical unity, it’s meaningless because the motives feel lifeless, devoid of human emotion. Eugenides has wasted his prodigious talents on puppets, facsimiles of human life that are simplified to the point of mundane absurdity.

For the most part, I enjoyed reading The Marriage Plot immensely—Eugenides is undoubtedly working his way towards an unabashed masterpiece and there are few things more viscerally pleasing than witnessing a living master at work. This attempt, however, is cluttered with the pseudo-intellectualism of his youth, caged in the gilded charm of his prose, and curbed by the staleness of his characters and their relationships. I continued to wait for Eugenides to subvert or rethink them, to make his work as powerful emotionally as it is intellectually. He falls short. My sourness, my doubt, emerged slowly but inexorably as the work progressed. Heresy or not, this much is certain: The Marriage Plot is no masterpiece.