Weekend

WEEKEND// FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2012

BARD B4SHAKESPEARE AT THE BEINECKECaroline McCullough traces the cultural capi-tal of Shakespeare’s genius.

BIKEPOLO B5NEW HAVEN’S QUIRKIEST SPORTCaroline Tracey hits the asphalt and scores some chuckers at the AT&T parking lot.

DESKS B9THE SECRETS OF YALE FURNITURETapley Stephenson tells the stories behind the desks of Yale’s administrators.

FRAT CITY? Why two new fraternities stand on shaky ground

// BY CAROLINE TAN

WEEKEND VIEWSPAGE B2 YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

Ladies and gentlemen, taxes are very important. Taxes fund things we all like and depend upon: health care for the elderly, public schools, roads and infra-structure, and the military. I think if we paid higher taxes, we would be able to get more great stu!! Another thing: isn’t it nutty that rich people pay a smaller per-centage of their income to the govern-ment than middle-class people? I think that’s pretty crazy. I guess if I had to sum up my opinion on taxes in three words, they would be these: “Taxes, taxes, taxes.” And another thing —

Sorry, hold on. It looks like I just got an email.

I wonder why my parents’ accountant would possibly need to email me. And why is the subject line “Your tax return?” I don’t need to file a tax return, right? Only adults have to do that, and I’m def-initely not an adult. Plus I make, like, no money. Well, I suppose it is my civic duty to pay taxes. What do I owe, like $20?

OK, let’s scroll right down. Wow, this thing is, like, 30 pages long. And here it is. WHAT!? HOW IS IT POSSIBLE THAT I OWE [amount of money]?!? THAT IS LIKE [fraction] OF [total amount of money I made this year]!!! PLUS I ONLY EARNED [total amount of money I made this year]!!! WHICH IS NOT ENOUGH FOR ME TO HAVE TO PAY [amount of money]!!!

OK, Jordan, stop crying and vomiting everywhere. It’s going to be OK. You see, some of the money you earned this year came in the form of a grant, for which a 1099 form is issued instead of a W2 form. This means that the Social Security tax is not withheld by the hiring firm, so you need to pay that tax now —

SHUT UP. SHUT UP. SHUT UP. YEAH, YEAH, YEAH. BUT STILL. I. WHAT. BUT. HUH? WELL. IT’S NOT RIGHT. IT JUST SEEMS EXCESSIVE. BECAUSE THAT’S MY MONEY AND I EARNED IT, AND I DESERVE TO KEEP IT.

Jordan. You love taxes! How cool is it that you get to give some of your money to the government you love so much? Plus, don’t you think it would be awfully ironic that you, who support raising taxes, would object so strongly now that you have to pay, yourself? Don’t you think that would be awfully hypocritical?

BUT DON’T YOU SEE THE DIF-FERENCE? I SHOULDN’T HAVE TO PAY BECAUSE IT’S MY MONEY AND I EARNED IT. WHY CAN’T THEY JUST MAKE SOME RICH DUDE PAY [amount of money] EXTRA? HE WOULDN’T CARE! HE’S RICH! PLUS, SOCIAL SECURITY WILL TOTALLY BE BANK-RUPT BY THE TIME I’M OLD ENOUGH TO BENEFIT FROM IT.

Cut the crap, Jordan. This obviously isn’t about [amount of money]. This is

about something more, I think. What’s bothering you?

NOTHING. IT’S JUST IT’S A LOT OF MONEY. JUST LEAVE ME ALONE. I WANT TO CRY A BIT.

Jordan.OK. Fine. I guess having to pay taxes

just means times are changing. For all the years I’ve looked forward to being an adult, now that I’m on the precipice, it makes me anxious. In past years, savings were just that — they never amounted to much. But, I mean, look at this tax! I’m paying into Social Security; that’s all about setting aside for later, making investments toward a future, toward a secure life. And I guess I’m anxious about taking responsibility for my own destiny, you know? It’s exciting, but it’s a little scary.

Wow, Jordan. That was really honest of you. I think I’m feeling a lot of the same apprehension as you. I guess that makes sense, since I am you. But you’re ready, Jordan. We’re ready —

JUST KIDDING. I WAS LYING. NO WAY I’M PAYING THIS. RING ME UP FOR TAX EVASION!!! I DON’T EVEN CARE!!! I WILL BE YOUNG FOREVER!!! I WILL NEVER DIE!!!

Contact JORDAN ASCHER at [email protected] .

DEATH TO TAXES// BY JORDAN ASCHER

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Friends, Romans, country-men: I’m a pretty hairy guy. I know that. Do you think you need to come up with euphemisms in order to make that observation in a sensitive and considerate man-ner? Because you don’t — really! I have hair on my arms, I have hair on my legs, I have hair under my armpits and on my chest and stomach and even one lit-tle stray bastard that keeps pop-ping up just above my sternum. More importantly, I usually have a pretty thick covering of the stu! on my cheeks, chin, neck and upper lip area.

Maybe I should make myself plain (or “pull back the razor blade,” if you will, ha ha). I’ll often be at a social gathering (I’m very popular, you know) at which, in the middle of a conversation that clearly isn’t going anywhere, or apropos of nothing while passing

by, a friend or an acquaintance or even a stranger will say some-thing like, “Oh, you’re growing your beard out!”

The sentiment in itself isn’t shocking. What is hair-raising (okay, last one — I promise) is the tone in which it’s usually deliv-ered. In my copious experience, it’s most frequently said in the same way you’d say, “Hey, you’ve been working out!”

But here’s the thing: as much as I love compliments on my appearance, deserved or oth-erwise, cultivating facial hair is not equivalent to doing lat pull-downs. It’s not hard. In fact, there are really only two necessary pre-conditions for “growing one’s beard out”:

the ability to grow a beardthe ability not to shave for a while.

So when you say, “Oh, you’re

growing your beard out!” what you’re really saying is, “Oh, you’re relatively hairy AND too lazy to wake up five minutes ear-lier in the morning to take a trim-mer to that bad boy.”

Food for thought.I bring this up because at the

moment, we, as a nation, seem pretty divided on the issue of beardliness. I’m not talking about whether you prefer your faceplant partner fuzzy or smooth; that’s just a matter of comfort. I’m talking about the broader issue of whether beards are things on our faces or things that exist out-side of our faces. Case in point: the vaguely embarrassing phe-nomenon of the beard holiday. In case you’re not familiar, there are designated periods of the year — some seasonal (a “winter beard,” a “summer beard”), some monthly (Octobeard, Novem-

beard, Decembeard, Manuary, Manly March) — during which certain men capable of follicular development band together and agree not to trim or alter their facegardens in any way.

I understand that the experi-ence is meant to be at least a little tongue-in-cheek. But I am con-vinced that all of this so-called “ironic masculinity,” at the root (sorry, I can’t help myself), is really just a screen to obscure a genuine generational insecurity about (of all the arbitrary shit) the ability to sprout “filamentous biomaterial” out of our faces. It’s a … well, it’s a beard, one we’ve grown to protect our rosy, vulner-able little cheeks from the sting of scrutiny and the possibility that we may not like what we find underneath.

As someone who gets a five o’clock shadow at, like, 9 a.m., I

can say that the genetic predis-position toward beardliness does not o!er you any benefits, aside from maybe making you look slightly older, maybe. In fact, I had the crappy fortune of being one of the first boys in my class to hit puberty in middle school, a hormonal shift which resulted in a wispy ’stache I found positively mortifying at best and socially ostracizing at worst. What I would’ve given to be hair-free in those days!

Evolutionary advantages not-withstanding, facial hair is really just another accessory. You can grow it out for a few weeks and then shave it into weird shapes, but I promise you there are way cooler ways to get attention at a party. Like literally any magic trick, for instance. Not only is magic more entertaining, but it also require much less invest-

ment than the time and care it takes to grow a beard and shave it into a pair of funny mutton chops right before a rager.

I don’t know who’s behind this (my current theory is that some-body’s got a vendetta against Gil-lette), but it would be great if it he or she would stop. It’s not a skill, folks. It’s not a hobby. I’m not a hero, though I’d be lying if I said I didn’t kind of like being treated like one.

So let’s stop beating around the beard. Some people can grow it; some people can’t. But isn’t the acceptance of those benign dif-ferences what makes America so great?

Yeah, I didn’t think this would go there either; just let it happen.

DEMOCRACY!

Contact AUSTIN BERNHARDT at [email protected] .

An Hairing of Grievances// BY AUSTIN BERNHARDT

F R I DAYF E B R U A R Y 2 4

“MORE EUROPE: THE EU’S RESPONSE TO THE DEBT CRISIS”

202 Luce Hall // 2:00 p.m.

Hungary’s ambassador to the U.S. György Szapáry gives us more more more.

SETTLERS OF CATAN TOURNAMENT — FUNDRAISER

Asian-American Cultural Center // 6:00 p.m.

What better way to fundraise than playing board games?! We’re not going to pretend we know this game, but maybe you do. Proceeds go to the YIRA 2012 Philippines Spring Trip.

“IF ALL MEN ARE EQUAL, THEN ALL MEN ARE OF THE SAME ESSENCE,

AND THE COMMON ESSENCE ENTITLES THEM OF THE SAME

FUNDAMENTAL RIGHTS AND EQUAL LIBERTY … IN SHORT, JUSTICE

IS ANOTHER NAME OF LIBERTY, EQUALITY AND FRATERNITY.”

B. R. AMBEDKAR

“CLASSICAL INDIA” — LECTURE DEMONSTRATION ON SOUTH

INDIAN MUSIC & DANCEMorse-Stiles Dance Studio // 7:00 mp.m.

Get your groove on with some Bharatanatyam.

// TAOTAO HOLMES

After the Associated Press revealed that the New York Police Department had been monitoring Muslim student associations at Yale, we were able to obtain access to the O"cial Police Report, which reveals the shocking find-ings of years of expert investigation on Yale’s campus. Students are advised to read in the safety and privacy of their rooms.

“The New York Police Department submits the fol-lowing report to the City of New York, Michael Bloom-berg, mayor, for consideration in maintaining homeland security.

Our findings regarding Yale University’s history and alumni highlight the institution’s long history of terror-ism and subversive activity. One of its earliest graduates, a Mr. Nathan Hale, is infamously remembered as one of the nation’s first experts in espionage. Not only did the University allow this spy to graduate but it also honors him today with a statue on ‘the Old Campus’ that bears his final insurgent utterances, ‘I only regret that I have but one life to give for my country.’ Fanatical rhetoric has even been incorporated into ‘Bright College Years,’ the University’s uno"cial alma mater. The lines, ‘the short-est, gladdest years of life,’ clearly invoke the glory of a short but honorable life sacrificed for the extremist cause of jihad. There are also clear allusions to the Arab Spring in the lines, ‘The seasons come, the seasons go,/ The earth is green or white with snow,’ the latter half a clear reference to the ashen remains of American civilization as we know it.

Past aside, the current environment at the University reveals greater cause for concern. We believe it is no coin-cidence that a popular religious meeting place on campus is named Battell Chapel, an open reference to an impend-ing battell with American values. Some nights earlier this year, our surveillance teams were able to pick up the tra-ditional extremist chants of Yale students. The tran-script reads, ‘The ’Houn, the ’Houn, the ’Houn is on fire! We don’t need no water, let the motherfucker burn!’ This inflammatory slogan both promotes the fiery destruc-tion of American infrastructure and demonizes the classic American hero, John C. Calhoun. Students have taken to nourishing themselves with traditional Middle Eastern cuisine, frequenting the suspicious local falafel establishment, Mamoun’s. Who ‘Mamoun’ is remains to be ascertained. Other surveillance has gleaned that stu-dents have been gathering and organizing at both ‘Blue States.’ We have determined this to be code for impend-ing battells in two of the several New England liberal states, including Massachusetts, Connecticut, or, pos-sibly, New York.

As this report confirms, it is absolutely necessary that the United States government prepare for battell with these Yale militants before President Levin officially declares fatwa on the innocent citizens of this country.

Report filed by:Sgt. N. FergusonNew York Police Department”*Please note: this message is fictional and was not cre-

ated by the authors of this View.

Contact CODY KAHOE and CALEB MADISON at [email protected] and [email protected] .

Message from NYPD re: the Yale Community// BY CODY KAHOE AND CALEB MADISON

“

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2012 · yaledailynews.com PAGE B3

WEEKEND COVER

W

F R I D A YF E B R U A R Y 2 4

YALE ANIME SOCIETY PRESENTS: “MONONOKE”

Saybrook TV Room // 7:30 p.m.

Even if you are sick of hearing about end-less events with Yale Anime, “Mono-noke” is stellar. Get over it and get to the Saybrook TV Room.

YALE PHILHARMONIA, ALDO PARISOT, XU ZHONG, GUEST

CONDUCTORS: HAYDN AND MAHLER

Sprague Memorial Hall // 8:00 p.m.

Mahhhhllllleeerrr. Everyone bleats: Mahhhhllllleeerrr.

“LICENSE TO TAP”O!-Broadway Theater // 8:00 p.m.

Yale TAPS’ Annual Show, Missy Elliot-inclusive.

“OF A SUDDEN HE FELT THAT FRATERNITY LIFE WAS THE ONLY WAY TO EXIST AT COLLEGE. HOW

COULD HE HAVE DOUBTED?”

FERROL SAMS

AMONG BROTHERS

elcome to Frat City.

In a three minute, 16 sec-

ond music video that surfaced last December, Yale rappers “DaLeg-end” and “MC Lars” captured that simple message in their musical debut, informing Yale students that “frat city … runs the whole school.” The video continues, rhythmically chanting a sequence of different Yale fraternities — including 3, Delta Kappa Epsilon and Zeta Psi.

While the video acknowledges the traditionally athletic frater-nities ADPhi, DKE and Zeta, Yale is also home to a variety of other Greek organizations, includ-ing Sigma Alpha Epsilon, Sigma Phi Epsilon and Alpha Epsilon Pi, which all typically draw members of the student body beyond just sports teams.

But while existing fraternities on campus have attracted inter-ested students every year, recent e!orts to establish new chapters have not been met with the same success.

Early last month, Geoff McDonald, coordinator of chapter and colony development for Alpha Sigma Phi fraternity, arrived on campus in an effort to recruit students interested in starting an Alpha Sig chapter at the Uni-versity. Though McDonald had intended to be on campus for one month to build a solid group of “founding members” for an Alpha Sig chapter at Yale, he ultimately cut his visit short by 11 days, leav-ing New Haven on Jan. 31.

McDonald said his efforts to start an Alpha Sig chapter on campus were hindered by Yale’s lack of a central student center and “inter-fraternity council,” which he said limited his ability to contact students who had previ-ously expressed interest in joining a fraternity but had not yet found

their niche. Though University administrators were not opposed to the idea of a new fraternity, he said they did not lend as much support as administrators had at other universities.

But Alpha Sig’s recruitment challenges have not prevented other fraternities from consid-ering expanding to Yale. Less than one month after Alpha Sig suspended official expansion e!orts, another national frater-nity, Chi Psi, has started looking into the possibility of establish-ing a chapter on campus. Justin Froeber, leadership consultant for Chi Psi fraternity, arrived at Yale on Wednesday for a two-day visit to the University. He spoke with student leaders and frater-nity members in order to gain a better understanding of Yale’s Greek life culture and determine whether Chi Psi should begin for-mal expansion e!orts at Yale.

“We initially opened at Yale in 1924 and we closed in 1963, and so we have a strong population of Chi Psi alumni who are also Yale alumni,” said Bradley Beskin, Chi

Psi assistant executive director. “We have a rich history [with Yale] that we’d like to reconnect with.”

BACK TO THE ROOTSLike Chi Psi, Alpha Sig also

shares a historical connection with the University. The frater-nity was first founded at Yale 167 years ago as a sophomore literary society, but membership declined following the start of World War II and disappeared from cam-pus entirely in 1943. As a result, McDonald said, Alpha Sig’s e!orts to reestablish its presence on campus mark an attempt by the fraternity to “go back to its roots.”

But reconnecting with its founding institution has not been easy. The absence of a University-wide umbrella organization over-seeing fraternity activity made

it di"cult for McDonald to reach out to students who would be potentially interested in the new organization.

Compared to other institu-tions, which McDonald said have specified administrators tasked with managing Greek life, Yale’s fraternities are more independent from the administration, which made it more di"cult to garner administrative support for his e!orts.

According to John Meeske, associate dean for student orga-nizations and physical resources, the process for establishing a new fraternity at Yale is the same as with any other undergradu-ate organization. Though a large majority of the University’s fra-ternities are not registered orga-nizations with the Yale Col-lege Dean’s Office, Meeske said administrators would “certainly” review an application from any group of students who want to start a new organization.

Still, he added, the administra-tion keeps Yale’s fraternities “at arms length.”

“We’ve chosen the route of having them be independent of Yale,” he said. “There are many [universities] with a real structure [to govern fraternities], and some have a hostile approach and some ignore the groups and let the things that happen just happen. We’re in that range somewhere, but it’s not that we’re necessar-ily extreme. It’s not that there’s one model for all universities in the country and Yale’s against that model — we’re just a di!er-ent model.”

In an interview last month, Dean of Student A!airs Marichal Gentry also affirmed that the Dean’s O"ce would be “recep-tive” to the formation of new groups if students expressed interest.

University administrators at other colleges are more involved in the Greek system, McDonald said, adding that he was able to recruit 56 founding members for an Alpha Sig chapter at the Uni-versity of Arizona because of the larger Greek culture there. Unlike Yale, the University of Arizona has a central student center as well as an inter-fraternity council, and a large majority of the university’s fraternities are registered with the administration, said Aaron Tatad, one of the co-founders of the university’s recently established Alpha Sig chapter.

Tatad said the strong sup-port from campus administrators facilitated communication and

helped ensure that all Greek orga-nizations followed campus guide-lines. He added that the close rela-tionship between fraternities and administrators made it easier for fraternity leaders to speak with University o"cials if they thought the administration was “being too big brother.”

A SUCCESS STORYBut Alpha Sig’s comparative

lack of success at Yale contrasts with previous expansion efforts from other fraternities in the last decade.

Sigma Phi Epsilon, or “SigEp,” founded its Yale chapter in 2003. The new fraternity was meant to offer an alternative experi-ence for students who wanted to join a social group on campus but had not yet found their match, said Aaron Shelley ’05, who co-founded the University’s SigEp chapter and served as the group’s chaplain in its inaugural year. Similarly, Alpha Sig and Chi Psi representatives expressed these same goals when describing what roles they hoped their fraternities would fill on campus.

“The whole premise behind SigEp was that it was meant to be di!erent from the other fraterni-ties,” Shelley said. “Rather than going through an initiation pro-cess that really tried to break you down and mold you into some-body, the purpose was to pick people who already had an estab-lished image of themselves and use that to mold the fraternity.”

In a similar process to Alpha Sig’s and Chi Psi’s initial expan-sion strategies, the national SigEp headquarters had sent two recruiters to campus to garner student interest in establishing a Yale SigEp chapter, Shelley said. Their proposal to bring SigEp to Yale seemed “fun and reward-ing at the same time,” he added, and the other co-founders began recruiting additional students who they thought would be a good fit for the new fraternity.

SigEp grew pretty quickly at Yale, Shelley continued, adding that it was not di"cult to get stu-dents interested in the new frater-nity. By the end of the first year, SigEp had purchased a house on Lynwood Place and had “sub-stantially” more students inter-ested in living in the house than the space could accommodate. SigEp has since relocated to High Street, moving into the house designed and formally inhabited by Paul Rudolph, former Dean of Architecture from 1958-66. The fraternity’s move was contro-

versial since the group renovated the house, eliminating many of Rudolph’s original design ele-ments.

“The downstairs [of the origi-nal house] would be packed with guys sitting along the walls, sit-ting on the furniture, sitting on the floors and standing by the stairs,” Shelley said.

He added that he thought SigEp — which currently has over 90 members — grew so quickly because there had been a “social vacuum” on campus for stu-dents uninterested in the Univer-sity’s existing fraternities, which he said had included ADPhi, DKE and Zeta Psi. Shelley said he wanted SigEp to be the fraternity that “didn’t have to have a kegger” at social functions and that a “girl would be able to come and not have to worry about whether or not [the events] would be sketchy.” In addition, he stressed that SigEp would not haze new members.

Shelley said he could not say why Alpha Sig was facing more di"culty attracting students for a new fraternity, though he said he thought there had been an espe-cially strong need for a differ-ent type of social organization on campus during his time at Yale.

Their varying successes aside, student organizers of both the current and former initia-tives faced similar experiences with University administrators. McDonald said administrators were not opposed to the idea but did not actively promote expan-sion e!orts, and Shelley said he thought administrators at the time were “kind of stando"sh” in terms of supporting their e!orts.

Shelley said he believes that administrators originally viewed SigEp as “just another fraternity” that said it would not haze. But he said it quickly garnered esteem in its first years:

“There was definitely more respect [for SigEp] by the time I left,” he said. “All of us were involved in other aspects of stu-dent life. We had guys who were involved in a cappella groups [and] guys who wrote for the stu-dent newspaper. So [administra-tors] had been exposed to the guys who were in our fraternity in other settings.”

CURRENT GREEK CULTUREUnlike some of Yale’s peer

institutions, the University’s social scene is not as dependent on the Greek system, according to several fraternity leaders and

SEE FRIENDS PAGE B8

“

IT’S NOT THAT THERE’S ONE MODEL FOR ALL UNI-VERSITIES IN THE COUN-TRY AND YALE’S AGAINST THAT MODEL — WE’RE JUST A DIFFERENT MODEL.

// JOYCE SHAN

“Shakespeare Remembered,” the exhibition currently on dis-play at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, tells the story of how one of many play-wright’s in Elizabethan London became the Shakespeare our cul-ture has come to know and love. Although the exhibit reminds us that Shakespeare is singularly idolized, it traces the origin of his singular brilliance as a cultural process.

“One might argue that Shakespeare is a genius, and his long publication history is both the appropriate and nec-essary acknowledgement of that genius,” David Scott Kas-tan, George M. Bodman Profes-sor of English at Yale and one of the exhibit’s curators, explained. “The first half of that is true. Shakespeare is a genius. His legacy might be an appropriate acknowledgement, but it wasn’t a necessary acknowledgement.”

The exhibition reminds the viewer that in various points in history, the continuation of Shakespeare’s legacy was at stake.

“Shakespeare Remembered” joins — one might argue cen-ters — this semester’s collabor-ative celebration of Shakespeare at Yale. Curated by Kastan and Kathryn James, the Beinecke Curator the Early Modern and

Osborn Collections, the items in the exhibition borrow from the collections of the Yale’s Eliza-bethan Club, Irving S. Gilmore Music Library, Lewis Walpole Library, Yale Center for British Art, and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The exhibition seems to be as much of a tribute to Yale’s astonishing resources as it is to Shakespeare. In creating the exhibition, Kas-tan said he was most surprised by the depth of Yale’s collections, and more so how few people were aware of the actual extent of Yale’s holdings.

“No university in North America could have done any of this,” Kastan said. “Not only the gathering of this exhibition’s particular collection, but also the orchestration of Shakespeare at Yale as a whole.”

Upstairs, the displays range from striking portraits of Shake-spearean actors by Carl Van Vechten, to an advertisement for Cole Porter’s “Kiss Me Kate” urging the viewer to “Brush Up Your Shakespeare,” to the seat-ing chart from Charles Dick-ens’ wedding — his guests were arranged by Shakespeare quotes. A certain element of playful-ness and humor runs through-out the exhibition. Commenting on a deck of Shakespeare playing cards, James remarked, “That’s

when you really know you’ve become iconic.”

In addition to the Vechten photographs, the exhibit also includes other visually stimu-lating works such as oversized prints and panoramic draw-ings of London with the origi-nal Globe Theater in the dis-tance. However, the exhibitions strength and focus lies in the early printings and texts found in the downstairs cases.

“One of the difficulties of exhibitions of books,” Kastan explained, “is that unless you are familiar with a particular edition, all the books tend to look the same. The challenge is to make the story clear and important for those who are not as familiar with the texts.”

The impeccable design and layout allows the exhibition to overcome this di!culty.

All of the cases are arranged predominantly in chronologi-cal order, grouped under sub-titles such as “Reviving Shake-speare,” “Defining Shakespeare,” “Performing Shakespeare,” and “Shakespeare in America.” The items under these labels are then arranged into groups of five with individual placards explaining the significance of each in the

context of the case. This method of identification provides an incredibly logical and e"ectively coherent relation of the exhi-bition’s larger narrative with-out losing the integrity of indi-vidual items. As another viewer put it, “This is the most readable exhibit I’ve seen yet. I know what I’m reading, and I know exactly what goes with it.”

James explained that each placard contains one sentence highlighted in red in order to allow the viewer to engage with the texts, even if she wanted to move quickly through the exhi-bition.

The acute attention to qual-ity of detail extends beyond the physical cases of the exhibi-

tion. Beinecke’s revolving door opens to a large and handsome “Shakespeare Remembered” sign that hangs over the secu-rity desk. There, the visitor finds the collection’s accompanying brochure. James explained that navigating a visitor through an exhibition at the Beinecke can be di!cult given the placement of preexisting cases and the build-

ing’s unique architecture. The exhibition’s brochure contains a clearly labeled map that success-fully alleviates this problem.

The brochure is a condensed version of a larger “Remember-ing Shakespeare” catalogue. “The catalogue is not just a won-derful memento of the show,” Kastan said, “but a serious artic-ulation of the narrative. It will become an important scholarly contribution, but is also wonder-fully readable for a non-scholarly audience as well.”

The exhibition encourages scholars and amateurs alike to engage with the texts themselves. In preparing for the exhibit, the curators scanned many of the holdings of the Elizabethan Club and Beinecke archives that can now be accessed through the online portion of the exhibition.

“Long after the exhibition comes down, the scanned collec-tions will be online for research,” James said. “That is something we were thinking of as the per-manent contribution of the exhi-bition. That it would not only bring these items together phys-ically, but also for scholarship going forward electronically.”

In addition, the Beinecke has installed iPads synced to the online exhibition. One can stand next to an original edition

of the “First Folio” while leaf-ing through its pages online. The “First Folio” is the first collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays, and is responsible for the preser-vation of some if Shakespeare’s most beloved work.

“It is a wonderful example of how a modern rare book and manuscripts library can negoti-ate between the old physical cop-ies that the library owns and the digital aspects that you can make available,” Kastan said. “This allows you to play back and forth between the two mediums in the same space.”

Both James and Kastan were interested in the ways in which the collection’s items demon-strate the historical development over time of a reader’s individual relationship with Shakespeare’s texts. Kastan pointed to an anon-ymous reader’s accurate cor-rection of a printer’s mistake and a mysterious annotation in the margins of a 1599 edition of “Romeo and Juliet.” The exhi-bition begins and ends with an edition of the “First Folio,” one belonging to the Beinecke, the other to the Elizabethan Club. James observed that the Eliza-bethan Club’s edition was much neater than the Beinecke’s, where “someone was so unconcerned with their[edition] that they wrote sums on it, smeared things all over it. This is exactly the way books would have been read in that period.”

Opposite Shakespeare’s iconic portrait in the “First Folio,” Ben-jamin Johnson, the book’s pub-lisher, addresses the reader to look, “not on his Picture, but his Booke.” Ultimately the exhi-bition is not only about the man himself, but the ever changing and complicated connection of his legacy with the culture that has embraced him. “Shakespeare Remembered” highlights this dynamic relationship in a way that is truly unforgettable.

“Shakespeare Remembered” will be on exhibit from Feb. 1, 2012 to June 4, 2012 at the Bei-necke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Contact CAROLINE MCCULLOUGH at [email protected] .

In case you missed it (I did), it was Charles Dickens’ 200th birthday on Feb. 7 — and in light of the English writer’s mega-stardom, people all over the world are celebrating. Dick-ens 2012, as the o!cial celebra-tion of the author’s “bicente-nary” is named, is just one long party. Think of it as an intellec-tual Feb Club (and Jan Club and March Club): multiple events will be thrown each day of for the remainder of February, in

addition to the daily events that have occurred this past January and that will continue through March.

Here at Yale, of course the celebrations will ensue. On Sat-urday, the Yale Center for British Art will screen “Nicholas Nick-leby” (1912), directed by George Nichols. It is one of earliest film adaptations of Dickens’ famous novel by the same name. The plot follows a young man named Nicholas Nickleby, as he strug-

gles to support his mother and sister after the death of his father. The film condenses the long story into a mere 20 min-utes — silently.

The YCBA’s choice to screen the silent version, one of the less popular and lesser-known film versions of “Nicholas Nickleby,” is an astutely relevant decision. Look at the Academy Awards: the current Oscar front runner for Best Picture is “The Artist,” a French silent film that origi-

nally didn’t make the competi-tion at last year’s Cannes Film Festival. Right before the festi-val launched, it was moved into the competition category and ultimately lost. But when the film’s lead actor, John Dujar-din, took home Best Actor, “The Artist” blew up in popularity. If it wins an Oscar, it’ll be the first silent picture to do so in nearly a century, when the first Academy Awards were held in 1929.

“Nicholas Nickleby” is a lit-tle di"erent. On the most basic level, it attempts to fit Dick-ens’ novel into a small chunk of time. The novel is already pop-ularly criticized for its lack of plot development, and to have such a short film perpetuates this original criticism. The film, too, struggles to connect with a modern audience, who under-standably takes the sound rev-olution of the late 1920s for granted. For many of us, film depends on a combination of audio and picture, and “Nicho-las Nickleby” provides only half.

To the viewer with less taste for the finer points of this classical form of cinema, the combina-tion of lack of sound and cen-tury-old film technique ham-pers full appreciation.

But the film skillfully utilizes the limited techniques of the early 1900s. The background settings are not simply painted sets as was typical of the time, but are naturally built environ-ments. The characters, too, are clear, defined, and personable without too much help or inter-

ruption from captions. Even more, the short length is unlike other depictions of “Nicholas Nickleby” and allows the film to be comprehensible and digest-ible in a short 20 minutes. Other stage performances of the novel have been said to last upwards of eight hours, with multiple meals served as respites. While all shots are taken from a static camera, it’s important to evalu-ate the film in its historical con-text with the technological limi-tations of the times.

Ultimately, “Nicholas Nick-leby” is both culturally rele-vant and a well-selected choice. The YCBA has outdone itself in screening such a rare interpre-tation of Dickens’ third novel — you’re unlikely to encounter this rarity anywhere else. Silent film is seeing its resurgence, and so is Dickens’ memory.

Happy 200th, Mr. Charles Dickens.

Contact JACK LINSHI at [email protected] .

PAGE B4 YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2012 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND ARTS


“LAUGH OUT LOUD!” (ASIAN-AMERICAN ARTS FESTIVAL)

Sudler Hall // 8:00 p.m.

It’s comedy (but they’re professional and Asian.)

REACH OUT BENEFIT CONCERTLC 102 // 8:00 p.m.

How joyous it is to have spring break — and so many people putting on events for you, the students of Yale, to enjoy in exchange for monetary support.

“TRANSLATIONS”The University Theatre // 8:00 p.m.

The Dramat’s Spring Mainstage. Will it be decipherable?

“COMMON RIGHT IS NOUGHT BUT THE PROTECTION OF ALL

RADIATING OVER THE RIGHT OF EACH. THIS PROTECTION OF ALL IS

TERMED FRATERNITY.”

VICTOR HUGO

// KAMARIA GREENFIELD

Shakespeare at the Beinecke

Dickens turns 200: ‘Nicholas Nickleby’ (1912) celebrates the silence// BY JACK LINSHI

SILENT FILM IS SEEING ITS RESURGENCE, AND SO IS DICKENS’ MEMORY.

‘SHAKESPEARE REMEMBERED,’ THE BARD THROUGH TIME AT THE BEINECKE// BY CAROLINE MCCULLOUGH

THE CHALLENGE IS TO MAKE THE STORY CLEAR AND IMPORTANT FOR THOSE WHO ARE NOT AS FAMILIAR WITH THE TEXTS.

“

WEEKEND BIKESYALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2012 · yaledailynews.com PAGE B5


“THREE DAYS OF RAIN”Calhoun Cabaret // 8:00 p.m.

They tell us: “So, then, this is the story as I know it so far: My father was more-or-less silent; my mother was more-or-less mad.” Review on p. 11.

“CLUTCH YR AMPLIFIED HEART”Yale Cabaret // 8:00 p.m.

And holy moley it’s GPSS night — free stu! and reductions. Read our review on p. 11.

“THE GERSHINS GO CAMPING”Trumbull College, Nick Chapel

// 8:00 p.m.

All-star cast & crew, so we gon’ be there.

“THE SPIRIT OF BROTHERHOOD RECOGNIZES OF NECESSITY BOTH

THE NEED OF SELF-HELP AND ALSO THE NEED OF HELPING OTHERS

IN THE ONLY WAY WHICH EVER ULTIMATELY DOES GREAT GOOD,

THAT IS, OF HELPING THEM TO HELP THEMSELVES.”

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

According to the flyers, here is what you should bring to New Haven Bike Polo: 1) a bike. 2) a helmet. 3) a mallet (if you have one). 4) a good attitude.

That’s all you need. But if you have them, also useful are: 1) tat-toos. 2) vegan baking skills. 3) past membership in a punk or metal band.

You won’t find polo shirts.When you show up at the

AT&T parking lot, you’ll be o!ered a mallet — a ski pole fit-ted at its base with a length of PVC pipe and taped up with col-ored stripes by Dude (not “the Dude,” just Dude). The mallets are constructed by Scott Rivera, who founded the current itera-tion of New Haven Bike Polo this past August. Next, Scott will give you a roller hockey ball so that you can practice before the game starts.

The rules of bike polo are sim-ple. Two sets of orange cones, spaced the width of a bike, make a goal at each end of the park-ing lot. Teams — two, three, four people, depending on how many players show up — start at their own goal and the ball is set in the middle, where Rivera has taped an X on the asphalt. Someone yells, “3-2-1-POLO!” and the teams charge forth towards each other trying to pass and drib-ble the ball towards the oppo-site goal. You can use either side of the mallet to play, but must use the small side to score. Con-tact is discouraged, but between like things (bike to bike; mallet to mallet) it’s accepted. You cannot put your feet down. Bikes some-times collide and people some-times fall, but not so often as a cautious outsider might expect. As Anthony Acock, one early New Haven Bike Polo player, said, “it never stops being an awkward game.”

Rivera is tall, has dark hair and wears hoodies, skinny jeans, and purple Converse sneakers. He rides a white fixed-gear bike with black handlebars and at polo he is always friendly. He came to N e w

Haven from his hometown of Albuquerque last year so that his wife, Amy Coplen FES ’12, could attend the Yale School of For-estry and Environmental Stud-ies. When not playing bike polo, Rivera works for Whole-G Bread and bakes at Book Trader Café twice a week.

Rivera didn’t play bike polo in New Mexico, but after following the blog of Albuquerque play-ers, he decided to get it going in New Haven this summer. Its early players included friends of the couple — other FES students, Book Trader employees and their spouses. But helped along by Rivera’s black-and-white fly-ers featuring a silhouetted polo player surrounded by stars, word got out, and Rivera and his friends were joined by others.

Some of the newcomers turned out to be holdouts from an older — and rougher — episode of New Haven Bike Polo’s past. In Sep-tember, Acock, a graphic designer and vegan baker who rides a black fixed-gear covered in stickers and spoke cards, and who has a fully tattooed right arm, appeared on the lot. He already had a mal-let — made not of a ski pole but from a wooden dowel spray-painted black — and was well more maneuverable on the polo court than anyone else. After the games, he slipped references to how polo in New Haven used to be, before everyone involved got old, moved away, or “quit riding bikes” (“how do you quit riding bikes?” replied Rivera). He lauded Rivera for picking the same park-ing lot where polo used to be played, talked about the “Satur-day Night Bike Fights” of yore, and started bringing friends from the old scene. Two of his friends came on BMX bikes one day, and joined the match at the very end, zooming in circles around everyone else like the seekers in a Quidditch match. Marty, a Devil’s Gear Bike Shop employee, started coming after the shop closed for the day. After games the group

usually hangs around to talk, sometimes about

v e g a n c u p -

cakes or local music land-marks, but mostly about fix-ing up bikes.

In the fall when leaves fell, Dude used a leaf-blower to clean the court; when snow fell in winter there were jokes to be made about “snow-lo” and a lot of sliding on curbside ice to wrangle the ball back into play. Daylight savings time in October meant that polo’s hours were suddenly dark, but Dude charged a glow-in-the-dark roller hockey ball with his head-lights. Combined with the lights overhead, the game rolled on. When the weather gets warmer, Rivera hopes to play more than once a week; Dude wants to make t-shirts to look extra official; there is always talk of matches against players from other cities.

On account of my enthusias-tic attendance, Dude presented me this winter with my very own polo mallet. Instead of the communal ski poles, I now get to swing a wooden mallet with a design of purple, black and yel-low stripes. And though I have a trophy shelf of Directed Stud-ies tomes and a couple well-designed t-shirts from my sum-mer on the Yale Farm, I have to think that when I leave New Haven, it might be my best token to remember this eccentric city.

New Haven Bike Polo plays every Sunday from three to five at the AT&T parking lot at the corner of Audubon and Orange streets. You can learn more and stay in the loop at facebook.com /newhavenbikepolo, where it reminds you, polo is “free, fun, and casual!”

Contact CAROLINE TRACEY at [email protected] .

NEW HAVEN BIKE POLO RIDES, NEVER STOPS ROLLIN’// BY CAROLINE TRACEY

WHEN THE WEATHER GETS WARMER, RIVERA HOPES TO PLAY MORE THAN ONCE A WEEK; DUDE WANTS TO MAKE T-SHIRTS TO LOOK EXTRA OFFICIAL; THERE IS ALWAYS TALK OF MATCHES AGAINST PLAYERS FROM OTHER CITIES.

// NEW HAVEN BIKE POLO

Bike polo comes to New Haven.

“

““

S A T U R D A YF E B R U A R Y 2 5


WEEKEND COVER

BROTHERS FROM PAGE B3

“NICHOLAS NICKLEBY” SCREENING

YCBA // 2:00 p.m.

Watch a silent film for Charles Dickens’ 200th birthday celebration! And bring your cake and eat it! Maybe outside, because it’s probably not allowed in the auditorium.

“IN ADVANCE OF THE BROKEN ART: THE SOCIAL AND THE POLITICAL IN

THE MUSEUM TODAY”YUAG // 3:00 p.m.

Kenneth Reveiz brings us into the politi-cal, mind-bending FUTURE.

“140 YEARS OF YALE CARTOONS”: PANEL & EXHIBIT OPENING

TD South Common Room // 4:30 p.m.

We know that the Beinecke did a cartoon exhibit last semester, but this one is all about Yale. And we don’t know … maybe we just like Yale best?

“WE ARE A GROUP OF FRIENDS, SCHOLARS, AND UNIQUELY

TALENTED INDIVIDUALS. BUT AS BROTHERS, LIVING BY A COMMON

CREED, WE ARE FAMILY.”

SIGMA PHI EPSILON YALE UNIVERSITY — CT DELTA

administrators interviewed.Avi Arfin ’14, president of

Alpha Epsilon Pi — one of the few campus fraternities registered with the Dean’s O!ce — said he thinks Yale has a smaller Greek culture because of the Universi-ty’s housing system and the pres-ence of senior societies.

Fraternities provide additional housing and dining options that might encourage students who are unsatisfied with their uni-versities’ living arrangements to join a fraternity, Arfin said. But because most Yale students find the University’s housing situation “good enough,” they do not feel a need to move o" campus or join a fraternity to give themselves that option, he said.

He added that Yale’s residen-tial colleges already o"er a social niche that is not as readily avail-able at other universities and that senior societies have historically functioned as the campus’ social groups, thus removing the need for fraternities as a sphere for inti-mate social interactions. Though Arfin said he thinks the impor-tance of senior societies has since declined, their previously strong role in Yale’s culture established a social environment that simply did not need fraternities in order to thrive.

“To some degree, there’s no good reason [why Yale does not have a larger Greek culture],” he said. “[The idea that] because fra-ternities haven’t been popular before, they aren’t popular now … [means] that that inertia doesn’t exist.”

Similarly, Meeske said he thinks Yale’s smaller fraternity presence is a “natural thing.” Stu-dents don’t come to Yale imme-diately expecting to join a frater-nity, he said, adding that when students do decide to pledge, they make a “choice” rather than fol-low a social expectation.

ADPhi president Jamey Silveira ’13 said Yale’s fraternity culture is “unique” in that many fraternities are connected to different ath-letic teams, adding that he thinks the University’s fraternities can generally function as the “social arms” of varsity athletic teams. As a result, Silveira said, it is already “sort of predetermined” who will get involved with fraternities.

In addition, Silveira said Yale students are so active in other extracurricular activities that

fraternity life becomes more of a “temporary commitment” than a part of college identity, a charac-teristic of Yale’s culture that Sil-veira said is not necessarily true at other universities.

“We’re so involved with so many different things,” he said. “Like literally from the day you step on campus, you have hun-dreds of organizations giving you their pitches … so people get involved with fraternities, but it’s not like they play a huge role.”

But Silveira said he still thought fraternities fill a necessary role for students at Yale who need a place o" campus where they can “just go and blow o" steam.”

Cultural fraternities — includ-ing the African-American frater-nity Alpha Phi Alpha — are among the plethora of fraternities rep-resented in Yale’s past. Despite a long history that dates back to the early 1900s, Director of the Afro-American Cultural Center Rodney Cohen said in a Thursday email that Alpha Phi Alpha currently does not have any active members on campus.

He added that this is not unusual among cultural frater-nities at Yale’s peer institutions, which he said have also expe-rienced an “ebb and flow” in recruitment over the years.

Cohen said cultural groups have played an important role in the University’s historical devel-opment: members of Alpha Phi Alpha were active in helping form the Afro-American Cultural Cen-ter and Black Student Alliance at Yale. Cohen added that cultural fraternities — which he said were initially established on predom-inately Caucasian campuses to provide a “brotherhood” for Afri-can American men — continue to “promote community” among the African American population.

Just as fluctuations in member-ship are not uncommon among cultural fraternities, these vacil-lations can also be experienced by other social organizations on campus.

REACTING TO NATIONAL MEDIA

But Yale’s recent fraternity his-tory has taken a more turbulent turn. After one of the Universi-ty’s fraternities, DKE, came under national scrutiny in Oct. 2010 for its controversial hazing practices, in which pledges chanted “Yes means no, no means anal” on Old Campus, University administra-

tors publicly condemned their actions and imposed restrictions on the fraternity.

In response to the controversy, Yale College Dean Mary Miller said in a May email to the student body that the Executive Com-mittee had placed a five-year ban on all DKE campus activities and formally requested that the DKE national organization suspend the chapter for five years. Miller added that though it was unusual to announce ExComm’s deci-sions publicly, she thought it was important to share the Commit-tee’s conclusions, since a “wide range of community members [had] been a"ected by this inci-dent.”

Despite the sanctions, DKE members interviewed last December said they did not think the ban has significantly a"ected the fraternity’s activities. One senior DKE member, who wished to remain anonymous in order to maintain a positive relation-ship with existing DKE brothers, said he thought the ban’s primary e"ect was to “change the tone” of the fraternity.

“Each individual is more vigi-lant about what’s going on now than [they were] in the past,” he said. “I think now we pay more attention to basically how the actions of the fraternity affect people in the Yale community.”

Still, he said he did not think the controversy necessarily lim-ited the group’s routine activities or ability to recruit new members, in part because DKE has tradition-ally drawn its membership from the football team. He added that he did not think DKE was a “par-ticularly bad place or that there was anything wrong with it inter-nally,” but that the recent scrutiny encouraged members to be more aware of the fraternity’s actions.

Shortly after the DKE incident, 16 Yale students and alumni filed a Title IX complaint in March with the Department of Education’s O!ce for Civil Rights alleging that the University had a hostile sexual environment. In response, Uni-versity President Richard Levin convened the Advisory Commit-tee on Campus Climate last April to evaluate the University’s sexual culture. In the Advisory Commit-tee’s report, which was released last November, Committee mem-bers recommended that Univer-sity o!cials establish a leadership council to govern Yale’s fraterni-ties.

But at a “Yale Greek Roundta-ble” held with administrators and Greek organization leaders last fall to discuss the possibility of creat-ing such a council, several frater-nity presidents interviewed last semester said they were resis-tant to the idea. Some said they saw a new leadership council as a way for University administra-tors to exercise additional control, and others said such a council was unnecessary since fraternity presidents already communicate informally.

“It seems to us that the frater-nities on campus are more inde-pendent… than [those] on other campuses,” Meeske said. “[Cam-pus fraternity leaders] think in general that rules are stifling, whether they’re made by Yale administrators or the fraternity’s administration; it’s still some-one telling them what they can or can’t do.”

Meeske added that Yale stu-dents were “independent in gen-eral” and typically preferred to make their own decisions.

Indeed, several fraternity lead-ers interviewed last month said they thought the University’s stricter tailgating policies, which banned kegs and unauthorized U-Hauls from all future tail-gates, unnecessarily restricted fraternity activities. While some Greek organization leaders said they understood the need for the tighter regulations, others said the new policies — which were imple-mented after a U-Haul headed for SigEp’s tailgate crashed during the Yale-Harvard Game last Novem-ber — were limiting.

“[SAE] will certainly not be tailgating to the same capacity and numbers as before,” former SAE President Ben Singleton ’13 said in a January email. “The new rules are so overbearing compared to what we have been used to that I would assume there will be lit-tle interest among brothers in the fraternity.”

Singleton said he thought

administrators were “clearly reacting” to national media criti-cism without fully understanding how to prevent future accidents. The new regulations will likely decrease tailgate attendance in the upcoming years, he said, add-ing that he thinks the lower turn-out might discourage alumni who frequent football games and neg-atively a"ect Yale’s football pro-gram as a whole.

AN OPEN QUESTIONAs Alpha Sig continues its

informal recruitment e"orts and Chi Psi decides whether to expand to Yale, fraternity leaders’ insis-tence that their groups’ daily activities have not been sigifi-cantly a"ected indicate the rela-tive independence of Yale’s Greek organizations and student body.

Despite campus discussion surrounding Yale’s fraternities, Silveira said he did not feel as if

he were “constantly walking on eggshells,” adding that he did not think students have “shied away” from fraternities any more than usual.

“It’s not like the cops have driven past [the ADPhi] house any more than they would normally,” Silveira said.

Still, the recent challenges that Alpha Sig has faced in returning to Yale — particularly in light of SigEp’s success less than a decade earlier — suggests that fraternity culture at Yale is not the same as it was when Shelley first began his recruitment e"orts nine years ago. Though Chi Psi representative Froeber left campus Thursday, the fraternity may return to the Uni-versity if it decides to reestablish a chapter on campus.

For students hoping to join a fraternity, it remains to be seen whether they will have two addi-tional options to select from dur-ing the rush season this coming fall.

Contact CAROLINE TAN at [email protected] .

A SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

EACH INDIVIDUAL IS MORE VIGILANT ABOUT WHAT’S GOING ON NOW THAN [THEY WERE] IN THE PAST.


WEEKEND OFFICE SPACE

SAT URDAYF E B R U A R Y 2 5

YALE SCHOOL OF ART MFA THESIS EXHIBITION PART II RECEPTION

Green Hall Gallery // 7:00 p.m.

WE LUV GRAD STUDENTS WHO MAKE ART and School of Art events coordinators who make really long event titles.

ISO DATE AUCTIONToad’s Place // 7:30 p.m.

Word on the street is an evening with some of our very own WEEKEND babies will be auctioned at this international dream show. We swoon.

THE HAVEN STRING QUARTET PRESENTS “OUT OF AFRICA,

INTO EUROPE”Unitarian Society of New Haven

// 7:30 p.m.

Performing Steve Reich’s “Di!er-ent Trains,” once described as “the only adequate musical response — one of the few adequate artistic responses in any medium — to the Holocaust.”

“I BELIEVE IN THE BROTHERHOOD OF ALL MEN, BUT I DON’T BELIEVE

IN WASTING BROTHERHOOD ON ANYONE WHO DOESN’T

WANT TO PRACTICE IT WITH ME. BROTHERHOOD IS A TWO-WAY

STREET.”

MALCOLM X

LOST UNDER PAPERS, A HISTORY: THE STORY OF YALE’S DESKS// BY TAPLEY STEPHENSON

// JOYCE XI AND TAPLEY STEPHENSON

If the desk fits

Master Laurans

Dean Miller

Vice President Lorimer

President Levin

There’s an impostor sitting in the president’s o"ce.

But the fraud is not University President Richard Levin — it’s the desk he’s sitting behind.

When distinguished lawyer Francis Patrick Garvan 1897 and his wife donated the desk — part of the University’s 10,000-piece Mabel Brady Garvan Collec-tion — Garvan said the desk was made by famed mid-18th century British furniture maker Thomas Chippendale. When he became president in 1993, Levin found the desk in his o"ce, still on loan from the Yale University Art Gal-lery.

With its detailed wood and brasswork, the desk matches the master’s style so closely that even a furniture connoisseur like Gar-van was convinced, and he made it his own personal desk. But Levin told WEEKEND that more recent scholarship suggests the fraudulent desk was made almost a century later than it appears.

“From Yale’s point of view, it’s nice because it’s the desk of Mr. Garvan, who gave Yale such a sig-nificant collection,” Levin said. “It’s not an original Chippendale, but it’s a beautiful piece of furni-ture with a lot of ornate decora-tion.”

He added that atop this “beau-tiful piece” sits “a great picture of my wife, Jane.”

Today, Levin’s desk is one of the only pieces of furniture still lent out by the Yale University

Art Gallery, said John Gordon, an assistant curator of Amer-ican decorative arts at the Gallery. In the past, Univer-sity administrators and col-lege masters also borrowed pieces from the collection, but the policy ended several years ago, and most pieces have been returned to the Art Gallery.

Still, the desks of Yale’s administrators and masters have stories of their own, though many histories are fractured and unverified.

Perhaps the most his-torically compelling desk at Yale belongs to Penelope Laurans, Master of Jona-than Edwards College and special advisor to Presi-dent Levin.

The front-drop desk is believed to have belonged to Jonathan Edwards 1720 himself. His fam-ily donated the desk to

the college centuries later, along with the Joseph Badger portraits of Jonathan and Sarah Edwards, which also hang in the Jonathan Edwards master’s house.

The desk sits in the master’s house framed on three sides by a series of cupboards, which are also assumed to have belonged to Edwards, though Laurans said she was less sure about the cup-board’s origin.

“I do not use it as a desk, it is rather fragile — it is on display in the house, though,” Laurans said. “There are little cupboards built around the desk, and it is said that Jonathan Edwards kept his sermons in the cupboards.”

Lauran’s work desk sits in the college’s master’s office, inun-dated by a sea of papers. The desk has remained tied to the posi-tion since the tenure of Beekman Cannon, who served as college master from 1961 to 1974.

Many of Yale’s desks have been tied to one position or another, though sometimes their histories have been less clear. Yale College Dean Mary Miller’s desk origi-nally belonged to Henry Wright, who served as Yale College dean from 1884-1909. Since then, it has been used by every subse-quent person to hold the post.

The desk is a “partners desk,” with a table laid over two large blocks. It is the same style as the “Resolute” desk that cur-rently occupies the White House Oval O"ce, but unlike President Obama’s desk, Miller’s desk fea-tures a number of cabinets that face towards the visitor. She said it was likely that it had been used by two people in the past, with a set of cabinets for each person.

Miller added that she found a small document scotch-taped into a desk drawer, detailing the desk’s history, and she said she sent the piece to Yale’s Manu-scripts and Archives. But archi-vists said they didn’t recall receiving any such document, so the story has since been lost.

Other desks at Yale are much less noticeable. University Sec-retary and Vice President Linda Lorimer’s desk

sits in a corner of her Woodbridge office, far away from the table where Lorimer has most of her meetings.

“When I arrived back at Yale, the desk in my o"ce was about the size of a small aircraft car-rier and didn’t give an inviting feel,” Lorimer said. “I scavenged around and found in University storage this beautiful drop front desk that Bart Giamatti had used in the same office that is now mine.”

University Archivist Judith Schi! said that many desks, along with other furniture items, are stored at the University’s library shelving facility in Hamden, Connecticut. The same facil-ity stores Yale’s non-circulating library collection.

Lorimer added that Giamatti was president when she first worked at Yale as an assistant to the general counsel and then as the University’s youngest deputy provost, so the desk brings back “warm memories” from her ear-lier time at Yale.

But it’s not just the desk that has a special meaning. H.W. Fowler’s “Modern English Use” sits on the top of Lorimer’s desk as a tribute to her first executive assistant, Kathy Perrone, who died suddenly in the late 1980s.

“She was the best editor and grammarian I have ever know, and this book reminds me of her,” Lorimer said.

The Mabel Brady Garvan Col-lection is part of the Yale Univer-sity Art Gallery’s American Dec-orative Arts Collection, which has 18,000 pieces.

Contact TAPLEY STEPHENSON at [email protected] .


WEEKEND COLUMNS

We live in a society that is glued to its laptops, iPads, smartphones and pagers. It’s rare when a concert isn’t interrupted by at least one ringtone, and if you don’t update your Facebook status at least five times dur-ing the course of a lunch, you’re not being social enough. The pocket and purse have become temporary holders for devices that get taken out again 30 sec-onds later, because checking email is only done obsessively or not at all (and *never* not at all). This is a problem, for two rea-sons. First, we keep wasting lots of time reaching into our pock-ets to pull out our phones — time that could be better spent play-ing Angry Birds on our phones. Second, the minimal movement needed to constantly store and un-store these devices prevents our arm muscles from fully atro-phying the way nature intended.

Enter The Future. These prob-lems are a thing of the past, because we no longer interact with the world through screens, but instead project our own images into the world. (Think: “Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi. You’re my only hope.”)

Seem too far-fetched? The New York Times just reported that Google is building heads-up display glasses scheduled for release by the end of 2012. The glasses will display live data based on the surroundings, and overlay that data on top of what you see, like the glasses in “The Terminator,” “RoboCop” and pretty much every other sci-fi movie ever. By controlling them with subtle tilts of the head, you can play Fruit Ninja in seminar while the professor sees you as simply nodding enthusiastically or cracking your neck or having a seizure.

But that’s something only you can see. What about project-ing images out into the world, like that miniature flickering Princess Leia in “Star Wars”? Researchers at the University of Arizona say they’re close to hav-ing the technology for real-time 3D holographic video projection, using the same basic principles that underlie security holograms on drivers’ licenses. Which means that instead of floating in midair, the projections lie on a thin screen, though the research-ers are quick to point out the dif-ference between a 3D movie like “Avatar” and this technology, as it allows you to see di!erent per-spectives by moving your head. In The Future, Skype will use this technology (though hopefully it’ll have evolved beyond the low-resolution, “Matrix”-green laser images of the UofA demo videos), and people will never

again have to suffer the injus-tice of moving their heads and not having a video’s perspective change. Oh, and nobody will talk on phones anymore, obvi.

In The Future, we’ll react and interact with the digital world through our surroundings, rather than escaping through a tiny screen on something once designed for calling friends and being more social. But don’t worry: we’ll still do a whole lot with the Internet. Take, for example, online shopping. Right now the biggest problems with online shopping are logisti-cal: How quickly will items be shipped? What happens if they don’t arrive at all? What do you do if you want to return some-thing?

Science fiction solves these problems with teleporta-tion, also known (in bad sci-fi plots) as “3D faxing” — send-ing a tangible object electroni-cally and reconstructing it at the other end. The real-world ver-sion of this is called 3D print-ing, and the concept is simple: send a printer blueprints, and it builds an object by stacking lots of tiny layers of glue-like mate-rial. Right now, 3D printing is mostly a way for nerdy people to fabricate 20-sided dice for Dun-geons and Dragons, but a com-pany headed by engineer Enrico Dini suggests using it for houses, with a printer the size of a ware-house. The building material is sand mixed with a sort of magic super-strong sand-glue.

Proponents of 3D printing see it as the next generation of online shopping — want a book or a Wenzel or a pet spaniel? Buy the plans online and print it in seconds! — and to an extent this may be the case (3D food print-ers, for example, already exist). But 3D printing isn’t just for the realm of humans: the GOLEM project in 2000 was a Brandeis University robotics experiment that automated the coevolution of robotic bodies and brains. The project automatically printed real robots, and allowed the cruel physics of the real world to nat-urally select and evolve the best ones. In The Future, when our smartphones become just a lit-tle too smart, that new iPhone will evolve and 3D-print other iPhones, which will print other iPhones, which will finally take over the world. If only Siri believed in birth control …

Contact JACOB EVELYN at [email protected] .

Let’s Get Physical!

JACOB EVELYNTHE FUTURE

In my freshman year of high school, my piano teacher, an ebullient, shrewd Japa-nese woman, plopped down a thick man-uscript on the desk before me. “This,” she said, with a devilish glint in her eye, “will be our next project.” Let me preface this anecdote with a confession: I am not, nor have I ever been, a fine pianist. I peered at the yellowed cover — “Piano Concerto in G – Maurice Ravel” stared back at me. Sens-ing my bewilderment, she quickly added, “Don’t worry, we’re just going to learn the first movement!” I gulped. My dread, how-ever, quickly turned to fascination, for this concerto was exotic, peculiar and unlike anything I’d ever heard or played before.

Born on March 7, 1875 in Ciboure, a small French town nestled by the Spanish border, Maurice Ravel was a bit of an oddball. At the tender age of 14, Ravel enrolled in the Paris Conservatory, whose distance from home he felt keenly. He was not an aver-age boy, and certainly not a “bohemian”: he was short and slight, and took great care in grooming himself. Amidst several try-ing decades — which included a horrific deployment in World War I and the death of his mother — Ravel swiftly found his muse. In 1928, he undertook a four-month performance tour in the United States, an experience that had profound e!ects on his subsequent musical style. While in New York City, Ravel met storied American composer George Gershwin, who took the Frenchman to hear live jazz in Harlem. As legend has it, Gershwin let on that he would like to study with Ravel; the Frenchman retorted: “Why do you want to become a

second-rate Ravel when you are already a first-rate Gershwin?”

It was on this tour that Ravel intended to play an original concerto, but his busy schedule postponed his work on the score until 1929. Though delayed further by a commission from a one-armed Austrian pianist (the result of which was his famous Piano Concerto for the Left Hand), Ravel finally completed the score for his Piano Concerto in G on Nov. 14, 1931. The pro-cess, however, was far from painless. Ravel remarked not a few times that the con-certo was giving him considerable trou-ble — “The concerto is nearly finished and I am not far from being so myself,” he wrote to friend and conductor Henri Ribaud. The second movement, one of the great-est things to come from his pen, especially tormented him. He wrote of the opening, “That flowing phrase! How I worked over it bar by bar! It nearly killed me!”

Despite his frustration, the finished product was magnificent. Smitten with the jazz he had heard first-hand with Ger-shwin, Ravel cleverly wove his own bluesy elements into the score (most notably in the first movement). And although the second movement caused him great con-sternation, he later revealed that Mozart had been his guiding muse in crafting its opening theme, immediately recognizable and supremely placid. Unfortunately, Rav-

el’s constant poor health — exacerbated by his maniacal practicing of Lizst and Chopin — precluded his premiering the work. Instead, he took the podium while renowned French pianist Marguerite Long debuted the concerto in 1932.

Since its American debut on April 22, 1932 (in actuality, simultaneous perfor-mances given by the Philadelphia Orches-tra and Boston Symphony Orchestra), Rav-el’s Piano Concerto in G has left a lasting mark on the modern piano repertoire. It is at once fiery, impassioned and yet remark-ably cerebral. Ever the perfectionist, Ravel crafted his Piano Concerto in G with an incredible precision. Igor Stravinsky, in fact, referred to Ravel as “the most per-fect of Swiss watchmakers.” As I strug-gled through that first movement, I felt as though I was building a hopelessly complex machine myself. Yet, despite his machine-like meticulousness, Ravel never composed without sensitivity. That evening, nearly six years ago, as I listened to a recording of this very concerto for the first time, I felt as though I understood Ravel when he said that “Music … must be emotional first and intellectual second.”

Contact BRAD TRAVIS at [email protected] .

RAVEL: THE GREATEST SWISS WATCHMAKER

At this point, guessing the major Oscar winners is worth-less — we pretty much know who’s going to win the big ones. Instead, what makes the predic-tion process fun is its capacity to inspire debate: Sure, we know Meryl Streep is going to win, but should she?

And for those of us filling out mock ballots, this argumenta-tive gray area provides just about all the excitement we can hope to glean from the Oscars, especially considering that half the celeb-rities who end up winning don’t seem to care. (Given the choice between Sean Penn’s acceptance speech from 2009 and Three 6 Mafia’s party on stage in 2006, I’d choose DJ Paul and Juicy J every single time.)

So without further ado, let’s jump right into this Sunday’s four biggest Oscar categories by sorting out who deserves to win from who actually will, making our bold predictions as we go.

BEST PICTURE“The Tree of Life” most

deserves the Oscar, and my defense is simple: no movie was more daring and had more to say about humanity than Malick’s all-encompassing work of art. That being said, it’s a movie made by Terrence Malick. First of all, the famously reclusive auteur probably won’t even show up to the ceremony, and second, the universal one-line description of the film is “DINOSAURS!!!!” That’s not a good sign.

Instead, most Hollywood vot-ers only have two options: “The Descendants” and “The Art-ist.” On the one hand, we have an Alexander Payne movie (think a better “Sideways,” with less Paul Giamatti and more Hawaii). On the other hand, we have a silent French film about a silent Amer-

ican movie star caught in a career slump. Please. This pick is much easier than people seem to think. It’s awkward tragicomic Alexan-der Payne versus a heartwarming success story with an innovative plot — book it. Harvey Weinstein isn’t leaving Kodak without an Oscar. Terrence Malick and his dinosaurs be damned.

Pick: “The Artist”

BEST DIRECTORAgain, Terrence Malick has

earned this Oscar. “The Tree of Life” is definitively his film; no other director poured as much of himself into a movie as Malick did this year. But the film is too metaphorical, too sweeping, too Malick (“DINOSAURS!!!!”). He really doesn’t have a shot in hell of winning, and that’s truly too bad.

So it comes down to kooky Alexander Payne and newcomer Michel Hazanavicius (“The Art-ist”). And even if their films were true competitors (not at all, in

my opinion), the general rule of thumb is to predict the win-ner based on how cool his name sounds. Hazanavicius. Seems like an Oscar winner to me.

Pick: Michel Hazanavicius

BEST ACTORGeorge Clooney and Jean

Dujardin are in the only real bat-tle of the evening. Dujardin is the sexy pick — the suave French throwback actor whose one line of dialogue in “The Artist” makes your knees quake “with pleasure.” But across from him is Hollywood humanitarian George Clooney, the American whose role as Dr. Ross on “ER” through the mid-’90s did the same thing that Dr. House did in the 2000s: make being a doctor cool.

The problem here is percep-tion. People seem to think that George Clooney is overdue for an Oscar — but what should he have won it for? “Batman & Robin”? Clooney is a very good actor, and he’s recently been in some pretty

good films, but what’ll carry him to the Oscar is his status of being George Fuckin’ Clooney. In com-parison, Jean Dujardin doesn’t stand a chance, even if he gave the best performance of the year. He’s handsome, yes, talented, yes, and starred in what will probably win Best Picture, yes, but he’s still not George Cloo-ney. Only the French equivalent.

But in a lot of ways, the time seems a little off for Clooney. The field is too open. When Clooney wins Best Actor, it’ll be because he was the absolute hands-down favorite to win. No debate. And if you think about it, Clooney probably wouldn’t have it any other way.

Pick: Jean Dujardin

BEST ACTRESSMichelle Williams did work

in “My Week with Marilyn,” and the Oscars love biopics (and their quasi-counterparts). And Rooney Mara (in my personal favorite female performance of

the year) was equally provoca-tive and captivating in “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.” But these two young ’uns cancel each other out.

Enter: Meryl Streep. The reigning Hollywood goddess is a surefire win this Sunday, for not only was her acting top-notch, but if you want to make a list of overdue Oscar winners that are still alive, I’d nestle her somewhere in the top five. (It still astounds me that she’s gone 30 years without a Best Actress Oscar.)

Pick: Meryl Fuckin’ Streep

So that’s that — I’ve done the best I can. Hopefully I’m more right than wrong, but then again, hopefully there are some surprises this year.

Either way, at least we’ve got Billy Crystal to entertain us.

Contact MICHAEL LOMAX at [email protected] .

Who will win big at the Oscars?

BRAD TRAVISBACK TO THE CLASSICS

MICHAEL LOMAXCINEMA TO THE MAX

// CREATIVE COMMONS

Maurice Ravel was born on March 7, 1875.

SAT URDAYF E B R U A R Y 2 5

“GOOD GOODS”Yale Rep // 8:00 p.m.

Last day to see the Yale Rep’s world pre-miere of “Good Goods”! Get ’em while they’re hot.

YALE PHILHARMONIA: WILLIAM CHRISTIE

Sprague Memorial Hall // 8:00 p.m.

Guest honcho Christie leads the show.

SOMETHING EXTRA’S 35TH ANNIVERSARY JAM

WHC // 8:00 p.m.

Do you a cappella?

“HAVING CHILDREN IS LIKE LIVING IN A FRAT HOUSE — NOBODY

SLEEPS, EVERYTHING’S BROKEN, AND THERE’S A LOT OF THROWING

UP.”

RAY ROMANO

I have a confession. I can’t count the times when, listening to a song with a pumping beat and trying to stay awake through those last 100 lines of Latin, I have just wanted to get up, flail my arms around and dance. Let’s not lie, I do this all the time. It’s obviously one of the best parts of having a single. Unfortunately, I can’t dance.

But the cast of the Yale Cab-aret’s “Clutch Yr Amplified Heart Tightly and Pretend” can really shake it. With a sense of looseness and freedom it would

take countless hours of yoga to achieve, the seven men and two women in the show bounced and shimmied energetically enough to enliven my mind, deadened as it was by midterms and hous-ing and all sorts of “yalegrlprob-lems.”

“Amplified Heart” explores the full range of emotions surround-ing that most discussed and least understood of subjects: love. Beginning and ending with pow-erful monologues on subjects ranging from love’s ability to be defined to any and all underlying

existential angst, the majority of the show was composed of short dance (and other movement) sequences set to an inspiring soundtrack of easily recogniz-able indie pop hits with escapable names.

The show’s specific plot is indescribable. Rather, the hybrid e!ect of lighting changes, move-ment, vocal tone, and music cre-ates a set of images and feelings in the viewer’s mind. I could say how I felt at every moment, but I know that these feelings would apply only to me, since every scene surely evokes some mem-ory of romantic experience in each individual. At times I felt warm and carefree, as if I were running on a beach. At others, the cold, dark atmosphere of the Cabaret faded to the warm and fuzzy feeling of cuddling in my bed. The lack of specific charac-ters normally would have irked me, but in “Amplified Heart,” it was refreshingly universalizing.

Such intangibles are not over-whelming in the context of the cast’s light tone and willingness to make fun of themselves. One memorable scene follows a cou-ple through their day as a third actor creates a range of sound e!ects from a corner. The ventril-oquism is flawless and the noises range from cartoon-like squeaks to dead-on animal impressions. Not a single member of the cast or audience shied away from a smile during one of the many carefree dance sequences.

Yet this sense of humor does not detract from the show’s ulti-mate introspection. The many light scenes are tempered by moments of hurt and relation-ship carnage. One dance routine, in which the majority of the cast donned masks made of colored, transparent material, ended in the seeming automation of the group. One actor was left out. Happiness quickly turned to lack, tranquility to frustration, as the lone sheep grew more and more paranoid about his isolation. The eventual flight of the cast out of

the Cabaret recalled the unde-niable and universal pain of a break-up.

When combined with the show’s overall aesthetic, the wounds are quickly bandaged up and, for the most part, forgotten about. Beautiful symmetries in both the show’s overall structure and each individual scene impart the message that despite heart-break, the cycle of life and love keeps on. You realize that you may even enjoy the melancholy of too much emotion, you may even benefit from it.

After all they’ve been through,

the cast ends up sitting on the floor of the Cabaret with their backs to the audience, con-nected by their shared experi-ences — both the happy times and the losses. A group of stars, simulated by shining a light onto a disco ball, flashes in front of them. The speed of their orbits increases with the pace of the music. The interaction of music and the star-speckled darkness invoked the simultaneously col-lective, yet deeply personal expe-rience of an outdoor concert on a warm summer’s evening. I can still acutely remember being

blown away by the magic of such an occasion and the sheer size of the spectacle. Somehow, being in the tiny cabaret with just nine actors and a few members of the crew made me feel the same way.

Contact NATASHA THONDAVADI at [email protected] .

“This is the day, Nan. We’re going to finally find out what belongs to us.”

“Three Days of Rain” at the Calhoun Cabaret tells the story of two architects and their chil-dren’s quest to piece together their parents’ legacies.

Beginning in a sparse Man-hattan studio apartment, sib-lings Walker (Tommy Bazar-ian ’15) and Nan (Christine Shaw ’14) are reunited after a year of separation. Walker, who dis-appeared after their father Ned Janeway’s birthday, has returned to take possession of the Janeway House, his father’s architectural masterpiece. They meet with their childhood friend Pip (Paul Hinkes ’15), whose father, Theo, was Ned’s business partner. The three of them read Ned’s will only to discover that the Janeway House was bequeathed not to

his children but to Pip. Tensions escalate as Walker accuses Pip of having manipulated his father, and what ensues is a whirlwind account of their parents’ parallel and interconnected lives.

The set of the production is designed like the blueprint of a house. Since the stage is sur-rounded by a skeletal frame built of white beams, you are given the sense of entering an archi-tect’s mind. Near the beginning of the first scene, the characters address the audience in a sort of monologue, chronicling the key moments of their parents’ lives with poetry and emotion. Walker breathlessly describes the Janeway House, designed by his father, as work of such architec-tural brilliance that it could only have been created from “an intu-ition held in reserve.”

“There’s a different kind of

light in every room, at every hour,” Walker says.

The house is the fantastical creation of Ned’s silent, tortured mind, made even more complex by his wife Lina’s insanity. The plot is forwarded by Walker’s discovery of his father’s journal. His first entry reads: “1960, April 3-5. Three days of rain.” In the following scenes, the same actors play the roles of Ned (Bazarian), Theo (Hinkes) and Lina (Shaw), retracing the fateful happenings of that documented downpour.

While this shift in perspec-tive is a little abrupt, the actors’ seamless chemistry makes it work. Bazarian, as Ned, skillfully embodies the role of an anxious, slightly neurotic young architect trying to make a breakthrough. As Theo, Hinkes provides force to the narrative, but the story is really about the two lovers danc-ing around him. While Shaw is slightly too melodramatic as Nan, she portrays her always-on-edge mother, Lina, with grace and bal-ance. Even though she comes across as poised and witty, we are also able to glimpse a bit of the madness that will plague her in the future. On a rainy drive through Ned’s neighborhood, the two of them run into each other

and proceed to spend the next three days braving the downpour in each other’s company. Between salad and religious debate, Ned and Lina fall in love.

The banter between the char-acters sets a rhythmic pace for the play. Each anecdote leads to another, and the dialogue is rife with literary references to keep you on our toes. Back in the pres-ent, the conflict between Walker and Pip is caused by Pip mut-tering, “Oedipus doesn’t make sense.” Other times, though, the allusions probably cause more confusion than amusement: for instance, when Walker burns his father’s journal, he declares, “I feel like Hedda Gabler!”

The pieces of introspective monologue interwoven between

action scenes help to slow down the otherwise accelerated pace of the production. There is a par-ticularly poignant scene at the beginning where Walker stands alone on stage and recalls his 8-year-old self chasing a drug-crazed mother down “thousands of flights of stairs.”

“She was rocking back and forth on her haunches,” he said, “muttering to herself in a lan-guage of her own invention. And then she ran.”

Through a child’s eyes, he describes the almost surreal feeling that overcame him as he watched his mother escape from his reach and propel her body through the apartment build-ing’s glass façade: “There was this moment, before the blood

started, that she looked like crys-tal.”

The plot of “Three Days of Rain” is simple, but endearingly so. There are times when the nar-rative is predictable, but the play doesn’t put on any airs — it lays out life as it is through the eyes of young, struggling architects. As Ned proclaims to Lina, “There’s no secret to be found: just energy, whims, personality!”

Contact YANAN WANG at [email protected] .


WEEKEND THEATER

S U N D A YF E B R U A R Y 2 6

POETRY AND MYSTICISM, A SYMPOSIUM

Bingham Hall // All day

And from day there was night, and from night day.

“THE CONVERSATOR’S DILEMMA: SCIENCE, ETHICS, AND ART”

YUAG // 2:00 p.m.

DJ LoMo in da house!

“LACRIME DI LEO”: A CONCERT FOR THE POPE LEO X

Yale Collection of Musical Instruments// 3:00 p.m.

Ladiladila Sundays are Churchy, you know.

“NO MATTER THE LETTER WE’RE ALL GREEK TOGETHER.”

GREEK PLEDGE QUOTE

‘Three Days of Rain’ lets the love shine through// BY YANAN WANG


“Three Days of Rain” at the Calhoun Cabaret.

THE HOUSE IS THE FAN-TASTICAL CREATION OF NED’S SILENT, TORTURED MIND.

REDISCOVER LOVE WITH AN ‘AMPLIFIED HEART’// BY NATASHA THONDAVADI

AT TIMES I FELT WARM AND CAREFREE, AS IF I WERE RUN-NING ON A BEACH.


“Clutch Yr Amplified Heart Tightly and Pretend” at the Yale Cabaret.

WEEKEND BACKSTAGE

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Q. Is it di!cult for you to write about Iran, knowing that you can’t go back?

A. Yes and no. It’s a mixed bag of lots of di!erent feelings. On the one hand, I have created my own Iran in a virtual, literary, intellec-tual fashion, and that’s the Iran that to some degree I can remem-ber. That’s the Iran I like the most. It’s sort of a medley of things I carry with myself that I love and are somewhat being forgotten since there are certain parts of Iranian history and tradition that have been made obscure in the past 33 years. So I connect to that virtual Iran. Also thanks to Face-book and the electronic media, my contacts over the past several years have suddenly increased, and the degree to which I now have access to those inside the country on a day-to-day basis has grown in a way I never expected. So not being able to have access to the physical Iran does cause a great deal of nostalgia, of course, but many other avenues have opened up that I look forward to every day when I wake up and can check messages from friends there.

Q. How does your Iranian heritage impact your journalistic endeavors? Do you think it’s easier for an Iranian to write about Iran?

A. I never write about things that require me to be anyone other

than who I am. In every piece I have written, it is clearly estab-lished that I’m a person in exile, and I don’t try to pretend that I’m going to be objective and have sympathies for all sides. I also don’t cover stories that require me to have access to, say, the presi-dent of Iran. So I mostly do sto-ries for which my own particular coordinates need not be hidden. Of course, there are stories for which my own particular coor-dinates bring a certain amount of cachet too. Being who I am gives me access to some who would otherwise be inaccessible. For my new book, for instance, I man-aged to spend tens of hours with those who had been in Europe and were victims of various terror-ism operations by Iran, who were Iranian dissidents and had never actually told their stories to any-one. I have something close to 500 hours of interviews with people with whom I simply sat down. I allowed them to talk at any rate in any which way they wanted to. So no, I don’t think you have to be an Iranian to do that, but I think hav-ing a certain amount of familiar-ity does create the possibility for bonding.

Q. You’ve said that connecting to the people you interview is an important step of the journalistic process. How does this di"er between television journalism and print journalism?

A. I find that whatever your medium is, you are required to tweak or adjust your strate-gies. When I was in TV, I couldn’t afford to be as open-ended as I am in interviewing folks for print. In television, the clock is always ticking, and it costs hundreds of dollars in camera, lighting and sound time — there is a huge team of people involved. Televi-sion production in general also does not allow you to arrive at that final interview and still not know what it is that you’re going to hear. You will have done all your leg-work prior to arriving at the point of recording, so that there are no surprises. That really changes the nature of the conversation and in essence you’re doing the reverse of what I just suggested, in that you precisely ask questions to which you know the answers. You have to structure, prior to the final inter-view, the course of the interview itself.

Q. Do you then feel that people reveal less to you when you interview them for television?

A. No, but I think the processes by which [print and television jour-nalism] unfold are very di!erent. And what often ends up a!ect-ing the amount someone says in an interview is whether they are someone in power or a victim — their willingness to engage you ends up being totally different.

Those who are in power will give you a lot less of their time and are less willing to be flexible, while those who are victims or have been victimized have a very dif-ferent attitude.

Q. How does that impact your decisions about what to write?

A. I’ve generally been drawn to stories that aren’t ‘hot,’ so to speak. You’ll hardly ever see me write a story about the nukes in Iran, for instance, which is pre-cisely what everyone else is writ-ing. This is not to say that I’m against these stories or that they’re the wrong issues to cover, but I think that there are only so many people who can write about the same thing at once. On the other hand, then, there are those of us who, because of depth of cultural familiarity or other ave-nues of intimacy with the subject, can open up other windows on the Iranian landscape, which has been covered to exhaustion. So I think the contribution of someone like me to this whole debate about Iran is to open up precisely the win-dows that aren’t being opened by others on this very covered land-scape of Iran.

Q. What, then, made you attracted to the topic of “Assassins of the Turquoise Palace”?

A. It started out really from sheer stubbornness. I had written a memoir that had been pretty suc-cessful, and many people includ-ing my editors and my publish-ers were interested in my doing a sequel to the memoir. My first reaction was ‘of course not’ — I’m going to do something di!erent. I realized that in order to remain an artist and be a truly creative per-son, I needed to try something else. It was in a quest to find that other thing that I initially enter-tained the idea of writing a novel, but then I had an encounter with a survivor of the Iranian assassi-nation that took place in a restau-

rant in Berlin in 1992. I knew the broad strokes of the incident, but spending time, something close to several weeks, with this survi-vor, convinced me that not just the killing itself, but also the investi-gation and the verdict of the trial, were some of the most important yet not properly told stories of the past several decades. I not only thought it would be a challenge for me as a writer to break away from first-person narrative, but that it would also perhaps be a contribu-tion to extending and expanding the current understanding about Iran and the lives of Iranians for Western communities.

Q. In what ways did the project end up satisfying that quest for creative fulfillment?

A. It was like piecing together a mathematical puzzle. Not so much because I had to investigate anything — the material was all there — but because figuring out how to tell a very complex story that involves hundreds or doz-ens of important characters and takes place somewhere unknown to your readers about a subject they’re unlikely to have heard anything about truly requires mathematical precision. There’s so much background informa-tion that needs to be established. I had to decide which characters to keep in and which to leave out, and what aspects of the story to indulge myself in telling when they were slightly extraneous to

the plot. It was interesting to try to figure out how to manage the tempo and how to keep the nar-rative moving forward while pro-viding background. Everything required a lot of balance.

Q. What was your process for figuring it all out?

A. It took me more than a year after I first began writing. I was just mapping out for myself and try-ing to figure out the skeleton. In the o"ce where I work at home, I have a wall that is covered with corkboards, and I had index cards that laid out the general chronol-ogy and the division of characters. It then took a year to figure out a skeleton of the story that I thought people could follow.

Q. And now that the project is done, are you looking into trying your hand at other genres? What are you working on now?

A. Certainly not another crime novel. I’ve been looking into the story, another nonfictional one, of the first Iranian who ever became an American citizen. I think the story of this first Iranian-Ameri-can citizen is emblematic of where we are today. I don’t know if it’s a book yet, but it has certainly cap-tured my attention. I also have an op-ed running this Sunday [in the New York Times].

Contact NATASHA THONDAVADI at [email protected] .

ROYA HAKAKIANPassionate, introspective, strong// BY NATASHA THONDAVADI

Born to a Jewish family in Iran in the mid-sixties, Roya Hakakian fled to the United States in 1985 on political asylum. She has since become well known as a Persian poet and an Iranian-American journalist, publishing

essays in prominent newspapers, such as the New York Times and Washington Post, and a memoir in addition to working on several television news programs. Her latest book, 2011’s “Assassins of the Turquoise Palace,” delves into the complexities surrounding the 1992 assassinations of Iranian resistance leaders at the Mykonos restaurant in Berlin.

// ROYAHAKAKIAN.COM

IT STARTED OUT REALLY FROM SHEER STUBBORNNESS.

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