photos by Dasha Zaporozhets

Poem by Falon Moran

The day began with rime,
A coating of ice all over
Dark sidewalks.
I wanted to fainaigue,
Stay in bed all day,
Forget about everything
Until I walked out to
A risible situation:
A small pup outside,
Howling and begging
For bacon, or anything
He could get, being a
Bit mendacious, continuing
To beg after the fact.
As I left the house, the pup
Gamboled across the lawn,
Excited for his new treats.
A repast to him, but a small
Gift of giving to me:
Ritz crackers, bacon, and
Even some cheese, all
The favorites of a dog.

photos by Dasha Zaporozhets

From the long overdue (re)readings (XIV)

Every journey is an inner journey. That is to say, the traveller goes off in search of himself. Not as if there were actually someone to search for. The traveller is under obligation not to be an individual; that is, he must stagger between being somebody and nobody. He is to be the infinite, or with more false-modesty, to be being itself, to be pure form, a carrel, a creel, a cell, full of books, full of fish, full of chains.

— Peter Esterhazy, The Glance of Countess Hahn-Hahn (down the Danube). Translated from the Hungarian by Richard Azcel. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1999. 35.

Seeing Through: Photos from the 80s by Nick Benson

Big thanks to Susan Rogers, Andy Richards, and Brian Lillie for their help and encouragement in getting this exhibit of ten photos from the 80s up in the Silent Study Room of the Library at The Gunnery. It is the first of a series of photo exhibits by students, alumni, and faculty. The exhibit will be up until we can get the next show organized...!

photos by Harris Owens. the growlers at the space

Night and Light. Poem by Xiaojin Jin

Night and Light

Night is long as the light is alone,

night is a song as the light is a gong,

night is gone as the light is dawn.

Night is wisdom as the light is freedom,

night is nonrandom as the light is random,

night is king: light the rebel.

Night is a king as the light is a ring,

night is ending as the light is accumulating.

Night is simplifying as the light is amplifying.

What light gives us is not merely a ray,

what night gives us is not merely a break.

What night gives light is not merely coverage,

what light gives night is not merely salvage.

What light gives me is not merely a greeting in the night,

what night gives me is not merely some hope for the light.

If one cannot get used to the night,

one cannot be friends with the light.

News Roundup. Two prose poems by Ian Riley

Rich White Kid Votes for Romney

In a shocking turn of events, self described “rich white kid” Johnny Clark voted for Mitt Romney in the election this past Tuesday. When asked why he voted for Mr. Romney, Clark was quoted as saying that “My parents like him,” and “He’s better than that Muslim socialist we have now.” When asked to elaborate, Clark refused, as there was a special about the ease of birth certificate falsification on Fox News that he had to get home to catch.

 

Hugo Chavez Discreetly Volunteers Election-Fixers’ Services

Calling them “the best in the business” Hugo Chavez reportedly called President Barack Obama to offer the services of his famed election fixers. “Barry looked a little soft in the debate on Tuesday night, and I want to help him in any way I can,” Chavez said while strangling his fourth Venezuelan peasant of the day. “If these guys can get me elected then they won’t have any trouble at all with him.” When reached out to for comment, Obama was unavailable, as he was feverishly looking through the Constitution to make sure Chavez’s help was not explicitly forbidden.

Cement. An essay by Jake Paron

photo by Jake Paron

Our goal was to create positive energy, or at least that was the motto of our community service program. As we mixed freshly collected sand and rock with cheap bags of concrete using primitive hoes and shovels, the mood was far from positive. The concrete was needed to create a “wedding lot,” which was used by the small Thai village to hold weddings and other ceremonies. Now I had never heard of a wedding lot, but if that is what the villagers asked for, I was determined to help create it. Before we began constructing the lot, two days were spent taking nearly one hundred buckets of rock and sand from a nearby river. Collecting this amount of rock and sand with four shovels and fifteen people took much longer than I thought. Nevertheless, we completed it after many long hours of work and complaining and could finally start mixing the cement.

            If someone had asked me how to mix cement before this experience I would have said with a cement truck. It turns out they don’t have those in Thailand, at least not in this remote village. Our process was much slower. Fifteen buckets of sand, one bag of concrete, six buckets of rocks, and water. What do you get? One batch of lumpy concrete that covers about three square feet. So we mixed a lot of concrete.

            “This work is pointless!” “Why do we have to do this?” “Why can’t we build a school?” The complaints go on. These kids really did want to help the village, but they could not see how this slab of concrete was going to make a difference in the lives of the villagers. We asked the village elders what needed to be done, and they told us. And although the final product was a lumpy slab of concrete, it was going to help by providing a space free of mud, in a very rainy climate, where important ceremonies could be held. This was probably not the heroic work many people had envisioned, but it is what the community needed.

            After the project was complete we left for the next village. That was the first of three villages we would stay in over the course of our month spent in Thailand. The group packed up in the back of two pickups and set off for the second village. Everybody hoped the next project would not involve mixing concrete and that we would be more culturally integrated with the community. Only half of that was true. We spent several hours of driving up winding, muddy roads and finally arrived. There were no cement bags or tools in sight, so we thought we were in the clear. Unfortunately we learned that we would be mixing cement this week as well to construct a tank to collect excess water. We then learned that this tank was located on top of a mountain only accessible by a steep muddy path and the bags of cement were at the bottom. The project required us to carry these bags, weighing around one hundred pounds per bag, up the path and then mix them at the top of the mountain.

            After the difficult task of carrying the bags to the work site was complete, we began mixing. The work was much harder than I had thought. We all sat down after a couple hours of work, sweaty and exhausted, and relaxed at the top. As we rested, a group of Thai men approached us. Many of them had a bottle in one hand and a chicken cradled in the other. I had met one of the men the previous night and he acknowledged my presence with a, “Hello Harry Potter!” He insisted that I was Harry Potter, and that another girl was Lady Gaga. They proceeded by us toward a small temple. As we began working again, the men began drinking. They were laughing and yelling, all the while holding these chickens. I started to piece everything together and figured out our group was about to experience something very cultural.

            BAM! BAM! Gunshots rang through the air. I quickly got behind one of the large water tanks for cover. Our group was frantically running around trying to figure out who had the guns and more importantly, who they were shooting at. We soon learned that the villagers were firing the guns to call up to the gods. Once they got their attention, they sacrificed the chickens in their honor. When I peeked out, I saw the chickens, which were previously being treated with much respect, running around headless in a crazed frenzy. Shovels were thrown down, buckets were kicked over and people began pacing around in distress. These chickens jumped and stumbled their way into our work site. Blood spurted out onto three of the girls working, all of them unfortunately vegetarians. “Don’t they have the respect to wait until we are done?” The Thai culture was clearly different than our own, but these comments, deliberate or not, showed that some of us thought we were more important than the native people. We were guests in their home. They were not required to help us, although many did. I recognized that the sacrifices were disturbing, and I would agree that I could have done without them, but this was their way of life. They should not be expected to change it for our convenience. We came to Thailand as visitors. These men lived here.

            Many community service organizations do not aid the direct needs of the people. However I believe our group was different. We asked the elders of each village what needed to be done and they told us. Simple projects, like constructing a concrete slab, may not be heroic work, but they are essential for the growth of these communities.

 

photo by Yea Weon Kim

From the long overdue (re)readings (XIII)

Our spread over the earth was fuelled by reducing the the higher species of vegetation to charcoal, by incessantly burning whatever would burn. From the first smoldering taper to the elegant lanterns whose light reverberated around eighteenth-century courtyards and from the mild radiance of these lanterns to the unearthly glow of the sodium lamps that line the Belgian motorways, it has all been combustion. Combustion is the hidden principle behind every artefact we create. The making of a fish-hook, manufacture of a china cup, or production of a television programme, all depend on the same process of combustion. Like our bodies and like our desires, the machines we have devised are possessed of a heart which is slowly reduced to embers. From the earliest times, human civilization has been no more than a strange luminescence growing more intense by the hour, of which no one can say when it will begin to wane and when it will fade away. For the time being, our cities still shine through the night, and the fires still spread. In Italy, France and Spain, in Hungary, Poland, and Lithuania, in Canada and California, summer fires consume whole forests, not to mention the great conflagration in the tropics that is never extinguished. A few years ago, on a Greek island that was wooded as recently as 1900, I observed the speed with which a blaze runs through dry vegetation. A short distance from the harbor town where I was staying, I stood by the roadside with a group of agitated men, the blackness behind us and before us, far below at the bottom of a gorge, the fire, whipped up by the wind, racing, leaping, and already climbing the steep slopes. And I shall never forget the junipers, dark against the glow, going up in flames one after the other as if they were tinder the moment the first tongues of fire licked at them, with a dull thudding sound like an explosion, and then promptly collapsing in a silent shower of sparks.

W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn. Trans. Michael Hulse. NY: New Directions, 1998. 170-171.  

It is possible for a whole culture to turn away from reading and writing. As the empire crumbled and Christianity became ascendant, as cities decayed, trade declined, and an anxious populace scanned the horizon for barbarian armies, the ancient system of education fell apart. Schools closed, libraries and academies shut their doors, professional grammarians and teachers of rhetoric found themselves out of work, scribes were no longer given manuscripts to copy. There were more important things to worry about than the fate of books. Lucretius' poem, so incompatible with any cult of the gods, was attacked, ridiculed, burned, or ignored, and, like Lucretius himself, eventually forgotten.
The idea of pleasure and beauty that the work advanced was forgotten with it.

Stephen Greenblatt, 'The Answer Man,' The New Yorker 8.8.11 (28-29)