In Medias Res
On Writing
I didn’t travel to New Haven in a “lit” shuttle this weekend. Instead, a few friends and I ordered Thai and sat in a circle on a fraying rug in their suite. We listened to Fleet Foxes as we picked around at noodles and egg rolls, spilling some soy sauce here, there, and mostly everywhere.
We talked a lot about our first impressions of each other, about how and when cordial friendship gave way to a sisterly kind of intimacy. Occasionally, we checked Facebook for updates about the Game, looking with vague interest at the flushed faces of our peers decked out in Crimson gear appearing, one after the other, in our newsfeeds. After a couple of hours had passed, we returned to our respectful positions: One friend lay sprawled on a futon with a book on her lap and her legs extended straight in the air, reaching for the ceiling. Another sat at her desk, pounding the keys on her Mac at a furious, frantic pace while tapping a heel and whistling. I put on my headphones and began to write this column, looking around the room, every so often, for inspiration. And that’s how we remained for the next few hours: in silence but surrounded by peripheral sounds.
Historitas
It’s a Wednesday afternoon. John’s glowing toe entices crimson-clad visitors outside, but shadows dim the wood-paneled seminar room. Already, the students are all sleep-deprived—the handful of first-years and sophomores, the senior, and Brown Girl. It’s mostly because this week’s hist and lit assignment has been a trying one: read “The Chosen.” The book, the students find, devotes 557 pages of research and 152 pages of notes to the Big Three’s “hidden history of admission and exclusion,” with Harvard consuming a substantial portion of it.
It begins by observing the writer’s task, something about making the strange familiar and the familiar strange. Then comes the description of a gray-eyed, “self-possessed” freshman with pince-nez glasses and “patrician features.” Soon, we see how the resentment that accompanies his rejection from the “venerable Porcellian” gives way to an “inferiority complex” that—his wife recalls some 30 years later while he’s negotiating the New Deal—“helped him to identify with life’s outcasts.”
Not Art
It’s a Saturday night in Kenmore Square. The sky, hazy and overcast, dulls the neon bar signs brightening the street. I’m shivering and so are the bouncers in front of me. When it comes time to show them my ID, one frowns. “You’re not 21?” he asks, confused. I sigh, then stutter, and quickly tell him about my hour-long ride on the green line, about the Harpoon bottles littering the train, the lost European tourists looking for Time Square, the sticky residue. I tell him that I’m here to learn, that anecdotes are valuable. He shrugs—from empathy or boredom, perhaps—and slaps a red band across my wrist. I enter the House of Blues.
I’m here because a Facebook post promised me that there’d be an immersive installation. I’m here because I don’t know what an installation looks like, don’t know if it should look like anything at all. I’m here because I have to make an installation (Ironic, right? But Art is ironic, no?) for a show to be seen, eventually, by Real Artists.
A Strange Space
It was June 21. A Sunday. A strange news day, my bureau chief had warned. And he was right, of course.
It began as just another news day, it was the day I learned that time-worn folktale, that D.C. is built on a swamp. The air was damp and moist and the sky went from clear to plump—thick and opaque nimbus clouds stretched their wispy fingertips and grazed me with soft pokes and prods in what seemed like a matter of minutes.