06

May

Compass: Focus

ADVO_illus_hana_long

Protractors and compasses were sold in sets at Office Depot, and I always wished I could mix and match the colors. I wanted a blue protractor and a green compass but I had to pick one so green it would have to be. Not a lime green and not an olive but some strange middle ground, like an unripe banana or maybe a bay leaf.

They were on the required supplies list, and though we rarely used them in math class I was always sketching circles on the scrap paper from my mother’s office. I started off shaky, and the hinge on the compass was a little loose, so even when I steadied the arc, my circle’s ends would never line up. I was frustrated.

But eventually I learned to hold it right, to position my fingers and flick my wrist just so, and I started to experiment. Who needed pencils when I could use pens, or squeeze in a crayon after I shaved its edges with scissors? My circles were good, and they were everywhere.

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13 days ago Short URL Comments

Compass

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05

May

Introduction: Compass

This month, we feature a series of short memoir posts centered on the theme Compass. James Wood ’14 describes our vision for this theme below.

Illustration to Dante’s Inferno, Plate I, Gustave Doré, 1857. Image courtesy of expressaomanuscrita.blogspot.com

I’ve only been lost in the woods once. Which, I’ve been told, is more times than most people have been lost in the woods. At the time, I remembered something that seemed important. What I remembered was science class in grade school. In that class, I made a compass.

Even now, I remember how: Get a bowl. Put water in it. Set it somewhere flat. Take a piece of paper and put the paper on top of the bowl. Steal a sewing needle from your mother’s kit and a magnet from the refrigerator. Bring them to class. Stroke the needle over the magnet, each time in the same direction, and repeat this step for a minute.

After that, it’s simple. You place the needle on the paper and move a corner of the paper back and forth to get the needle to spin. Then, you wait. When the needle stops, follow its point to find your way.

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14 days ago Short URL Comments

Compass

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29

Apr

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Posted by Kevin Hong ’15

19 days ago Short URL Comments

Cabinet

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27

Apr

Habit: Sleep

Kayla Escobedo Illustration Advocate. Sleep

A friend and I diverge in our attitudes about sleep. Ever the pragmatist, the utility of her sleep is a function of what it will allow her to accomplish in her waking hours. After it has served that purpose, its value quickly diminishes, and sleep as a leisure activity is little more than a waste of time. An allocative inefficiency.

Meanwhile, I think sleep has its own, self-contained merit. Ask a recreational traveler about their hobby, or maybe more accurately ask a coin collector, a wine connoisseur, for a sense of this perspective. Every interval of sleep is different, like every fingerprint. Eight-hour spans that pass like the blink of an eye, so sudden they cut you off mid-thought. Long, lazy naps that leave you feeling sick and heavy. Jagged-edged insomnia like a broken-off branch. Clean sheet sleep.

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21 days ago Short URL Comments

Habit

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26

Apr

Sounds: Meditations in an Emergency

Julian Gewirtz ’13 reads Frank O’Hara’s “Meditations in an Emergency.” Gewirtz is a member of The Harvard Advocate‘s art and poetry boards.

22 days ago Short URL Comments

Audio Recording

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25

Apr

From the Archives: Gilinsky and Feehan

DaynoCritique_Image

Untitled, Image: Laura Gilinsky, Text: Noah Feehan, 8.5″ x 11″, Black and white Xerox,
The Harvard Advocate Fall Issue, 2002

Fractured faces smile above a whirring tessellation of legs and wheels, bodies broken and re-grafted in a latticework of steel and bone. Two lines of scrambled text scrawl beneath the image before terminating in a single, indecipherable word. The artwork is the result of two student artists – one having crafted text, the other the image it describes – and the piece thrums with division and recombination. The visual artist has taken a mild mid-twentieth century snapshot and fragmented the image, Xeroxing and re-Xeroxing rectangular portions onto a single plane, multiplying the mechanized reproductive mode of the photograph. The process of reproduction, akin to Warhol’s silk-screening, has preserved and introduced imperfections into the artwork. Some tessellated fragments are overexposed or contrastingly dark, others rough with large grains. The text repeats similar flaws in the inconsistency of ink and jumbled, offset type: the third line comprises the letters “g” and “e” and a final, crossed-out character. The relationship, however, between the text and the image is ambivalent. The process of creation and collaboration among artists is unclear and as a result parsing the dialectic between symbol and icon, reference and referent, falls to the viewer. Looking between text and image, the artwork begins to take on an erotic turn. The last word of “gex” links together a string of sexual phrases – “limbs”, “still warm from” and what could be “(k)issed” – and turns the viewer back to the content of the image. And yet on investigation Untitled presents not a passionate vision of two lovers on a motorbike, but a frustrated sensuality and a mechanistic neutering of the erotic. The legs of the young couple are reconfigured as gears of the automobile; natural locomotion and flesh propel only wheels. This reassignment becomes altogether menacing and the smiling faces of the motorcycle riders, many-headed and obscured by glasses and a scarf, appear less and less human. The image and its text point not only to the melding of man and machine, but moreover to the unsettling seams of such an alignment.

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23 days ago Short URL Comments

Archives/Art

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22

Apr

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  • The New Yorker’s Alexander Nazaryan writes about The Caucasus in the Literary Imagination, a theme whose history stretches back far beyond the tragic events of last week.
  • In honor of the death of beloved children’s author E.L. Konigsburg this weekend, an interview with the writer from Scholastic.
  • On a lighter note, a meditation on the mistress in literature by Jessica Crispin.
  • And finally, events are taking place around the country on April 23 for World Book Night, which hopes to increase access to books for non-readers and light readers. For those in the Cambridge area, the Cambridge Public library is hosting a kick-off with local authors.

Posted by Victoria Baena ’14

26 days ago Short URL Comments

Cabinet

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22

Apr

Habit: The Key to Muscle Memory

My keychain is heavier than it needs to be. As my fingers move from the central loop outwards, keys and knick-knacks gradually become less and less important. On the central loop itself is my dorm key. One loop removed is the key to home in San Francisco, a key to 21 South Street, my CVS ExtraCare card, and a miniature rice bowl keychain I bought last summer in China. If my fingers need to dig any further in my pocket, they eventually will hit a bottle opener and pair of compressible chopsticks. It’s always good to be prepared.

I realize that my pockets could be much lighter, but the bulk of the keys together makes the keys much harder to lose. I’d rather have too much in my pockets than not enough.

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26 days ago Short URL Comments

Habit

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20

Apr

Review: Terrence Malick’s To the Wonder

Since the WWII film The Thin Red Line (1998), all of Terrence Malick’s movies have opened with voice-overs that play on some form of the mythic invocation. The war film and The New World (2005) begin with appeals to a higher power, the former interrogating the mysterious relationship between being and (human) nature. The Tree of Life (2011) begins, after a quotation from the Book of Job, with Jack addressing the family members he will remember and reconstitute throughout the rest of the movie. The first lines of The New World follow the exhortative model of the classical invocation most explicitly: “Come, Spirit,” Pocahontas says. “Help us sing the story of our land. You are our mother, we your field of corn. We rise from out of the soul of you.”

In each of these cases, the voice-over, though spoken by a character anchored in the present of the narrative proper, calls forth a power or presence from beyond the temporal or spatial bounds of the plot. Rather than affecting the substantive action of the story, they accompany its unfolding and overhang its representations. In other words, they act much in the way that a prophecy is structured: they project a mode of thinking into the future events of the film by taking recourse to a higher (divine) authority, but, through their infinite re-interpretability, they can also be applied to a variety of events in mutually conflicting ways. When Private Train asks, at the beginning of The Thin Red Line, “What’s this war in the heart of nature?” his words clearly perforate more than just his experience in Guadalcanal or the soldiers’ encounter with the South Pacific flora and fauna. What these opening lines have in common, then, is that they all open an arena of interpretation overseen by a higher presence that is marked by two things: its absence, and, via its absence, a latent promise of events to come that will complicate or elucidate the reasons for its initial invocation.

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28 days ago Short URL Comments

Review essay

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17

Apr

From the Archives: Djuna Barnes

“Reading Djuna Barnes is like reading a foreign language, which you understand,” said Marianne Moore about her friend and contemporary near the end of Barnes’s career. “The Perfect Murder,” printed by The Harvard Advocate in its 1942 75th Anniversary Issue, exemplifies the curious linguistic prowess that Moore praises. In fact, the study of “foreign [languages], which you understand” is the very occupation of Barnes’s protagonist, Professor Anatol Profax, a dialectologist (specialist of tongues). A crossbreed between Middlemarch’s intellectually stubborn Casaubon and Baudelaire’s voyeuristic flaneurs, Profax harbors his cherished work in the crook of his elbow as he haunts the streets with a removed aspect and attentive ears. He records the “figures of speech and preferred exclamations in all walks of life” in order to classify species of speakers. He bunch-indexes (Barnes’s term) the inarticulate of England, France, and America as “The Inveterates” and devises other groupings—among them “Excitable Spinsters” and “The Impulsive”—along lines of fanaticism, eloquence, and verbosity. Profax’s scrupulous science literalizes what Moore recognized as Barnes’s genius: she paid close attention to the subtleties of expression, and did not underestimate the potential of a single language to spawn multitudinous variations.

Djuna Barnes lived first in Greenwich Village, and then in Paris, during both cities’ bohemian heydays. It was in Paris that she became acquainted with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, like-minded contemporaries who together heralded the rise of the avant-garde. By the time “The Perfect Murder,” her last published story, appeared in The Harvard Advocate in 1942, Barnes was an established author. Her reputation at the time (at least within the Advocate) can be surmised from her inclusion in the anniversary issue, which the editors dedicated to “new material from the important figures in literature today.”

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31 days ago Short URL Comments

Archives/Fiction

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