NSOP 2024 Masthead
Editorial Board
TARA ZIA, CC ’26, Editor-in-Chief
JAZMYN WANG, CC ’25, Managing Editor
SAGAR CASTLEMAN, CC ’26, Deputy Editor
GEORGE MURPHY, CC ’27, Publisher
LUCIA DEC-PRAT, CC ’27, Crossword Editor
BETEL TADESSE, CC ’25, Digital Editor
JORJA GARCIA, CC ’26, Illustrations Editor
PHOEBE WAGONER, CC ’25, Illustrations Editor
KATE SIBERY, CC ’26, Layout Editor
SHREYA KHULLAR, CC ’26, Literary Editor
Senior Editors
JOSH KAZALI, CC ’25
ANNA PATCHEFSKY, CC ’25
SONA WINK, BC ’25
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Staff Writers
ZIBIA BARDIN, BC ’25
ELI BAUM, CC ’26
CHRIS BROWN, CC ’26
EM CHMIEL, CC ’25
SCHUYLER DAFFEY, CC ’26
STEPHEN DAMES, CC ’25
BOHAN GAO, CC ’28
SAYURI GOVENDER, BC ’26
MARIANNA JOCAS, BC ’27
AVA MORRISA JOLLEY, CC ’25
MAYA LERMAN, CC ’27
AVA LOZNER, CC ’27
GABRIELA MCBRIDE, CC ’27
GRACIE MORAN, CC ’25
LILY OUELLET, BC ’27
ROCKY RUB, CC ’26
EVA SPIER, BC ’27
VIVIEN SWEET, GS ’25
OWEN TERRY, CC ’26
DOMINIC WIHARSO, CC ’25
ANDRE WILLIAMS, CC ’26
CECILIA ZUNIGA, BC ’26
Staff
Staff Illustrators
INES ALTO, CC ’28
EM BENNETT, CC ’26
EMMA FINKELSTEIN, BC ’27
LULU FLEMING-BENITE, BC ’25
BEN FU, CC ’25
KATHLEEN HALLEY-SEGAL, CC ’28
KATE HENRY, CC ’27
SELIN HO, CC ’27
ELLIE HODGES, CC ’26
ETTA LUND, BC ’27
OONAGH MOCKLER, BC ’25
DERIN OGUTCU, BC ’27
ISABELLE OH, BC ’27
OLIVER RICE, CC ’25
FIN STERNER, BC ’25
JACQUELINE SUBKHANBERDINA, BC ’27
LI YIN, CC ’26
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Contents
Letter from the Editor by Tara Zia
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Bwecommendations by The Blue and White Staff​
Blue Notes
Essays
In Defense of French Autofiction, Or Of the Self. by Kate Sibery
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An American in Wetherspoons by Josh Kazali​​​​
Measure for Measure
flowers & wandering stars​ by George Murphy​
The Conversation
Joan Jonas by Sona Wink​​​​​​​​
At Two Swords’ Length (ATSL)
Am I an Academic Weapon? by Maya Lerman and Ava Lozner
Letter From The Editor
September 2024
On the “family of things.”
If this issue has in fact made it out of the abyss of summer (and Slack) and into the unsuspecting hands of a Columbia freshman, I hope that you will lend us a few moments of your time. Before arriving on this campus, you were likely told a great deal about what your experience would be like at Columbia by various sources ranging from peers to politicians.
While the specter of national scrutiny and a heavily policed campus persists, the days, weeks, and semesters of our college lives still play out in an intricate series of mundane and monumental choices. These choices range from whom to surround ourselves with, to which courses to select amidst a sea of mildly traumatizing CULPA reviews, to how to interact with the ever-evolving and occasionally historic campus and city within which we find ourselves. These choices present both a privilege and a daily obligation. Mary Oliver captures the gravity of this feeling far more eloquently in her poem “Wild Geese”: “the world offers itself to your imagination,/calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting–/over and over announcing your place/ in the family of things.”
In this issue, our writers, each in vastly different ways, examine how the daily ritual of choice unfolds across our community. For some Columbians, quotidian choices and routines lead them to the very edges of their own ambition and imagination. Shreya Khullar speaks to Columbia Olympians about their Olympic experiences as the culmination of grueling training schedules, academic responsibilities, and personal sacrifice. Meanwhile, Sona Wink speaks to Joan Jonas, a Columbia alum and renowned visual artist, on her MoMA retrospective as the result of decades-long processes, practices, and experiences. In the artistic “family of things,” her work is informed both by the tradition that precedes her and the transience bestowed upon it by the viewer.
Other writers explore the (albeit rare) moments in which Columbia students choose to pause and reflect, both on their experience of their surroundings and relationships with themselves. Chris Brown recounts the recent departure of former President Minouche Shafik, offering reflections from students’ past on the fractured bonds between students and administrators. Kate Sibery describes French autofiction as a vehicle for finding community and for reckoning with the distance, or lack thereof, between our written and real selves.
As you stand against the blank, or possibly checkered, prospect of a new year stretched out, I hope that the pages of our magazine may offer some inspiration regarding a place to start. Whether an autofiction enthusiast (see pg. 10), an existentialist about whale communication (see pg. 18), or an overambitious freshman with dubious coping mechanisms (see pg. 24), the possibilities are endless, and the choices are entirely yours.
Personally, I begin the year endlessly grateful to once again find my place in the “family of things” of The Blue and White magazine.
Wishing you all a good start to the year,
Tara Zia
Editor-in-Chief
Bwecommendations
Tara Zia, Editor-in-Chief: Itamar Viteria Junior, Crooked Plow. Freddo cappuccinos. Central Station (1998).
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Jazmyn Wang, Managing Editor: Eagles, “PeacefulEasy Feeling.”
George Murphy, Publisher: Lion Feuchtwanger, The Oppermanns. Only Lovers Left Alive (2013). The Velvet Underground, “Stephanie Says.”
Jorja Garcia, Illustrations Editor: Clairo, Charm. Mitski, “I Guess.” Emil Ferris, My Favorite Thing is Monsters. Andrew Joseph White, Hell Followed with Us.
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Lucia Dec-Prat, Crossword Editor: Erlend Øye, “La prima estate.” Molina, “Parásito.” Dolmades.
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Phoebe Wagoner, Illustrations Editor: Scavenger hunts in Prentis (try finding the frozen fish!).
Kate Sibery, Layout Editor: Joan Didion, Run River. Reality Bites (1994). Wilco, “If I Ever Was a Child.”
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Josh Kazali, Senior Editor: Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies. Babfilm (1976).​
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Sona Wink, Senior Editor: Stephen Stills, “4 + 20 (Demo).” Joanna Newsom, “Sprout and the Bean.” Raw corn.​
Eli Baum, Staff Writer: No taste, no ability to judge.
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Chris Brown, Staff Writer: Dinosaur Jr., You’re Living All Over Me. The Sundays, Static & Silence.
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Ava Lozner, Staff Writer: Khatumu, “hunting days.” Third Eye Blind, “How’s It Going To Be.”
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Cecilia Zuniga, Staff Writer: Morcheeba, “The Sea.”
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Em Bennett, Staff Illustrator: Pency Prep, Heartbreak in Stereo. Tooth Fairy (2010). Fernand Léger & Dudley Murphy, Ballet Mécanique.
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Selin Ho, Staff Illustator: Lamp, “Mood Romantica.” Pomodorosa, pomodorosa. Laurie Colwin, Passion and Affect.
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Ellie Hodges, Staff Illustrator: Clairo, Charm. Deb J. J. Lee, In Limbo. Ali Smith, Artful.
Ben Fu, Staff Illustrator: E. Tani & Kaé Sera, False Nationalism False Internationalism: Class Contradictions in the Armed Struggle
Derin Ogutcu, Staff Illustrator: Rumble Fish (1983). Sabahattin Ali, The Devil Within. Dorothy Ashby, Afro-Harping.
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Jacqueline Subkhanberdina, Staff Illustator: Ichiko Aoba, “Asleep Among Endives.” Iced London fogs.
The President Next Door:
Shafik’s resignation and the role of the University President
By Chris Brown
“If [administrators] are really concerned with discovering who is doing his utmost to destroy this academically-promising, backwardly structured University, they ought to look long and hard at themselves,” read a 1968 editorial in the Spectator. The article was published immediately following the “Spring Revolution” of that April, when Columbia erupted into protest over civil rights issues and before President Grayson Kirk’s resignation.
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With Minouche Shafik’s resignation from her brief, controversial stint as Columbia’s president, the University’s highest office once again provokes heated discussion. Shafik boasts the second shortest tenure in the University’s history (trailing only Charles Henry Wharton, who never showed up to his post in 1801). But, as we return to a 1968-esque scene, we are left wondering: What should the president’s relationship with students be?
Illustration by Ben Fu
A student’s view of the university is necessarily self-centered. Of the trinity that makes up daily life—the students, the faculty, and the administration—we see ourselves as the heart of the school. Without us, there is no university. Yet we also sit lowest on the totem pole of academic life: relying on an implicit trust that our professors and the administration will facilitate our learning in a fair and safe environment.
But while professors can disappear after classes are done for the day, administration is never far out of sight. The rarely-entered Low Library at the heart of campus is a constant reminder of that presence. And though most students’ experience with their president bookends their college career—as freshmen at Convocation and at Commencement four years later—he or she is, in fact, always in view. Anyone eating at Fac House or walking on Morningside Drive is in eyesight of the President’s House, located right on campus. But despite their presence, they are impersonal and faceless; we have relationships with professors, rarely do we have them with administration.
But who our neighbor is, we have little choice in deciding. It is the Board of Trustees, the University’s behind-closed-doors decision-makers, who choose the president. When searching for someone to replace President Lee Bollinger after his retirement, the board publicly described their ideal candidate: someone with “a vision for the University” who “is known for important advances in their field of study.” Simultaneously, they sought someone to “represent the University impeccably” and “be a passionate and effective fundraiser.”
Which brings us back to President Shafik. Chosen by the Board and implanted among us, her appointment prompted the typical reaction to administrative decisions: jokes and quiet indifference. But she brought a clean slate, and students gave her the benefit of the doubt. Her first semester, though rocky, did not seem to indicate that a record-speed resignation was looming. But in the spring, amidst a student body that truly erupted for the first time in 40 years, our new neighbor left with nobody satisfied.
Columbia and her presidents are no strangers to student criticism and protest. Bollinger saw multiple major protests during his two-decade-long tenure, including an eight-day occupation of Low Library and multiple sit-ins. Eisenhower, during his five-year tenure before accepting the Presidency of the United States, was frequently called “absentee” due to his work in Washington and his time spent golfing in Georgia. But neither President ever faced pressure to resign like Shafik.
Kirk is her closest analog, ending his tenure after the Spring Revolution despite insisting that he would remain. He was also the last President before Shafik to have summoned the New York Police Department to campus. Unlike Shafik, however, Kirk had spent fifteen years at his post before the fateful events of 1968. And rather than resign, he used the opportunity to announce his retirement.
So what made Shafik’s tenure different and untenable? Put simply, she had lost the trust; both the students and Board felt that she could no longer perform the job. When she first ordered the NYPD onto campus in April, there was a palpable feeling of betrayal among the students. Thousands watched as the student protesters were arrested. The academic bubble had popped. No longer was discord at Columbia an internal issue; it had been opened up to the world.
Neighborly trust was shattered. Columbia was in the national news; politicians arrived on campus while students were locked out. Shafik’s emails were met with dread. The president had positioned herself in conflict with her students. Where before the Office of the President had been an afterthought, it was now an object of resentment.
This was how the school year ended. Seniors were denied a full graduation, which had been an administrative justification throughout the entire conflict. Those of us who weren’t seniors finished up our classes (largely online) and were sent back home. But the scars on campus and the collective psyche remained. Maybe we were misguided to envision the resident of the President’s Mansion as having our best interests in mind. It is not too much to ask, however, that alongside her fundraising ability and vision, the president of our University should do no harm to her students.
As we inaugurate another school year and a new president, perhaps the administration and highest office will return to their place: back of mind. As we move on, it’s worth remembering words from nearly 60 years ago. Going into the fall of 1968, Jerry Avorn, CC ’69, wrote on the front page of Spectator: “In a community in which the process of change has become the status quo, it is reassuring to see that a few constants are left. The uneasy smile, the stiff freshly-bought suits, the clinging overdressed mothers, the look of optimistic awe–despite the Spring Revolution, these eternal traditions of Freshman week returned to campus yesterday, innocent, naive, and unblemished.” Though few will be wearing suits, it is important to retain and nurture some of that optimistic awe. Love thy neighbor.
Grit and Glory
Columbia Athletes’ path to the 2024 Paris Olympics
By Shreya Khullar
Illustration by Ellie Hodges
Everyone is silent. There is jostling, the brisk squeaking of shoes, and then, the crowd erupts. I squint my eyes at my laptop screen to see what the uproar is about. I rewind the video ten seconds to watch the sequence again. Two opponents in white gear are facing off. The swords between them are glinting silver threads as they lunge then parry against each other. Cheering breaks out. It’s the 2024 Paris Olympics, and Jackie Dubrovich, CC ’16, has just scored a point for Team USA in the Women’s Foil. They would go on to win the gold.
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As I continued to click through videos, one thing became very clear: In this arena, the slightest turn of a foot, the briefest lapse of judgment, determines an athlete’s fate.
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When I, and other casual Olympic viewers, watch video clips or post-competition interviews, we see the winners on the podium ecstatic with joy or sobbing with relief, but what we don’t see are the hours of toil behind the medals.
Speaking on training regimens, Dubrovich detailed aspects of the Olympic preparation process including consulting sports psychologists, analyzing video recordings, and abiding by nutrition plans, all in addition to five-hour-a-day training schedules, while Charlotte Buck, CC ’18, two-time Olympian, mentioned the difficulties of balancing 6 a.m. rowing practices while being a pre-med student. I became lost in the chronicle of Bogdan Hamilton, CC ’26, Olympic fencer, who traveled from Montreal to Lima then back to Montreal, and then finally to Paris in a series of coaching sessions and competitions, and when Evita Griskenas, CC ’24, two-time Olympic rhythmic gymnast, recounted her routine flight from New York to Chicago every week to train, I found her description of it as “a little bit crazy” to be a little bit of an understatement. Every athlete expounded on a truth that, while most people acknowledge, they never fully understand the weight of: Being an Olympian requires an incalculable amount of dedication.
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“When you make a decision to do something as big as the Olympics, you just orient your life completely towards that,” Dubrovich said, “The athletes that you see competing, they structure their lives in these four year blocks.” In addition to physically demanding training, the roller coaster of emotions that comes with competing on the international stage can be just as challenging to navigate. “You pour your soul into something and you don’t know if you’re gonna come out and be happy,” she continued. “And that’s a very raw and vulnerable feeling.”
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The only people who truly grasp the difficulties that come with competing at this caliber are other Olympians. Many of the athletes mentioned the spirit of camaraderie in the Olympic village born from this mutual understanding. “They knew that everyone was just there to have a good experience,” said Hamilton, recounting a story of how fencers competing for China asked to trade pins even though they would be opponents on the piste a few hours later.
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This feeling of friendship despite the stakes of the competition was both international and inter-sport. “I’ve been joking that the hottest club in the village was the Team USA recovery room,” said Buck. “I got to watch the men’s gymnastic team final with Simone Biles and Jordan Chiles. I got to watch the men’s rugby final with the whole women’s rugby team, including Ilona Maher. We got to watch the women’s rugby final with the whole track team. Tara Davis was there. And truly everyone is as nice as you would expect them to be online.”
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In the moment of competition, however, you are alone—it is just you and your training. Everything has been practiced until movements become unconscious, reflexive. On the day when everything is on the line, you have to “trust the training,” as Grisekenas put it.
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The goal of Olympic athletes is to push the limits of the human body. These athletes understand that great sacrifice is a necessary aspect of achieving this ambition. So, they show up again and again to train, to compete, and to perform. Along with knowing what it takes to get there, they know what it feels like to come out the other end. “Indescribable,” Dubrovich said on winning gold. “Surreal.”
In Defense of French Autofiction
Or Of the Self.
By Kate Sibery
Illustration by Selin Ho
Disclaimer: All translations in this piece (except for book titles) were done by the writer.
“Dans ce livre je n’invente rien, et j’assume complètement la notion d’autofiction. Mais, en même temps, il s’agit d’un roman, dans lequel tout est vrai, et tout est faux également.”
- Cécile Balavoine, “J’ai compris l’autofiction le jour où je suis moi même devenue personnage,” RadioFrance, 2023
(In this book I’m not inventing anything, and I completely assume the notion of autofiction. But, at the same time, it’s a novel, in which everything is true, and everything is equally false.)
It was in a 2023 interview with RadioFrance that French novelist and French language professor at Columbia University in Paris Cécile Balavoine declared her unwavering adherence to autofictional writing. As a genre, autofiction proves difficult to define. In the French tradition of literary categorization, autofiction is a rendering of the self that relies on certain facts of the author’s lived experience while also employing fictional conventions. “Everything is true, and everything is equally false.”
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When I asked Balavoine what it meant for her to identify as a writer of autofiction, she cut in just as my words tapered off: “After my first novel came out, I do remember some people coming up to me and even to my family, my friends and asking … ‘So when are you going to write a real novel?’”
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Baked into that line of interrogation is some sense that writing autofiction requires no invention, no imagination—that the genre is somehow easier to write. But for Balavoine, although the facts of the lived experience are there, memory can be a fickle thing, and the task of using language to build the self and the atmosphere—what she calls “the little music of the novel”—persists. “I don’t think that autofiction is less than pure fiction that you have invented; you put yourself in danger, you are going to the bone because you really reveal what you have in the stomach, your guts, and when you do that you confront yourself. You have to find the right words, the right sentences, the right rhythm, the right atmosphere to say it as best as you can, and to translate it for your readers as best as you can,” she said.
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The first time I encountered a work of autofiction—or what I thought was a work of autofiction—was when I read L’événement (2000) (The Happening) by Annie Ernaux in October 2022, a few days before seeing her speak at Barnard, and a few days after she won the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature. In a little under 150 pages, the book recounts the narrator’s experience as a young student attempting to obtain an abortion in 1960s France, twelve years before the procedure was legalized. The book makes no room for sentimentality; it does not force itself to tune into the musical quality so pervasive in novelistic writing but rather makes a sustained cutting motion, dissecting the experience through a language that refuses to adopt what Ernaux calls “la poésie du souvenir” (the poetry of memory). Despite her methodical reconstruction of past events and acknowledgment that she is writing about her own life, Ernaux emphatically rejects the labeling of her work as autofiction. As Sam Sacks, writer of the Fiction Chronicle at The Wall Street Journal, said to me, “Annie Ernaux writes about herself, but she writes about herself as though she is not herself, but sort of observing herself as an anthropologist of this character who is Annie Ernaux.”
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It’s what Balavoine described as a confrontation with the self through a fictional mode that makes autofiction—or at least works with an autofictional sensibility—so fascinating to me. Since early December of last year, I’ve been playing with this consideration of how writers, specifically contemporary French writers, confront themselves before an audience of readers. I don’t normally read much contemporary fiction. However, every other Wednesday evening between December and April, I made my way to the long dining table in the kitchen of Columbia’s Maison Française, where I joined a group of 17 or so undergraduate and graduate students to discuss works of contemporary French literature. It was at that table that I became obsessed with how French authors render the figure of the self.
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The group, known as the Groupe Goncourt, gathers to read and discuss a selection of works of contemporary French literature nominated in the previous year for the nation’s most prestigious literary prize, Le Prix Goncourt. Simulating the official Prix, Columbia’s Groupe Goncourt and its counterparts from 10 other participating universities each vote for their chosen work to be considered for the Choix Goncourt des États-Unis (U.S. Goncourt Prize). In late April at the Villa Albertine, a French bookstore and cultural center on the Upper East Side, delegates from each university meet to defend their respective group’s book choice before bringing it to a vote and toasting their new winner with a flute of champagne.
Led by an adjunct professor in Columbia’s French department, Dr. Laurence Marie, and participating for the second year in a row, Columbia’s Groupe Goncourt read six of the books nominated for the 2023 prize, which was awarded in early November of the same year. The reading list included Triste Tigre by Neige Sinno, Sarah, Susanne et l’écrivain by Éric Reindhart, Humus by Gaspard Koenig, Proust, roman familial by Laure Murat, Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s L’échiquier, and the official prize-winning novel, Veiller sur elle by Jean Baptiste Andrea. Each meeting began with a ceremonial go-around during which everyone shared their thoughts on the week’s reading. I always wanted to go toward the end of the go-around—that way I would have enough time to rehearse in my head what I planned to say, and maybe pick up some new word or turn of phrase from the enviably fluid and expressive French spoken by the native speakers of the group.
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The book that won the official Prix Goncourt was lauded by some members of the selection jury for its traditionally novelistic qualities. Set primarily in Italy during the rise of fascism Veiller sur elle traces the life of Mimo, a young and talented sculptor carrying the weight of a tortured love for his childhood best friend, Viola. For many jury members, the book is, to use Balavoine’s phrase, “a real novel.” In a Huffington Post article, long-time Goncourt jury member Françoise Chandernagor praised the fact that this year’s winner was “un vrai roman” (a real novel), adding, “Ça manque un peu. Aujourd’hui, les gens ont tendance à raconter leur vie,” (This has been missing. Today, people have a tendency to recount their lives). Implicit in Chandernagor’s final comment is the same pejorative view of autofiction of which Balavoine spoke, rooted in the notion that writing directly and openly about one’s own life requires less imagination, and that the final product will somehow be less “literary.” Chandernagor isn’t alone in the sentiment, but her comments speak to a persistent divide in the Académie Goncourt between those who favor the more traditional novel and those who are open to more experimental novelistic forms. The debate was particularly heated in the selection process for the 2022 prize. The Jury chose the winning book, Vivre vite by Brigitte Giraud, a work of autofiction, after 14 rounds of deliberation. And still, one jury member insisted that Giraud’s novel was only a “petite autobiographie” (a little autobiography). I haven’t read Vivre vite, but I think diminishing the novel to the status of a little autobiography reflects a desire to diminish works of autofiction and to ignore the complexity of writing from memory, and of the self as a literary subject. The terms “autobiography” and even “memoir” don’t adequately seize and wrench open the space that the passage of time and the slippery nature of memory create between a writer’s self and a writer’s subject, although the two subjects are on the surface one and the same.
We voted in early April, ranking our choices from one to four, and so selected Sinno’s Triste Tigre, which went on to win the overall U.S. Goncourt Prize a few weeks later, as our winner. In my personal ranking, Triste Tigre fell second to Reindhart’s Sarah, Susanne et l’écrivain, largely because I became obsessed with the latter’s narrative structure. The book is written as a sort of triptych dialogue between the author, Sarah, and Sarah’s literary double, Susanne, over the course of which Sarah recounts the unraveling of her marriage and family while the figure of the author translates it into the fictional narrative of Susanne. Sinno’s book, by contrast, is pointedly not a novel, but rather a hybrid of many genres of writing that Sinno harnesses in an effort to bring readers inside her head as she studies herself—recounting and disassembling the experience and aftermath of being sexually abused by her stepfather as a child. While Sinno refuses to place the book within the bounds of any one genre of writing (many regarding it as “inclassable”), there were moments while reading during which I felt the text knocking up against the amorphous body of literature that calls itself autofiction. Like Ernaux, Sinno persistently muddles the “Je” of her book, at times holding it, and subsequently the reader, so deep within her mind that my impulse to read it as an autofiction is heightened. But she loves to break things too, distorting the sense of intimacy between herself and the reader just as quickly as it was established; as she writes in Triste Tigre, “Je suis celle à qui c’est arrivé. Qui est le je qui parle ici?” (I am the one this happened to. Who is the “I” speaking here?).
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What I find compelling in works of autofiction, though some authors—such as Ernaux and Sinno—reject that terminology, is the pointed divergence between author, narrator, and character. Writing about the self is effectively an act of translation; memories, self-conception, and the words themselves all coalesce to create a version of the self unique to the page. It’s a selfish interest, I admit. I often treat myself as the subject of whatever I’m writing and struggle with the inevitable divergence between the “I” that is thinking (writing in my head really) and the “I” that I commit to the page. In a 2021 interview with the The New Yorker, Lois Lowry was asked whether dreams and memories reveal truth or are stories that we tell ourselves. In her answer, she talks about watching an old videotape of a birthday party she attended as a kid, saying that it was funny to watch because, in her memory, she was always standing on the outskirts, observing everyone else play. But then she saw herself in the video running around, playing with the rest of the kids. Writing about myself, I’m both the kid running around, losing myself in play, and the one on the periphery, watching.
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Perhaps this is all my way of saying that the complexity of rendering the self through writing is a factor of distance, at least in part. Ernaux does not consider herself a writer of autofiction, classifying many of her works as “auto-socio-biographies,” because she perches herself at a distance. And because her “I” is an inherently impersonal one—simply a means of seizing the greater sociological, historical, and familial contexts within which she exists. I understand Ernaux’s project, but find it difficult to believe that the core of the self—one’s center of emotion and feeling—doesn’t somehow make its home in that forever exhilarating and terrifying declaration, “I.”
By Josh Kazali
In many ways, England is an unlikely candidate for Americans studying abroad in Europe. It doesn’t boast the lively nightlife of Berlin or Barcelona; it lacks the ancient ruins of Athens or Rome; the cuisine certainly doesn’t hold a candle to Parisian croissants or Florentine pastas; and for weather, you’d frankly be better off anywhere else on God’s green earth. But Great Britain still boasts one shining cultural triumph, something wholly unique among its European compatriots: the humble public house.
If you spend enough time around wayward Britons at Columbia (or, in my case, date one), it’s only a matter of time before they begin to wax poetic about their local pub. Surrounded by classy cocktail joints, seedy dive bars, crowded student spots, and everything in between, it’s difficult to imagine the city lacking a watering hole of any kind. Myself, I was always rather skeptical of the sanctity surrounding the pub. After all, a pint is a pint is a pint—isn’t the pub just another place to get one? Yet, with an affinity for British literature and historic drinking venues, I landed at Heathrow Airport ready to see what all the fuss was about.
Illustration by Jacqueline Subkhanberdina
An American in Wetherspoons
Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Pub
The Campaign for Real Ale (also known as CAMRA, a powerful organization that shows just how seriously the British take their brew) remarks that a pub needs only two things: It must “be open to and welcome the general public” and “allow drinking on the premises.” For a relatively small city, Cambridge has these in spades, places decked in old wood, ripe with the smell of yeast, with names like “the Anchor,” “the Eagle,” “the Pickerel,” and my personal favorite, “the Panton Arms.”
The Panton Arms exemplifies the pub in all the ways I grew to love, and I immediately gravitated to my local: It’s reliable, a five-minute walk from my shabby room in South Cambridge. It’s cozy, with a warm indoors and a spacious patio (for the few days during the English spring that one wants to enjoy outdoors). It is intimate, and on Thursdays a group of older musicians gathers to play Irish folk music, not performing for us so much as each other and the pints of Guinness they down. There’s a magical atmosphere in great pubs like the Panton that makes you feel deeply comfortable, content to stay sunk in the cushioned couches for as long as you need. If this is what every pub is like, perhaps England has a rightful claim to being Shakespeare’s “other Eden.”
Americans, I think, enjoy and admire pubs like the Panton Arms on their vacations to the sceptre’d isle. To stop here, however, paints an incomplete portrait of the pub. To see the rest, you’ll want to stay up later—past 11 p.m., when most pubs in England close—and walk up the high street to a place called “the Regal.” The Regal is a pub owned by J D Wetherspoon, a conglomerate colloquially known as “Spoons.” And if the Panton exhibits the pub for what it can aspire to be, Spoons exhibits what the pub is—its truthful and occasionally unflattering reflection.
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. . .
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First, there is no J D Wetherspoon. The English company is a series of chain pubs that borrows its name from a character from the ’70s American television series, The Dukes of Hazzard—a bizarreness which befits Spoons. They buy big, strange, unused spaces, like banks, opera houses, or in the case of the Regal, cinemas, and convert them into vast and outlandish pubs. The Regal has two stories and could surely fit over 400 people. On weekend nights before Cambridge students flock to one of the few clubs in town, I suspect it frequently does. It is grand in the same way that a Las Vegas casino is grand, with garish patterned carpet and massive chandeliers, bathing the entire place in a flat, pale glow. It is sticky from pitchers of shockingly colored cocktails, and a little smelly from plates of greasy food. Drinks here are cheap, sometimes as low as £2 at the Regal (pretty good for post–Brexit times), and people imbibe accordingly (in the King’s English, they get properly pissed). It is, in its way, a church—a comparison strengthened by the fact that one Spoons in Scotland is literally a converted chapel.
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The Regal is profoundly unkempt, uncouth, and ungraceful, and yet people just go. Students, retirees, in some cases, families. You will go, too. You will drink the neon cocktails (or, in my case, an alarmingly cheap lemony concoction known as “Hooch” that some rowers recommended). You will use the palatial bathroom. And in spite of the splitting headache you will have the next morning, when someone texts you “Spoons?” that night, you will invariably, unflinchingly, happily go again.
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It is this loyalty to the pub that most fascinates me. Wetherspoons is owned by Tim Martin, a controversial English businessman with a shock of gray hair (one YouTube commenter notes his passing resemblance to Steve Bannon). Besides owning the popular pub chain, Martin became a public figure for his fierce advocacy for Brexit, donating £200,000 in 2016 to the Vote Leave campaign. His statements have led some to call for boycotts. Yet, because of its essential place in English culture, or if you’re more cynical, because of the merciless undercutting of Wetherspoons pricing, Spoons prevails in its ubiquity. This, too, is what the pub is: a place that you return to time and time again, if not out of desire, out of habit. The deep groove the pub wears into the English psyche is something my American mind strained to grasp, and yet I desperately wanted to understand. I needed an expert.
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. . .
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Fortunately, in my neck of North London happened to live Jimmy McIntosh, a copywriter who moonlights as a pub aficionado. Under the moniker @londondeadpubs, McIntosh has cataloged and mapped over 4,000 locations throughout London that have been shuttered, closed, or burned down in the city’s centuries-long affair with the pub. His commitment to the project borders on the obsessive: “My girlfriend’s like, ‘You wanna come watch The Wire?’ I’m like, ‘No, I gotta map these pubs.’” More recently, McIntosh has dipped into reviewing pubs around London on his social media accounts, as well as writing for The Fence as the magazine’s “pints correspondent.”
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I met McIntosh at the Coronet, a former Spoons which now is a mostly vacant, still-vast pub on Holloway Road in North Islington. By the time I arrived, he had already downed the better half of a pint of San Miguel. He has a sixth sense for the innate quality of a pub, something that he terms the DPF—the Dead Pub Factor—in his videos. I eagerly asked him how he quantifies this mystical je ne sais quoi, to which he responded frankly: “Do you want to spend a whole afternoon in this place getting slowly pissed with your mates? Yes or no?”
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I could have listened to McIntosh talk about pubs for hours. He told me of his love of tacky ’70s carpeting, admiration for New York’s dive bars, and distaste for Millenial exposed-brick-and-pipe refurbishment. He emphasized the role of the pub as a common ground for English life. “You have your house, you have your office, you need somewhere else to exist,” he told me, describing the pub as a crucial third space. “I got married!—Let’s go to the pub! My dad died—let’s go to the pub,” he said. “It’s the backdrop to which the theaters of our lives play out.”
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McIntosh slips into poetry when speaking about pubs with remarkable ease, a flair for the romantic that he extended to our conversation about Wetherspoons. He readily admitted Tim Martin’s flawed persona (“a real cantankerous cunt, looks like a cartoon shotgun has gone off on his face”). But he also argued that in spite of his issues with the massive corporate conglomerate, to condemn the people who depend on Spoons to gather, commune, and interact is to misdirect that frustration. “Ultimately, if you’re bringing people together in this place, it’s their lifeline.”
In that sense, perhaps Spoons exists as the perfect example of a third space, one that has been entirely redefined by its patrons. “They’re cathedrals of memory,” McIntosh said, gazing wistfully into his pint. “Some of the best nights of my life have been in Wetherspoons pubs—some of the first snogs I’ve ever had, wakes I’ve been to for friends who’ve died have been in Wetherspoons. Everything happens in Wetherspoons, more broadly, pubs in general.”
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. . .
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I think I see where McIntosh is coming from. For him, and many other Brits, the pub is a centrifugal site, a place where the often fraught nature of English identity can find some semblance of equilibrium. For that, it is sacred. As we finished our interview and headed for one more drink at McIntosh’s favorite pub (which I will not disclose out of respect for the relationship between an Englishman and his local), I wondered, not for the first time: Why can’t we have this in New York? Is it our lingering sense of puritanism, or the dry years of Prohibition, or simply an American sense of defiance that precludes pub culture from harboring on our Yankee shores?
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The pub expects nothing of you. If you have a couple of pounds to buy a drink, you are a member of a community. As CAMRA says, pubs must first and foremost be “be open to and welcome the general public.” This openness allows English pubs to transcend their definition and blossom into something endlessly unique and significant, from the intimacy of the Panton Arms to the hedonism of Wetherspoons.
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If you have friends who have studied abroad, or have studied abroad yourself, you have no doubt heard the lessons of foreign travel ad nauseam. You have heard, and are already growing tired of, the semesterly Parisians cloying for wine and cigarettes, the Berliners moaning about New York’s techno scene, the Florentines decrying the price of an Aperol spritz in Manhattan. Though the pub may not be as sexy as the clubs of Barcelona, the ruins of Rome, or the canals of Amsterdam, I see why Londoners join their ranks, longing for what they briefly enjoyed in their time away from the Upper West Side.
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The pub is a kind of miraculous togetherness with only a bit of lager to grease the wheels. It is a lesson in camaraderie and commiseration, in claiming space—something which Columbia has in such little quantity—and using it to build memories, start conversations, or just be alone. It’s this philosophy which distinguishes the pub from your everyday American bar, a gospel whose praises I intend to sing throughout Morningside Heights. For now, though, I’ll have to find somewhere else to drown my sorrows.
Joan Jonas
Sea creatures, magic shows, and inner spirits
By Sona Wink
I came to know Joan Jonas amidst unusual circumstances: We sat side by side for two consecutive Thanksgiving dinners, during each of which she read a poem, I cried, and our food went cold. We came to those meals to celebrate the life of our mutual family friend, Sekeena Gavagan. We sat alongside Sekeena in 2022, while she was undergoing chemo, and we mourned her absence in 2023, shortly after she died.
Sekeena was a defense attorney. She would often print out Supreme Court decisions for me to read so that we could discuss them together; she was the only person who I ever witnessed defeating my stepdad in a political debate. She was whip-smart, deeply principled, and immeasurably warm. She was only 56 when she died. Her daughter Lila and husband Eddie outlive her.
Joan and Sekeena were next-door neighbors and dear friends. Sekeena lived in an apartment where Joan used to make her performance art before she partitioned her loft into smaller spaces. During the lighter moments of our Thanksgivings, Joan and I talked about American history and Greek art. It instantly made sense to me why Joan and Sekeena loved each other: they are fiercely intelligent and confident, with gravitas that emanates from them. I admire them both so fiercely that it cuts through me.
Illustration by Phoebe Wagner
Joan is 88 and sharp as a tack. Interviewing her was, frankly, terrifying: she does not suffer fools; she does not mince her words. Since the late ‘60s, she has pioneered the genre of performance art (a term that she dislikes, as I learned during our conversation). Her storied career, which spans half a century, was on display in a sprawling exhibition in MoMA from March to July 2024. Joan’s work can take many forms: for example, naked people shuffling mirrors around a room, crude drawings of fish, or footage of Tilda Swinton superimposed upon an Icelandic hot spring. These seemingly random components are, in fact, carefully planned by Joan and grounded in her vast knowledge of literature, art history, and folk tales.
Ghosts were on my mind as Joan and I meandered through the cobblestone streets of Soho on a warm evening in June. I pictured the mythic rough-and-tumble New York of Joan’s young adulthood, which contrasted sharply with the hyper-commercial sprawl that surrounded us. Joan and I spoke only briefly about Sekeena, but I felt the undercurrent of her loss throughout our conversation. As the sun set, casting pink on the brick edifices, I walked Joan home to the loft where she has lived since the ‘70s, where Sekeena used to live. I imagined the unique loneliness of outliving your young friend in a neighborhood that never stops changing. We spoke about the energetic traces that linger.
This transcript has been edited and condensed for clarity.
BW: Do you remember any “aha” moments you had at Mount Holyoke, any specific books, paintings, or artists that mattered to you?
JJ: I mean, I read everything I could. What can I say? … I loved Jacometti, and then I discovered Agnes Martin in my last year … I wrote my thesis on, believe it or not, Picasso. Well, he’s a genius. Now I wouldn’t go there. Matisse is another favorite.
I was particularly interested in early Greek art, Minoan and Mycenaean art … I don’t know if you’ve heard of the Minoans and the women dove with the fish, with the porpoises. It’s interesting, it’s a kind of ongoing theme in my work, the fish. That was why I went to Crete, but that was after college.
BW: We are a Columbia Magazine, and you are a Columbia alum—
JJ: What did I learn at Columbia?
BW: Yeah.
JJ: In those days you got your masters in one year, if you can believe it, at Columbia. Studios were in the rotunda of [Low] library … It was a very small group of us. Our teachers were, I hate to say it, second-tier abstract expressionists. I took a class in modernist poetry, I took a class in ancient Chinese bronzes … The modernist poetry class was really important to me in relation to my work and what I was thinking about.
At that time I wanted to switch into a performative situation … That was my transition period. Columbia was pretty important, even if it was for one year.
BW: How did you get introduced to the downtown scene?
JJ: At Columbia they didn’t teach anything about what was going on downtown. It was really separate. That was in the ’60s. But I knew there was a whole scene downtown … I got a job at a gallery on 57th called the Green Gallery and it was a job as a receptionist, which I was terrible at. I learned everything about what was going on in contemporary painting and sculpture. After that I got other jobs in galleries. Every time I worked in a gallery I learned about the artists in the galleries. It was part of my research, working in galleries.
BW: What was Soho like when you moved here?
JJ: Just factory space.
BW: Empty?
JJ: Mostly empty, but there were people moving in. There was a group called “Fluxus,” a group of artists. There were different groups of artists down here … There was a guy in Fluxus, George Maciunas, who was buying lofts and selling them to artists. All these places that were empty, factory spaces, were slowly being bought. At first by artists, and later on it became incredibly commercial. My first loft I bought through that, paying very little.
BW: What did you pay?
JJ: My first loft I paid $2,500.
BW: To rent it?
JJ: No, to buy it.
BW: Oh my god.
JJ: Really. Then I sold it and bought my second loft—I won’t say how much—for very little.
BW: Wow. And that’s the same place as today. What initially drew you?
JJ: The idea that you had a space to work, to live and work.
BW: I once had a teacher who lived in New York in the ’80s, and she often talked about how it was cooler back then, how you could get away with anything. She spoke of it in romantic terms.
JJ: I never talk that way about that period. You know why? I don’t like to tell students or young people that it was better then than it is now. It doesn’t make sense. And who knows?
But the fact that it was cheaper to work then, as I just told you about, and there were a lot of places you could perform in. And then the galleries came in and things moved uptown. So, it was a very exciting period. Everybody, you know, Richard Serra, whatever, we all felt like we were on the cusp, but we weren’t calling it the most important moment. It was an exciting moment in that it felt like you were on the cusp of happening, of new ideas. But I don’t think any period is better than any other period because you never know.
BW: That’s refreshing, because sometimes I fall into feeling wistful about the New York I never got to see.
JJ: One should never feel that way. One should look at what’s here now. I’m sure there’s many interesting things now—it’s just harder now, much harder. It’s not so easy for young artists in New York. It’s awful, actually. The rents are so high.
BW: What do you think of the neighborhood now?
JJ: Well, I think New York is being ruined.
BW: Oh! By what?
JJ: By developers. You know, there’s no architects anymore. There’s developers. They put up these incredibly tall buildings, which are ridiculous. The tall buildings that sway in the breeze. Who would want to live there? I mean, some people do. What was your question?
BW: Do you still feel connected to this neighborhood, having lived here for so long?
JJ: I mean, this is my home. And of course I feel connected in that it’s so familiar, and I still have friends here, but not as many as I used to.
BW: Let’s turn to your MoMA exhibit. Can I describe my first experience going there?
JJ: Yeah.
BW: I think, subconsciously, I went in with the naïve approach of trying to decipher it. I would read the plaque on the side and try to look for those themes in the work. Then I’d get frustrated and disoriented because there’s a lot of sounds, a lot of different images, a lot of which are often uncanny or challenging.
JJ: Yeah.
BW: I went twice, because it took me a while before I finally felt like I understood how I was supposed to be in the space.
JJ: What was that?
BW: Embracing disorientation. Submitting to the work, letting it be exactly what it was. I stopped trying to think about it or use words to explain it, which is what I’m often taught to do, as a student.
JJ: Right. That sounds good.
BW: I’m curious how you think your work ought to be approached.
JJ: I mean, that would be what I would say to somebody: Just look at it and don’t try to understand it or make judgements. Just look at it and enjoy it, if you can, and absorb it. That’s all. I don’t try to explain my work to people, except if I’m teaching a class.
But of course, it’s not just that … It’s my work. And there’s a meaning to it. I try to make it as clear as possible. Some people have trouble with my work because it is obscure. It’s based on art history, references to myth … My interest, always, when I was beginning was: how do things begin? How does Minoan or Mycenaean, those are Greek, that’s Western art, how did it begin? Well, it began as ritual. That’s how I began, was to look at the history of art and how things began.
BW: You’ve described your work as ritual-like; I’m curious what makes a good ritual.
JJ: I can’t say what makes a good ritual. But for me … I’m looking at my mirror performances and I think they look like rituals. It’s moving very slowly, so the audience gets into that contemplative space and follows the visual.
My early research was all about magic and ritual … That’s what interested me. I grew up with magic shows. My stepfather was an amateur magician. I went to magic shows. We couldn’t afford it, but my schoolmates always invited magicians to come and do magic tricks. So that was one of my sources, magic shows.
BW: What does it feel like for you, in your body and your mind, when you perform in front of a crowd?
JJ: What does it feel like? There’s an energy that happens between the crowd and the performer. They exchange energies, in a way. For example, if I’m doing a bad piece, I know I’m doing a bad piece. If it’s going well, I know it.
BW: How do you know?
JJ: Well the thing is, I don’t always know. It’s intuition.
BW: Or, what does it feel like to know?
JJ: Well, when you perform, the time feels very different. Time goes very fast. All of a sudden it’s over. There’s no time; it’s over. On the other hand, I’ve had experiences where I thought it was awful and people come up to me years later and tell me it was the best thing they ever saw. So I don’t think you’re always the best judge of your own work. Those are my experiences.
BW: I was curious about how, on the one hand, your journals were on display, and I could tell you put a lot of thought and structure into your work. Yet at the same time, the videos of you moving or drawing seemed quite visceral or playful, they seemed to be spontaneous. I’m curious how much freedom you allow yourself, and how you go about—
JJ: I choreograph everything.
BW: Really?
JJ: Yeah. Everything. I mean, I edit everything. Yeah, because I don’t want bad work to get out there. You could say on one level I’m a choreographer. I choreograph my own work … I’m very careful about what I show. You don’t just show everything. You have to edit it, take things away, put things back. All the work you see here has been chosen, edited.
BW: What role does spontaneity play in your work, if anything?
JJ: In the making of it … To develop a work you improvise, in other words, you decide what you’re going to do, you find things, you put them together … You have to make a piece! How do you write a novel? How do you do anything? Somebody has to choose. How do you do a beginning and ending, and all that?
BW: I have a strange question.
JJ: What’s that?
BW: It’s a longer question.
JJ: That’s ok.
BW: I took a class where we read Elective Affinities by Goethe. In the book, there was a scene where characters reenact paintings by standing perfectly still and wearing costumes. The onlookers feel delight at first, but then they start to feel ill at ease. It’s a moment of diffuse anxiety: the feeling of looking at life that is still in a deathlike way. I was reminded of this scene when I was sitting watching your Organic Honey performances because I find that mask really disturbing, and it really gives me this feeling—
JJ: Really?
BW: Yeah, like diffuse anxiety. I’m curious what drew you to that mask, and what the Organic Honey persona involves for you.
JJ: The Organic Honey persona. When I began to work with video, I’d been in Japan where I bought my first video camera. I was very influenced by Japanese Noh theater, where they use masks. Because I was not a performer, I did not feel at ease in front of the audience. It took me a long time … This was in 1972.
I didn’t want to be Joan Jonas. I wanted to transform myself into another performer. And so I found the mask. I liked the erotic aspect of it. It was the opposite of me at the time … I wasn’t this erotic seductress, but I played it. I think it had a lot to do with the technology of video—it brings up eroticism.
I had a jar of honey on the table. I named it after that jar of honey, Organic Honey … I wanted to transform my persona, so I dressed up in different costumes, I wore the mask, I wore a headdress. I wasn’t Joan Jonas. I didn’t want to be. I still don’t want to be. Although now I don’t really disguise myself anymore, but maybe I will someday.
That piece was during the Women’s Movement. So in part, that piece is about exploring female imagery. In the late ’60s early ’70s, during the feminist movement, people were talking about, “is this female?” Sticks are male, the moon is female, the sun is male. I was exploring that idea.
BW: I have another long question. You mentioned in an interview for your 2015 Venice Biennale: “Video projections will tell fragmented ghost stories, which … function partly as a reference to what remains and what is lost.” I was very struck by that. I also was struck by how, in your work, you often repeat the same action over and over—it reminds me of exhausting something out of your system. I’m curious if you’ve felt haunted by anything.
JJ: I was always interested in the idea of ghosts, and I always wanted to experience a ghost but I never did. I found it too scary or too disturbing. However, I’m very interested in ghost stories and in the supernatural … Interesting, it’s very seldom that I talk about this—how we are involved with the invisible side of things. It’s magic; by that I mean that it’s not like the everyday. Art comes out of something else. It comes from the everyday, and it comes from the inner spirit of people, which is not describable. Why do artists make what they make? It’s based on dream and fantasy in many cases. Anyway.
BW: Does your artistic practice connect to your sense of inner spirit?
JJ: I hope so. That’s all. I mean, I hope so. Everybody’s does. Whatever one’s inner spirit is … it does connect. But it’s very hard to translate it into the world. It’s about translation. How do you find the form? You have to find the form.
For me, installations are a form that I deal with … For a long time it’s been about the form of video installation. It’s a three-dimensional, multi-layered work. They call it “multimedia.” I mean, they always have to call it something. So it’s “multimedia.” Somebody came up to me today and said, “I do multimedia.” They didn’t have that when I went to art school.
BW: Do you like the term multimedia?
JJ: I don’t like any of those terms, even “performance art.”
BW: Do you have a name for it?
JJ: I’m an artist. A visual artist. It’s ok. I think it helps people to name things. But also, I get worried about naming certain research of animals because it means that people are doing research and going into a situation in which they might destroy. I’m talking about the present situation.
BW: Which situation?
JJ: Well, whatever situation where they do, say, research about birds or about whales. They’re going to put machines in there, they’re going to take pictures and find out where they are.
BW: What do you think of the putting of those machines?
JJ: I think it’s invasive. But it’s also part of our culture, we have to find out. Researching how animals communicate requires listening and recording with machines.
BW: Your dogs are a clear through-line throughout your work, and the later rooms in your exhibit revolve around marine life especially.
JJ: Well, dogs are very important because they were part of my life. I included dogs because they were there … Have you ever had an animal?
BW: Oh yeah.
JJ: So, you know, you communicate with the dogs, in different way. Which I do. I speak with my dogs. I’m sure many people do.
I was commissioned to do a piece about the oceans, but I already had curiosity about the oceans. At MIT I had a class called Action Archeology of the Deep Sea. I had my students do research in relation to their project on a subject they chose … That was some years ago, since then a lot of research and knowledge have been accumulated about fish and animals in the sea which they didn’t have before because it was unknown territory. I started working with this marine biologist David Gruber, who was a diver and has developed cameras and lenses to photograph animals in the ocean, deep sea animals. Things like luminescence that we can’t see with our naked eyes that he has found a way of photographing and recording. And now he’s doing a project about whales. He contributed his footage to my work. That’s the way I work with him, to put his footage into my work as backgrounds. You can see it.
BW: Yeah. And then you would draw on top of it, if I remember correctly.
JJ: I would draw, but I didn’t alter it … I also had figures in front of it. I also did a lot of shooting. I went to aquariums and recorded the fish. Whenever I went to a new city I had my camera and I went to an aquarium. So a lot of that footage is in there too. During this period of working with the so-called ocean, I learned a lot about fish.
BW: What did you notice about fish?
JJ: Well it’s not about me, what I notice. Fish are sentient beings, you know. They have feelings. They have another kind of intelligence that they’re exploring. In the research about whales, whales have an alphabet. They’re more intelligent than we think. We don’t know anything about them. They have diphthongs, which I didn’t even know what that was.
BW: Oh my god! That's amazing. I think those are all of my questions. Is there anything else you would like to say?
JJ: Well, I can never think of anything else. What else would you like?
flowers
by George Murphy
Saturday and we are lost in a sea of cherry-billows,
alone together.
We lie down, reach our roots deep, and
pour ourselves into empty space.
Soundless, bodiless, and then—
dazzling from blue to gold, the sun!
Everything leaves, pulls away,
But you’re still returning year by year
Finding yourself in bloom once again,
as you sink into the earth.
I wish you could see yourself unfurling
The way I do. Your scars wind down
to the core of the world, and suddenly burst green—
The tilt of the planet cannot faze you
your roots hold firm.
When you exhale,
The shadow of the moon is on your lips.
You have done it again—
are a reflection of a sunbeam,
a flower and a girl.
wandering stars
by George Murphy
No city lights scrape away our stars here.
The wind comes and goes in darkness, and owls softly boom,
as small creatures rustle through the dew.
The piney crushed-flower smell of the world at night
wafts through the window. When I look out I can’t see anything,
except for fireflies, and a tiny slip of crescent moon.
When my eyes adjust everything glows,
and who can say where the stars end and the fireflies begin?
We walk to the beach in the last blue of dusk,
lie tumbled on the sand, and trace movements in the sky.
Each night now Saturn is closer to the horizon, the moon coalesces
and we will be gone as soon as it’s taken a new phase.
How many crescent moons will you remember me for?
I want to be your wandering star, but I’m afraid
that I’m just a meteor streaking through your atmosphere,
never to be seen again.
Soon enough the sand that we’re lying on will be washed into the depths,
the wind will carry away our breath and we will spin out of this orbit,
we’ll wake up in the morning and leave all this behind.
But we don’t care tonight, we are freer than falling stars,
because when we run back it’s as though we’ll run forever,
and when you take my hand it’s like you’ll never let go.
Affirmative (Maya):
I still can’t believe I’m here at Columbia, my dream school! To stand here on Low Steps, in the greatest city in the world, with Ivy League tier opportunities at my fingertips… I need to make the most of this moment. NSOP is coming to a close and I’m still getting the hang of things here—everyone’s so busy, and I’m scared I’m not doing enough. But no matter! My semester plan is rock solid. I will achieve a perfect blend of productivity and social life, and maintain 10 hours of sleep every night. Let me walk you through how.
Okay first off, whose bright idea was it to stifle the great minds of our generation with a course credit limit? It’s ridiculous! But don’t worry, I’ve already spammed my advisor into oblivion until she let me over enroll. It's just that I'm so passionate about learning that I can’t choose only five classes, much less pick a major. My tentative schedule is Organic Chemistry, Advanced Programming, a class or two in the Physics department, Calc XXXII, and of course, Columbia’s Core Curriculum. But out of all my classes, my favorite has got to be “Feminist Furniture: Rethinking the Chair.” It’s exactly the kind of phil-o-sof-a-cal exploration of the household that I hoped to find at Columbia.
It goes without saying that I’m running for Columbia College Student Body President. I’m excited to represent my class, and to make real, meaningful change at our revolutionary and avant-garde institution. And, I think I have a good chance at winning. When I was campaigning, one guy told me that my enthusiasm “borders on mania.” That must be a good sign.
Oh, and who can forget about all the extracurriculars I’m planning on joining? I’m in a couple dozen clubs for now, but the most important is obviously The Columbia Daily Spectator. Ok, technically I’m not on Spec yet, but when they see what comes of my groundbreaking personal investigation, they’ll accept me for sure! I don’t want to reveal too much yet, but let’s just say when my piece is published, Katrina Armstrong will resign faster than you can say Minouche Sha-fucked! As much as I love Spec, I will say their “ethical journalism” guidelines are a bit of a pain. According to their editorial board, being a journalist doesn’t excuse “stalking” and “breaking the law.” Personally, I think they’re overreacting. How am I supposed to get the scoop of the century if I can’t trespass on private property?
I know I have a lot on my plate already, but I need to make sure I maintain my healthy habits despite the busy schedule. I’ll go to Dodge for at least an hour a day and eat three meals a day at Ferris—gotta keep up the physique! I’m here to strengthen my mind alongside my body: I’ll read every Lit Hum book cover to cover, go to every available office hours appointment, get a campus job, and in my free time, explore all the Big Apple has to offer. I’ll go to a museum at least once a week, become a street-style fashionista, volunteer at local non-profit organizations, and maybe even dip my toes into the New York techno rave scene. I’m going to be my best city-girl self this semester, and nothing can stop me!
But I’m not all about the self-improvement grind. I’m also here at Columbia to find love; after all, isn’t that what college life is all about? As soon as I moved in I downloaded Hinge and Tinder, and all the other apps for good measure. Needless to say, after a couple blind dates, Sidechat DMs, and some stalking on the Columbia2028 Instagram page, I think I have some promising options on my roster.
First, there’s this girl, Lucy. She was in my NSOP group, and we really hit it off when we were the only two people to show up to the “mandatory” social and emotional learning session. Since then, we’ve spent every waking moment together. And, she even said “I love you.” Afterwards, while we held hands she told me she wants to keep it “casual” and that it’s “not that deep.” Since Lucy is so adamant about not being exclusive, I started talking to this upperclassman named Damon. He’s in something called the John Jay Society. He says it’s Columbia’s oldest and most prestigious debate organization, which sounds great to me. Finally, there’s Beelzebub, an international student. I couldn’t quite catch where he’s from since his accent is so thick, I think he said Nether-something? The Netherlands maybe? Anyway, I’m really into him, but my friends say his blood-ingestion kink is a “red flag.” The way I see it, it’s my freshman year in New York City, and I’m here to try new things!
Unrealistic, you say? Pfft. I got into Columbia, I can do anything.
Negative (Ava):
Ok, so I was a bit… ambitious. I’m just a girl!
You may have noticed earlier that I forgot to mention a certain scientific requirement when I first introduced my extensive schedule. It seems that while I was busy maintaining my C average, I simply forgot to attend a single Frontiers of Science lecture or discussion section. But would you believe that even after my extremely apologetic email, my discussion professor still refused to let me make up my 43 missing assignments? Whatever happened to women in STEM?
Don’t even get me started on Feminist Furniture – Fem Fur if you’re with it. My chair-building final went up in flames when the professor claimed my chair wasn’t inclusive enough for people with GG breast size and above. He said the chair lacked back support.
Unfortunately, the adversity didn’t stop there. Although my campaign for Columbia College Student Body President debuted flawlessly, I was quickly plunged into a PR nightmare. I think I can best explain the situation with a segment of the apology email I sent out while I was being canceled earlier this year:
I’m sure by now we’ve all seen the video of me that has recently gone viral. I would like to sincerely apologize to all of you for the video’s contents. This video was taken at the very start of the year, before I understood the Low Steps Bottle Flipping Man to be an integral part of our campus community. I was in the middle of a dark moment, having just taken a tumble down the top of Low Steps, and took my anger out on an innocent bystander. I have been informed that, upon inspection at Mount Sinai Hospital, it was found that the blow to his groin burst Mr. Bottle Flipper’s left testicle. We have come to a settlement to avoid a trial and I am committed to earning back his trust over time. I will take this experience as an opportunity to better myself and become the leader that the students of Columbia University deserve.
I think it goes without saying that my bid for Columbia College Student Body President was unsuccessful. But nevertheless, she persisted!
The end of my campaign was really a blessing in disguise, as it allowed me to throw myself into my work as an investigative reporter for Spec. I was truly inspired to go hardcore in my exposé of President Armstrong when I found out University Hardware was having a sale on binoculars. Let’s just say that from my perch at the top of a tree in Morningside Park, I became intimately familiar with Armstrong’s daily routine through the windows of the President’s House. During my week-long stakeout, I gathered loads of compelling footage. However, upon bringing my evidence to the Spec higher-ups, they seemed less than pleased. Apparently, I was “tarnishing their reputation” as I was never given clearance from Spec to “pursue that trail,” and I should have “stuck to my assigned piece on the Ferris lunch specials.” Safe to say that was the end of my professional partnership with The Columbia Spectator, but I’m not sweating it.
It’s all water under the bridge, though, as the true highlight of my year was finding my person. Of course, it didn’t work out with Lucy and Damon. Lucy and my whirlwind romance is nothing but a faint memory now. I should have known it wouldn’t last when she refused to introduce me as anything more than her “NSOP buddy” to her friend group despite claiming to be madly in love with me. I eventually said good riddance to her and decided to give things a go with Damon. Things started off a bit rocky when he invited me to a meeting of the John Jay Society (NOT my crowd), but I decided to see where things went. However, I soon realized that our differences were too steep a hill to climb when I walked in on him in a very compromising position – I won’t say too much out of respect for his privacy, but let’s just say it involved a Ben Shapiro Tik Tok edit, red LED lights, and a furry butt plug.
After the whole Damon situation died down, Beelzebub (Belly for short) invited me for lunch. I haven’t looked back since. Although I was a bit hesitant at first, I’ve never known a love this all-consuming (I did give the blood-ingestion thing a try). I am forever thankful to Belly for introducing me to the Father. After getting through the boring housekeeping stuff — small-scale animal sacrifice, a quaint soul-selling ceremony, etc. — I really got to the bread and butter of worshiping the Dark Lord. Not to brag, but since Belly is a pretty big deal in the church, I’ve been let in on a few secrets that not all disciples get to know. And trust me: some of this stuff would blow your mind (three words: QAnon was right).
I really don’t know why I let the stress get to me at the start of this year. Everything seems to have worked out for me. I’m especially excited because I’m visiting Belly’s home country this summer. Although, he claims that once I get there, I “won’t have to worry about enrolling for classes for the Fall semester.” Whatever that means! Anyways, Hail Satan!
Am I An Academic Weapon?
By Maya Lerman and Ava Lozner
Illustration by Jorja Garcia
