A tertulia is a regular social gathering focused on literary and artistic endeavors, like a symposium without the pederasty, or a salon without the politics. Through the six mediums of music, creative writing, photography, architecture, art/illustration, and food the collaborators of The Tertulia will seek to highlight the beauty of daily life in New York City and our travels elsewhere. Our outlook will be contemplative, analytical, sometimes whimsical, and will ultimately attempt to end on a positive and hopeful note. The contributors of The Tertulia are all 20-somethings living in, and being inspired by New York City, and as such, the blog will connect the stories, reviews, essays, and other posts to the real-world events, concerts, venues, etc. to which they relate.
I first heard about the community of women in Crossing Over over a static-y, long-distance phone call last July. I was sitting on the driveway of my mom’s house in Pittsburgh (the only spot with good reception), catching up with my best friend Isabel. We had both been having lackluster...
1. Of Montreal- Sleeping in the Beetle Bug
2. Os Mutantes- Panis et Circenses
3. David Byrne- Glass, Concrete and Stone
4. Mama Cass- Dream A Little Dream of Me
5. Hot Snakes- Hi Lites
6. The Turtles- Happy Together
7. Sound of Rum- Slow Slow
8. Fischerspooner (Wire Cover)- The 15th
9. Armanaz- Khala My Friend
10. The Bamboos- The Wilhem Scream
11. Town Hall- Text Me (R. Kelly Cover)
12. Beach Fossils- Golden Age
13. Fiona Apple- Periphery
14. Depeche Mode- Enjoy the Silence
15. Bad Brains- Attitude
16. Antony and the Johnson- Fistfull of Love
Joyce Johnson (seen here, appropriately out-of-focus, in an image later used for a Gap ad) is perhaps best known for once dating Jack Kerouac, the writer who inspired many young English majors to come to Columbia and NYC. This year, she will publish the most comprehensive-and accurate-biography of Kerouac to date. But more than a famous ex-girlfriend and careful chronicler, Johnson is a great writer. Her memoir Minor Characters, about being on the fringes of the Beat Movement in the 1960s, as well as growing up in New York City, has proven the ideal springboard for my own reflections on graduating, New York, and my friendships.
I often find that when I write in this style of automatic writing, striving for instantaneous brilliance or at least comprehensibility, the hardest part is figuring out what to write when because my brain gets over-full with ideas, and I want them to be mostly cohesive, but sometimes a tangent will slip out which is good I guess but also there’s the problem of the ones that slip away, the pre-verbal images or whatever you call them of something that could have been great but as soon as you start writing they fade and writhe away from you and you’re left with a shadow of all the things your mind wanted you to say with such urgency just a moment ago. And I guess in a way it can be a good thing because then there’s an added element, a second voice to your writing, if you will, that’s like chance or luck or providence or the environment, that is the space between your fingers and your mind, influencing those thoughts that make it through and the way you can convey them and in all of the things you lose between the honesty of your brain and the honesty of your written word is an element over which you have no control. So it’s partly yours but never entirely you. Or maybe better writers don’t experience this and eventually are able to reach a point where their communication is perfect, flawless, intentionally unintentional. But there is something about this process of writing, the fear of leaving something out, the focus on one moment or idea that shines more brightly than others, that feels so familiar when reading Minor Characters, because I’ve been thinking a lot about the process of memory writing and memoir writing and how you could ever really fully write a life, especially your own life.
The thing is, I think, that each of our lives is so compounded by stories that are sometimes related and sometimes not, so that no one person ever really lives one story, one plotline. I have a lot of stories. And by this I don’t mean episodes or tidbits, but rather the ways in which my life can be told. Sometimes depending on my state of mind or who I’m talking to or what the weather’s like it’s a Sartrian story of existentialism. Sometimes it’s a Chekhov-ian drama, deeply human and tragic. And sometimes it’s a comedy, a fluffy romantic comedy even, where I linger in moments that are fun and beautiful and funny. So which kind of story do you use to tell a life? How do you choose? Because if you’ve lived it, it seems like it’s all important, and by choosing one story you’re cutting yourself into parts and saying, this view of myself is more important than that one, and it feels alienating and weird. And any true-life story can never tell the full story, can never even accurately and completely relate the experience of one perspective. And satisfaction that the story is true and honest and good is not the same thing as satisfaction that the story is complete.
I know I’m being vague and rambling right now but what I really mean to say is that memoir is a project of the self more than it is an exercise in memory or a simple, straightforward retelling of the important moments in one’s life. It’s a process of self-examination, of determining which stories are relevant and which aren’t. Which years to describe in detail and which to jump over with a couple of connecting sentences. Which themes will be given credit as being significant. Which images will be given notice as recurring and important. And I guess there’s a kind of power in this project: while life’s happenings may be random, we get to choose the way we view them and tell them.
Which is why Minor Characters is so interesting. In a memoir, you get to be the main character. Your experiences are the ones that drive the plot. It is through your eyes and your voice that your life is colored by motifs, allusions, the repetition of symbols that you have deemed important. What does it mean then to be a minor character of one’s own memoir? What does it mean for Joyce Johnson? Of course there’s the issue of being a woman in the 1950s, the paradox of being part of a movement toward freedom and expression that the rest of the country hadn’t felt yet and was about to feel because of them, a movement that was meant mostly for men and for whom women were hangers-on or spoilsports like in Kerouac’s and Robert Frank’s movie (and what happened to Frank’s artistic wife with her own ambitions, I wonder?). And it’s also related to fame, that as the girlfriend or friend of a famous person who wasn’t famous herself until years later and still never anything like Kerouac or Ginsberg, she finds shadows of herself in unexpected places—in the background of a Gap ad waiting patiently for Jack to come along already, in biographies, misrepresented as Ecstasy Pie, in stories where her name is never mentioned but that she was nonetheless a part of. But what I didn’t realize until talking to Joyce Johnson in person was how deeply I related to her own understanding of herself as a minor character—yes, as a woman in the 1950s and yes as someone who knew Jack and yes as a line in the important names section of a biography of the Beats, but also as a personality trait, a permanent condition that is totally separate from the context of the Beat world. She said of herself, “I’m an observer, I’ve always been an observer” which is the thing that makes her a good writer and great chronicler, and I think is the reason she is able to talk about her former self with such careful tenderness and honesty. As the one who goes along but sits back once she arrives, the one who is surrounded by mad ones but is ever cautious, waits to run to San Francisco until she has the money, dates Jack Kerouac but instead of joining him on wild binges mostly gathers him and takes him home and looks after him. This is a condition that I recognize because it’s my own, too.
I have a feeling that I, like Ginsberg, might know some of the best minds of my generation. I go to this great school (Kerouac: Columbia ruined a lot of people) and I see brilliant people, my friends, but mostly their ambitions aren’t those of the Beats, they’re not driven mad with alcohol or drugs or unbridled energy to create or destroy that they struggle to reign in, but rather with the forever urge to find employment, find the best employment, achieve achieve achieve. Because mostly anyone who had creative ambitions shrugged them off years ago and started to craft them into resume-speak, figuring out how this creative skill transfers into that practical use, using brilliant writing talents to craft a better cover letter for that marketing firm, prestigious internship, Teach for America. So instead of the madness of the Beats I’m seeing the best minds of my generation crack under pressure, or quake with fear and shame in the face of directionlessness.
My NYU friends and Columbia friends both are putting maybe other dreams on hold in favor of prestigious options and a solid paycheck and those who aren’t are realizing the harsh realities of living in modern-day, non-affordable NYC without a solid starting salary. So everyone is freaking out. And while the storm of my friends and their employment options is racing around me I’ve never felt so directionless in my life, don’t know what I want to do, don’t know where I want to be, I turned down a job in Shanghai because even though I said I wanted to travel and have an adventure when it came down to it I had the feeling that I’d be missing too much in New York, and if after a year it turns out I’m not I can turn around and have an adventure then. And I guess this is what drew me to Joyce Johnson, too—she was drawn to where the people were, comforted by people, excited by the adventure of knowing interesting and wonderful people, felt like a family when a group of friends chose each other and validated each other and went on weekend trips and played house when they weren’t partying more publicly. Because while my friends contemplate jobs and summer training packages and freak out that their decision is the wrong one, I contemplate my friends. And when I think back over my four years of college, yes I’m proud of the work I produced but more than anything I’m proud of the friends I’ve met and especially those I’m lucky enough to call my best friends. And while I am of course confident in my intelligence and aware of my own talents and possibilities I can’t help but think that one of my best ones (talents that is) is my judge of character. And one of my favorite feelings is that moment when one beloved friend meets another and they immediately connect and I like to think that it’s them recognizing some unspoken commonality that we all share that makes us click, makes us love each other almost immediately.
And I can’t help but think that this is partly why Joyce Johnson pursued the Beats, because of the community of camaraderie and friendship and love that felt special and intentional and like the best kind of family imaginable—a connection that was related to their talent but was also beyond it, while it was important to write it down the real importance were the lived moments of friendship and love and closeness that felt larger-than-life because this kind of family happened naturally and magically. And this is, I think, what made Neal Cassady so authentic, because he understood that friendship and love and experience together was the thing and never had to write it down to feel infinite in his friendships. And even if the reason that she ultimately stuck around through the really grueling moments was because she loved Jack, her affair with the Beats also came from the love of this type of family—the type that I feel on nights when I gather a belated birthday crew of all my favorite people at the Indian restaurant on 2nd and 6th with the back garden strung with chilli pepper lights and we eat tikka masala and drink too much wine and feel cloistered by the Bedouin-feeling tent and the hanging lights and the colors they reflect on all of our faces, or in Sunday brunch at home when everyone comes over for mimosas and we feel excited by the minor rebellion of being drunk before noon, or standing with Isabel and Geri and Mathilde smoking on a rooftop huddled together as the sun sets over the city.
So I want to be here to bear witness to my own gathered, intentional family and if I leave and they gather anyway I’ll be sad and jealous, like I’m sure Joyce was that night that she saw Kerouac and his dark woman and Ginsberg huddled together in the snow on New Years’ Eve. And of course part of the problem is that in the 1950s you could work odd jobs and type when you felt like it or publish a story and have enough money to live on and pay your rent and treat your friends to a cheap meal and some drinks and continue living, not a glamorous life, but a livable life. And now you can’t even do that—to do those same things, to pay a cheap rent and live in close quarters in near-squalor (and fine maybe not squalor but definitely not luxury or even really comfort) and treat your friends to a round of the cheapest beer and visit them across town you need a full time job and when it’s entry-level and not finance you’re still eating Lipton’s soup and ramen just to exist here and be a part of it all, part of the family you’ve created in this city that seems so huge and cold and part of the pride is the fact that among it all, despite it all, you’ve managed to find the special ones, ones you love and ones you cherish and ones that are totally your own because you found each other.
And I guess this is part of what it means to me to be a minor character too, to recognize the importance of this kind of family, of taking pride in your friends as much as yourself, of finding the value not in their talents or skills or potential alone (but certainly in valuing these things, of course valuing these things) but also and most importantly perhaps in the spark that you feel when you gather, of the excitement of adding a new face to the fold and having them fit so perfectly, of shifting the dynamic in a way that feels perfect and inevitable, and to take on the responsibility of keeping it together, of convincing everyone else how special it is and trying as hard as you can to keep it alive. Of knowing, sometimes, that your value is as a connector, as an observer, as a keeper of these moments that remind everyone why we’re here, in this city, where in a year half of us will be struggling to pay rent and will still manage to blow half of our paychecks on six dollar drinks at East Village bars, and the other half will sleep four hours a night in an apartment filled with gourmet groceries that will go bad in favor of fast meals in between spreadsheets and meetings with clients.
And all of these thoughts, deciding to stay here and turning down the job in Shanghai and not pursuing employment with the fervor that most of my friends have comes partly I think from an overwhelming directionlessness and something else—I don’t know what to do, or what I want to do, and also I kind of don’t want to do anything which is a feeling that I know won’t last and that I’ll probably regret when it’s July and I’m at home in Pittsburgh with no foreseeable options, alone in Pittsburgh with my family and my mother worried and nagging and my friends starting their new adventures in New York or enjoying their last hurrah before selling their souls and their time to big banks and hedge funds. And mostly I feel pretty numb about it (meaning I try not to ever think about it if I can help it), it being the future and next year but also the years after it. Will I be happy? Will they? Will those of us trying to do something different and creative and productive pull through, or will we join all of those like us working in jobs that are sort of but not really what they always wanted to do, convincing ourselves that it’s enough and that we’re happy? And what if we do get what we want and it proves dissatisfying? Lately, I’ve been frantically asking older friends how they did it—what did they do when they first graduated, where did they go, did they lose touch with their friends? Was it sad or inevitable or both? Are they happy? Were they then? Because until the past couple of months, my life has always followed a trajectory that was both surprising and predictable, like a puzzle with interchangeable pieces, the pieces being school, college, study abroad, travel, friends—sometimes the pieces could change unexpectedly (Columbia for NYU, Ireland for India) but while the specifics might have changed, the fact that they were there, falling into place, never did. Until now. Sometimes I feel like I can glimpse my life ahead of me in vague shadows but not with any kind of certainty like I once did. And so what strikes me about memoir and especially about this memoir is the sense that within the seemingly-haphazard chronology of a life, of Joyce Johnson’s life, was a pattern that was not entirely random and that as a young woman she could sometimes glimpse, too, if only vaguely, and that looking back over her life she can see it far more clearly. It’s comforting to know that even those years where she was mostly without direction, working on her book only halfheartedly while she waited for Jack, seemed to come together into something important and worthwhile. Even with its random directions her life seemed to grow into what it was always meant to be. Or maybe, maybe it’s only there because as the writer it’s her power to tell it that way, to craft the pattern as a writer can, making things seem necessary, making the plot make sense because she has to, because otherwise things would be too sad.
Because the last sense that Minor Characters imparted was one of covered-up sadness, of a very long-term kind of covered-up sadness. Of a family that was lost and that can only be recovered through writing, through constant reflection and revisitation. And I guess it’s inevitable if your first real love turns out to be Jack Kerouac to revisit and remember because most of all the public, your friends, your family won’t let you forget that time of your life. But there’s also a sense that Joyce Johnson will never stop revisiting this period in her life for other reasons too, she seems to haunt her former self and her early life, revisiting (permanently impermanent) which suggests that there were things she would have done differently, relationships (Jack, Elise) that were unfinished and cut short. And this is my fear—what if, in leaving, I miss those opportunities, lose those friendships and spend the rest of my life lingering on the moments in which things could have been different? Which is why decisions regarding my future give me such pause—it’s cowardly, but I’m afraid to get it wrong.
Spicy roasted broccoli with almonds from Plenty, an incredible cookbook by Yottam Ottolenghi. This recipe is posted online here, but as you can see I left the almonds whole.
I guess I should begin by saying that I am writing this at the airport as I wait for my flight to LA and that I am a very nervous flier as of five years ago (this is another story for another time, but my anxiety stems from the time that my friends and I got into a horrible car accident on the Pennsylvania turnpike and everyone was okay but we rolled three lanes and Hannah was knocked unconscious and for a minute I thought she was dead and as we rolled I thought I was going to die and even though I was fine I remember getting out of the car through the smashed window and blood running down my leg and finally processing that the gum I was chewing had shards of glass in it crunching between my teeth and for a week I was convinced that the shards had caught in my throat and intestines and that I was slowly, internally bleeding to death). But anyways, I’m in the airport and anxious and writing this story.
It seems that I always go to really sad theater when no one else is around, not on purpose, just that I saw The Cherry Orchard sophomore year with my NYU friends when Columbia was on fall break and when I came back to campus it was so quiet and lonely and Chekhov was still in my mind and I felt so empty. And last night I went to see Death of a Salesman with Phillip Seymour Hoffman and he was phenomenal and that play always makes me so sad and when I came back to campus all of my roommates had already left for Spring Break and I was all alone in an apartment that had never felt so big and quiet and creepy.
And it was last night at the show that I remembered this story. It was last year in Galway and Kali and I had left the rest of our friends to drink together before going out because we were always doing romantical things like that and spending all our time together and our time in Ireland was drawing to a close and we wanted to drink wine from the bottle by the boathouse on the banks of the Coiribe. And usually over there it’s quiet but not entirely deserted, there are always high school kids picnicking—getting drunk on cheap cider and generic-brand vodka—and couples and people taking their dogs for walks. And so we were sitting in our usual spot, on a bench by the boathouse drinking our wine straight out of the bottle and it was beautiful and a little bit too cold but still. We were both so sad to leave and very nostalgic and indulging in reminiscing and trying to not think about the fact that when we came home I would be in New York and she would be in Minnesota and those places are pretty far apart and we might never see each other again (though, of course, we have and she is visiting next week and moving to New York maybe in September which I hope she does). And we were looking at the green top of the Cathedral and there was a beautiful sunset the sun skipping the waves of the Coiribe in that golden sunset way and we were so happy to be there. And it got dark and we drank our bottles and everything was so Irish and lovely we felt. We talked about her boy and how she really did still like him and maybe they would date when she went home for the summer (though of course they didn’t and it’s still complicated and probably always will be because that’s how things always seem to be) and I don’t remember what I talked about but I mostly listened, I think, because I am always the listener and build my personality mostly around the singular tenet that I am a good friend, if nothing else, which is sometimes proven wrong and then I feel terrible for a while.
So as we sat and drank our wine and lips turned purple from the cold and the wine we noticed a singular lurking character. Or did we notice him at that point? I think I remember seeing him before it all happened but that might be a mis-memory. He was tall, I think, and in the typical Irish-boy uniform of track pants and a zip-up sweater and that haircut with the spiky front bits that was popular among American boys in sixth grade but not anymore. He kind of limped, I think, and kept walking back and forth along the pier as we talked and generally I didn’t pay him much attention until, without warning, he sat down on the bench next to me.
And as soon as he did I was scared, or I guess nervous, because he was young and a boy and way bigger than us and it was pretty much deserted on the pier at this point and even though Ireland is generally a pretty safe place, and especially Galway, and especially compared to New York, or even Pittsburgh, where I grew up, there was a girl who was raped and murdered under the bridge by the NUIG campus the year before and I always thought about that story as I walked to class and also, I don’t know, I’m paranoid and have an overactive imagination. But it wasn’t my imagination or paranoia because this guy was kind of shifty and there was something off about him from the beginning. I don’t know if he could see the panic on my face but he sat down right next to me without looking at me and said in the thickest Limerick accent I’d ever heard—he sounded like a traveler, almost—and said, “Do ye think life’s worth livin’?” And we said, “what?” And he said it again, “Do ye think life’s worth livin’?”
And right then I really thought he was going to murder me, I thought he was going to stab me as I sat next to him and rob me (good luck going far on twenty euro) until he said
“I think I’m going to kill myself. Do ye think life’s worth livin’?” And we said “Yes, of course” And he asked us “Why?” And I don’t know what Kali thought but I felt so awkward and so much pressure to make life seem worth living and stupid for anything I was about to say because this boy was clearly very troubled and I don’t know. So we said, “Look at the sunset! Look at the sunset hitting the top of the cathedral and it’s so beautiful and if you can believe in that you can believe in anything!”
And then he explained a little bit, that his baby sister had died that morning in Limerick and his Ma had died the month before and he was all alone and so sad and did we think that if someone fell into the Coiribe anyone would ever find them? And so I said, “yes, definitely, it’s not that deep and it’s all lit up and look at that big group of people downstream and all the way down by the bay and those people would notice” because I was hoping that if he thought people would stop him farther down he wouldn’t jump in the first place but maybe this was the wrong thing to say and the security of it made it seem less scary but I had to say something and who the fuck knows what to say in situations like this and is there even such a thing as “situations like this”?
And I can’t remember exactly what he said after that but I remember he kept apologizing for bothering us and asking if we wanted him to leave and even though I did, I wanted him to leave more than anything else at that moment, I wanted him to be ok and to not jump but mostly I just wanted him to get away from us because I was also not entirely sure that he still wasn’t going to stab me and run away, but he stayed with us for awhile and we offered him some of our wine and sat in pretty much silence while he chatted about things. He asked us if we liked going to the clubs in Galway and complained about which ones wouldn’t let underage kids in or were hard on fake IDs (that’s how we learned he was under seventeen) and told us that Limerick was dangerous and that people were always getting stabbed (and again I got scared of the knife he probably did have but probably was not planning on using against us) and about other things but not about his baby sister or his mom.
And eventually he walked away and the point of the story isn’t about what happened to him, because we never saw him again and we didn’t hear any stories about bodies turning up in the bay but I guess he could have done and we would never have known and sometimes I think about it and hope that he didn’t. But the point of the story is how deeply useless I felt. I felt so stupid convincing this kid that I didn’t know that life was worth living and that the river was too shallow and pretending that I wasn’t terrified and so bothered by him being there, because I was. Because I didn’t play it off that well, I know that. My face never registered calm the whole time he was there and Kali’s and my conversation became clipped and we weren’t that encouraging when he wanted to chat about the clubs or being from Limerick. And I guess it was one of those moments that happen when you realize that you’re not the person you’d always hoped you were, or I guess when you realize that you are the person you always hoped you weren’t. I want to be the person who knows what to say to strangers, or who instinctively knows what to do when some sad boy comes over and is trying to just talk to some human so that he doesn’t do what he’s scared he might do, but I’m not. The truth of the matter is that most of the time I just want to be left alone and I get annoyed by the interruption and this feeling is sometimes if not mostly stronger than the urge to help the boy from Limerick. Like when I went to the post office with Josh and I was so perfunctory with the lady who worked there and he joked with her so easily and she loved him and I tried miserably one chatty, chummy line about it being Friday and she looked at me like I was exactly what I am, lame.
And this time in Galway wasn’t like that exactly because there was more on the line and I wasn’t scared of the lady in the post office and this boy from Limerick scared me so much. And maybe he never was going to kill himself but oh my god it was terrifying, and I felt so inadequate afterwards and while he was there I just mostly felt embarrassed and annoyed. And when he left Kali and I laughed nervously and we told everyone else about it afterward and by then the story was somehow almost humorous, or at least, they laughed at it. And at the time to be honest it was even a little funny in a really grim way because I was sweating through my shirt and I wanted to throw up I was so nervous and I’m sure I looked ridiculous and he even made fun of me for not drinking my wine fast enough so he could joke, too, even he could joke with strangers in that way that I can’t.
And after he went away we finished our wine, Kali faster than me because I can’t chug wine fast which I guess is a good thing but really didn’t impede the fact that by the end of studying abroad in Ireland I was a functioning alcoholic and needed like two bottles of wine to get drunk and even then I would order drinks out and wake up in the morning and not be hung over at all and do just the stupidest things about which I won’t talk right now but they were embarrassing, stories for another time. So we finished our bottles and threw them in the Coiribe and walked to town to meet our friends. And I should also mention that this whole time, as we were talking and nostalgizing and reminiscing in the way that you do when you know the moment you’re sharing will eventually become one of those moments you remember and romanticize later in life, so you feel somehow lonelier in the moment itself, or at least sadder, and then when the boy came and everything was horrible for a little bit, and then again after he left and we finished our bottles and laughed nervously at him and vaguely wished that he wouldn’t do anything stupid but eventually went back to talking about Kali’s boy, there was a party happening in the boathouse. There were people outside on the deck and it looked like the ideal party, the kind that is outdoors, at night, when the air has a chill but is still warm enough for sustained conversations and the sun is setting on the top of the cathedral and then the stars are shining so bright. And we could hear the music the whole time, sometimes louder and sometimes less loud and it was high school prom music like rap and pop and sounded like so much fun so as we walked into town, drunk off of our bottles and finally forgetting the boy we decided to party crash. Like the nerd I am I had never party crashed before and was so nervous about getting caught because authority makes me nervous and getting caught gets me nervous so usually when I do things like this I’m the one who can never really let go. But we went into the boathouse to the bathroom and everyone looked to be around our age and everyone was in party clothes and we went to the bathroom and the girls were all foreign—as in, they weren’t Irish and they also weren’t American. And they didn’t seem to be surprised that we were there, because we learned that the party was for their high school (so we were actually at a prom and our musical inclinations were correct) of international students in Galway and it was so fun and we should come in and dance. But it was all such a bust because we had wanted to crash a wedding or something and this was a high school dance and our crazy plan turned out to be really tame and unexciting, so we kind of laughed and said no, thanks, and went into town and met our friends at the Front Door and had another night like any other, drinking too many ciders and meeting Irish boys in the smoking room and making out with a boy on Shop Street and telling Kali I’d see her later and taking a taxi home alone.
The Tertulia has been sadly (I think) lacking in writing posts over the past few weeks, as this girl has been inundated with more work and activities and scheduled events than ever before in my life (But seriously! Senior spring! What gives?). I’ve decided to break the silence for two reasons: first, because this is the hour of my procrastination, and second, because a recent issue has cropped up that I want to pay some attention to somehow.
This week, it was announced that President Obama would speak at Barnard College’s graduation. While this is great news for Barnard, Columbia students are not taking it incredibly well (I might have frustration-cried just a little bit). Since Obama is Columbia’s most famous and most relevant alum, students sign petitions and pray to the graduation gods every year to hear him speak. While his choice to speak at Barnard is clearly a political move to gain the lady-vote, to Columbia students, it feels a little bit like salt in the wound (the wound being the fact that our graduation speaker this year is a boring old man when our other options were Bono and the Gyllenhaals).
The slightly bitter disappointment of coming so close (he’ll be on campus!) yet so far (we won’t!) from having Obama speak at graduation blew up on online message boards, where students used the anonymous platform to post truly disgusting and hateful things about Barnard and its students. The internet trolling caught national media attention and now The New York Times and Jezebel, among others, have run stories on the comments, which ranged from the mild (generally that Barnard students are not as intelligent as Columbia students or that Barnard is an inferior institution) to the very-not-mild (I don’t even want to repeat these but the Jezebel article lays some of the worst out for you).
I don’t understand how any Columbia student, male or female, who has even a single Barnard friend, can consciously blanket the institution with such insulting monikers. The Barnard friends that I have are far more than bold and beautiful—they are smart, funny, weird, creative, and most importantly, very worthy of being on our campus.
But what is most disturbing to me about the comments that appeared online were that they revealed disgusting and sexist attitudes that I generally like to think no longer exist in modern society, and especially not among my peers. And what’s worse, it’s pretty clear in reading the comments that many of the worst were written by Columbia women who should know better. Some of the worst insults were horrible variations on calling Barnard women easy and promiscuous. Really, girls? Is this what we’re going to do? I don’t even need to say it because we all know it to be true to such an essential extent that it feels like an internal and eternal truth, but I will anyways—insulting girls by calling them sluts (sluts being the tame version of what most of those comments said) undermines all of our intelligence and sense of self. It sets all of us back, and makes all of us inferior to men whose promiscuity is more easily portrayed as an asset, not a scarlet letter. We don’t have to be feminazis to respect ourselves and each other. Get it together, ladies!
Last post I did was about the High Line, and this one is about that park's future Lower East Side sister. I recently began working for an amazing project called the Delancey Underground, aka the Low Line. The park will be an amazing space, built in the old Williamsburg Trolley Terminal at Delancey and Essex. The creation of the park requires some serious work--including adding enough light to the space to allow for plants and grass and trees and things to grow, and one of my awesome bosses, James Ramsey of RAAD Studio, has created an insanely cool technology that can make it happen. And he knows his stuff, because he used to work for NASA.
The park cannot come to fruition, though, unless we get the moolah. There's been a Kickstarter page up for 6ish days, and as you can see, we're doing pretty well. But we could always use more help. Even if you donate $1, $5, or $10 (you'll get a sick button if you send $10!), it will help us reach our goals of becoming no less than a landmark for the LES. So pretty please, help us out and donate! Or at least, reblog this post, send the link to friends, spread the word, etc.
We've had some pretty amazing press--The Wall Street Journal, FastCo, The Huffington Post, The New York Observer, The Lo Down, Arch Daily, and many others--don't you want to see what all the fuss is about?
Check out filthybutfine, a photography blog by a group of friends from Columbia University who document their world travels in Mexico City, Istanbul, Paris, Cape Town and more. They are beautiful photographs that capture beautiful moments.
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