Sometime early in ninth grade, a substitute teacher saw me reading a John Grisham novel and laughed. I told him I liked the book and he said something like, “Yeah, but it’s not like they’re going to be teaching Grisham in a hundred years.”
I love John Grisham novels. I’ve read everything he’s ever written. Sure, they’re formulaic, but, as I’ve written in the News before, I really like that formula. For what it’s worth, there are actually two formulae: The first is the generic high-stakes legal thriller, and the second is the small-town legal thriller. Virtually all of these latter novels take place in fictional Ford County, Mississippi, a Faulknerian universe unto itself, with a cast of recurring minor and major characters and an endless supply of provincial intrigue. (There are also a few outlying books, such as one devoted to baseball, two devoted to football, a Christmas novel, a memoir, five children’s books — the “Theodore Boone: Kid Lawyer” series — and a nonfiction book. Like I said, I love me some Grisham.)
In the last few years, however, Grisham has departed from his previous formulae to create a new, hybrid model: the activist legal-thriller. His novels are no longer about “just,” say, a fresh-faced Harvard grad working for a mafia-controlled firm, or a fresh-faced Tulane student trying to solve a murder, or a fresh-faced Ole Miss grad stumbling into a twenty-million-dollar case, or a fresh-faced Georgetown grad stumbling into a hundred-million-dollar case. Now, they have a political message.
At first, this message was subtle. “The Appeal” (2008) was about the immense problem of electing appellate judges. “The Associate” (2009) was about the soul-sucking perils of Big Law. “The Confession” (2011) was about the iniquities of the death penalty. “Sycamore Row” (2013) was about the prevalence of racism in the legal system.
But Grisham’s latest novel, “Gray Mountain,” published in October, goes way further than any of these. It also breaks new ground for Grisham’s literary activism: environmentalism.
“Gray Mountain” tells the story of Samantha Kofer, a fresh-faced Columbia graduate who is laid off by her Wall Street mega-firm in the midst of the 2008 financial crisis. Kofer is not completely cut loose, however; she can keep her benefits and have a shot at re-employment if she works pro bono for a year. So Samantha sets off for the Mountain Legal Aid Clinic, a tiny public interest firm in rural Brady, Virginia.
“Gray Mountain” has all the usual Grisham themes of an unlikely-yet-oh-so-predictable love interest, a diamond-in-the-rough case and the charms of small-town America. Samantha gradually grows to appreciate her time in Brady, falling for its unadorned beauty. She helps poor people fight against ruthless lawyers, intransigent bureaucrats and abusive spouses. She meets Donovan Gray, a man straight out of a soap opera: the ruggedly handsome, smart, tough, earthy, orphaned, fierce lawyer with a heart of gold, lungs of coal and a tragic past. When Samantha meets him, Donovan is in the midst of a series of suits against Big Coal. In one, a strip-mining company accidentally dislodged a boulder that crushed two small children, killing them in their beds. In another, the chemicals used by a mining company have created a cancer cluster in a small town. Meanwhile, Samantha finds a cause of her own: an apparent epidemic of “black lung” among poor, unlettered miners.
But “Gray Mountain” also departs from the Grisham model in a few important ways. First, a main character unexpectedly dies. Second, there is no climactic case — in fact, no major case is resolved; many are left annoyingly open-ended, even more so than usual. And, most importantly, the plot ends up playing second fiddle to Grisham’s furious and noble vendetta against Big Coal.
Much of “Gray Mountain” amounts to an unrestrained jeremiad against the mining industry. Grisham decries the evil companies that mislead Appalachians and then abuse their land. He points out the countless instances of murder, the jurists and politicians in the pockets of industry and the environmental desecration that is fundamentally changing Appalachia. In doing so, Grisham runs the risk of losing the story, while retaining nothing but his politics. Yet he doesn’t quite go so far. The novel has an unusual plot and no clear ending, but its characters are engaging, its scenery beautiful and its story cohesive enough to hold interest.
“Gray Mountain” is a good read, as always. But it also brings light to a largely unknown, massive problem. It is a public service. It is the reason we just may be reading Grisham in a hundred years.
“I was drawn to the topic of mountaintop removal because it is an ongoing environmental disaster, destroying much of the culture of Appalachia,” Grisham said in a recent interview. “And I’m not finished with it.”
And I’m certainly not finished with Grisham and his exciting new activism (whatever my substitute teachers might say).
Student poetry gets a notoriously bad rap. Much of that is deserved — teenagers going through adolescence do tend to write about trite things: breakups, emotion, botched sex, emotion. But on Wednesday, the Connecticut Poetry Reading Circuit proved that some student poetry is worth paying attention to. The event, in Morse Common Room, featured poets from the state who had been selected by their colleges to participate in a series of readings around Connecticut. Four writers took to the podium and were joined by four undergraduate Yalies.
Standards varied. The first reader settled the audience in nicely, inflating expectations perhaps a little cruelly. Justin Greene, a junior in Anthropology at Wesleyan University, gave a lively reading of his very anecdotal and sharply-observed poems. He performed as much as he read, pausing between poems to throw optimistic questions at a stolid audience that seemed reluctant to laugh.
The next two poets — Nikki Byrne from the University of Saint Joseph and Lisa Gaudio from the University of Connecticut — were less flamboyant in their presentation. Byrne’s poetry was strewn with clichés — a lover’s freckles formed “constellations,” his back was a “landscape,” his spine a “valley.” If Emily Dickinson had indeed been an influence, as Byrne intimated, the older poet was keeping a characteristically low profile, as Byrne didn’t seem to pursue Dickinson’s subtlety and restraint.
Gaudio followed Byrne and delivered a change in tempo. In one powerful poem, the speaker articulated the tension between her wish to remain a grease-elbowed tomboy, and the desire of her “momma” to have a recognizably feminine daughter. But standards slipped once more in Gaudio’s last poem, a cumbersome ode to endangered elephants. Sounding like a Greenpeace tirade, it was bookended with maddening archaisms (“I bid you not that way,” etc.) that clashed with the tone elsewhere, as well as the youth of the reader herself.
Katherine Rose Monica, of the University of Connecticut, blew the rather limp competition out of the water when she finally took to the stage, having arrived late after getting stuck in traffic. Vivid and fluid, her poems were remarkably songlike, featuring anaphoric patterns that the writer wove and unpicked expertly. Like that of her peers, Monica’s poetry also tended towards the confessional, but it was still fresh and, at moments, unexpectedly moving.
The Yale poets were accorded less reading time than the others, with the exception of Jessica Yuan ’15. Her background in architecture came to the fore in her meticulously constructed poems, which were at their most effective when grappling with her family’s immigration narrative. One poem, for instance, took aim at the notion that a “mastery of speech” would offer a failsafe weapon against cultural and social alienation.
It would have been nice to hear more from the other Yale writers invited to the podium. Margaret Shultz ’16 offered a brilliantly dry piece about sisterhood, entitled “Ghost Poem”. This teetered dangerously — and successfully — on the edge of banal anecdote,but was repeatedly brought back from the precipice by abrupt changes of rhythm, time frames and moods. The unusual poem of Austin Carder ’15 was accompanied by a photograph of the YUAG sculpture his verses were about. And although the poem relied a little too much on the picture, it was an elegant, well-written response to an object Carder sees regularly, as a member of the YUAG workforce. The singular offering of James Orbison ’16, “Beauty Supply,” was luminous: short and sweet enough to leave me wishing he had been accorded considerably more stage time.
This mismatch between stage time and ability was a theme throughout the evening. Although the poetry reading offered its share of delights, some writers walked off the stage with lots left to say, while others seemed to be gasping for air by the end of their set. After all, student poetry is nothing if not inconsistent. But even in a mixed bag, there are some things worth holding on to.
No doubt many of our classmates are hoping to dip their toe in the waters of consulting and finance at places like McKinsey & Company or Morgan Stanley. Unsurprisingly, however, the mere mention of such companies sparks heated discussion on campus.
We all know the stereotypes, which have only intensified since the 2008 economic downturn — the big, bad banker; the soulless consultant; Excel spreadsheets until three in the morning. Yet according to the Office of Career Strategy post-graduation survey of the class of 2014, Goldman Sachs was the second most common employer of graduates of the class of 2014, behind only Yale itself. Some find this worrying.
Scott Stern ’15, a columnist for the News well known for his stance on finance and consulting, is troubled by industries that he views as focused solely on making money, rather than making money and a difference. When Yale students enter such industries, he explains, something is “lost,” some potential goes unrealized.
Stern may object to these jobs on moral grounds, but others wonder whether the industries are even good for their recently graduated employees. In a review of Kevin Roose’s “Young Money,” a book about the experiences of eight fresh Wall Street recruits, The New York Times’ Chris Hayes compares a high-powered investment bank to “a boot camp that will reliably turn normal but ambitious people into broken sociopaths more or less willing to do anything.”
But say we take all this as read; all this has been discussed. The question remains: How do the actual experiences of graduates who have entered these stigmatized industries stack up next to the impressions we receive on campus?
* * *
According to the OCS survey, 16.9 percent of the Class of 2014 went into finance, and another 11.0 percent chose consulting. In a follow-up survey conducted by the News last fall, 56 percent of respondents working in finance reported being “satisfied” or “highly satisfied” with their work — just barely lower than the 57 percent of those employed in education reporting the same. Seventy-nine percent of respondents working in consulting reported being at least satisfied with their jobs.
Whatever you might glean from these statistics, they provide little detail about the lives or career trajectories of students taking entry-level jobs in these industries.
There is, of course, the distinction between finance and consulting; within these industries, moreover, are a range of possible roles.
“There are venture capital firms that help set up new businesses, and private equity firms that help finance non-profits,” noted Office of Career Strategy Director Jeanine Dames. Moreover, she said, many consultants at smaller firms specialize in topics from health care to sustainability.
And even within a single job, a new employee’s work might not follow a set routine. According to Michal Benedykcinski ’09, who spent over three years in banking, life as a junior banker could involve anything from working on financial models late into the night to juggling multiple investment pitches. There was no “typical day,” he said, likening the intensity of the job at times to “drinking from a firehose.”
On the consulting side, Sarah Minkus ’08, who has worked at The Boston Consulting Group since graduation, sees a similar variety.
“I’ve gotten to taste-test for food manufacturers, tour plants with industrial-goods companies, visit stores in different countries and interview moms and babies living in Israel,” she said.
Brian Goldman ’05, a co-coordinator of Dwight Hall during his time on campus and a business analyst at McKinsey for two years afterwards, recalled that he typically spent four days a week at his client’s office, working with their senior team on the strategic questions that kept them up at night.
Sitting in a room with executives twice his age was intimidating at first, he said. He’d think to himself, “What am I doing here, offering advice to these people about their organization that they know so much better than I do?”
Yet Goldman came to believe a fresh perspective could be valuable, introducing a new way of thinking that, as he put it, “breaks open a problem.”
* * *
Although many Yalies go on to work in finance or consulting, they don’t all stay there. The 27.9 percent of the class of 2014 employed by those industries will almost surely diminish as the years go by.
Monaghan said it would upset her if the large portion of Yalies who work for Goldman Sachs, for example, stayed there for an extended period of time. “But,” she explained, “that’s not really the case.”
After three years as an investment banking analyst at Morgan Stanley, Yoonie Hoh ’11 now works in private equity, a common career trajectory. At the same time, she was optimistic about those who leave finance altogether.
“I know banks may feel differently, since they invest a ton of time into their analysts.” Hoh said. But she found it natural that young people should want to explore before settling into a dream job.
Drawing contrasts between their own generation and that of their parents and grandparents, both Sheila Rustgi ’07 and Shannon Monaghan ’08 believe that it’s less common now for people to stay in the same firm or industry for life.
According to Dames, the OCS director, many students enter consulting hoping to gain business experience across a variety of employers, which they can then apply to future pursuits. Likewise, many who enter finance seek strong analytical experience.
“In both these cases,” she added, “I think their expectations are met.”
After graduation, Rustgi spent a year at Archstone Consulting working on projects like helping a client’s human resources division develop a health insurance plan. She said that, among other things, she learned how to set goals and solicit feedback, skills that she has carried into medical school and her residency.
Career changes like Rustgi’s are far from uncommon among recent graduates who go on to work in consulting or finance. In fact, in information sessions and on its website, McKinsey is open about the fact that after two or three years, employees often pursue professional schooling or other work experiences — something Caitlin Storhaug, a recruiter with the firm, corroborates. Monaghan sees this cycle as a major factor in consulting firms’ heavy recruitment presence on campus.
As a history major who had realized after taking a course in constitutional law that law school wouldn’t be a good fit for her, Monaghan, like many of her classmates, was unsure what to do senior year. Then management consulting, which she hadn’t known even existed for much of college, emerged as a possibility.
Although Monaghan was excited about the prospects of her job at Oliver Wyman, she harbored no expectations of working there for the rest of her life. If anything, a major draw was the flexibility that it would afford.
“It wasn’t like I was signing onto something forever in a way that I would have, for example, if I had gone into a Ph.D. program immediately, or if I’d gone to law school,” she said.
Ultimately, Monaghan believes that her work experience has better equipped her in pursuing a Ph.D. in history at Boston College. She plans to finish her Ph.D. after five years, a total of eight years after graduating from Yale, which she said is the average completion time for such a program.
Unlike other students who may enter graduate school too quickly and have difficulty formulating their dissertations, Monaghan said she was able to approach her scholarship from a more disciplined and experienced background — not to mention that she was more financially stable after working at Oliver Wyman.
Likewise, one of Monaghan’s best friends from Yale, after working in consulting for a year, is now completing a residency in surgery at Columbia University. Another friend who worked for Goldman Sachs for a year has since finished his Ph.D. in computer science and works at a tech firm in San Francisco.
But if a consulting or finance job is only a springboard to more “worthwhile” employment later, why not start doing something worthwhile now? What value could a stint in consulting or finance hold for those who end up moving on to something completely different?
For some alumni, consulting jobs afforded them the business acumen they needed to pursue their fields of interest. Shannon Stockdale ’06 had been interested in education throughout her time at Yale. Having worked for Teach for America, the Yale Early Childhood Development Fund and NYU’s Institute for Social Policy, however, she discovered that teachers weren’t necessarily the ones making important decisions.
“In a lot of ways,” said Stockdale, “it was the businesspeople.”
Stockdale wanted to become more fluent in the language of business and worked at the management consulting firm Katzenbach Partners, honing her skills in research and data analysis. Non-profit organizations don’t always have the resources to invest in employees’ development to the extent that consulting firms do, said Stockdale. She believes that her experience prepared her better for entering the education policy field, where opportunities for entry-level positions are limited. Stockdale now works for the KIPP Foundation, an educational non-profit that serves nearly 150 schools across the U.S.
Similarly, Goldman, the former Dwight Hall co-coordinator and one-time McKinsey employee, said that his experience in the Dwight Hall Management Fellows group first exposed him to the management questions that occupy organizations of all kinds, from Dwight Hall to federal offices.
After McKinsey, Goldman went to Stanford Law School and now works in a legal practice in San Francisco.
“I went to law school with a much more realistic understanding of the way companies and individuals in government operate, and there’s a lot in law that’s very rooted in economics,” he said.
Such perspectives extend to finance as well as consulting. Lynn Wang ’11, the child of two doctors, was pre-med freshman year, but realized after a summer internship with International Bulldogs that business suited her better. After working a year as an investment banking analyst at Morgan Stanley, however, Wang decided that she wasn’t passionate enough about finance to make a career of it, so she struck out on her own, founding a nail polish company.
Wang, who now works in an urgent care clinic, is currently exploring ways to apply her business knowledge to the health care industry, a far different set of challenges from what she would have encountered had she practiced medicine. She said that finance allowed her to build analytical skills at a time when she wasn’t completely sure what she wanted to do, and that those skills have continued to prove valuable.
Disputing the notion that bankers are “spreadsheet monkeys,” Wang recounted how she was able to completely redesign the clinical workflow at her clinic.
* * *
Some Yale students lament that would-be engineers and creative types end up as suits. But some of those would-be engineers and artists don’t seem to mind.
For example, Minkus, the BCG employee, majored in theater studies and psychology at Yale but worried that the theater world would be too unpredictable.
“Consulting met this list of requirements I loved about theatre that I didn’t want to lose — working on scenes, having new projects all the time, traveling to different places, playing different roles — but it also offered stability and meritocracy,” she said.
All this isn’t to say that consulting and finance are for everyone, nor that opinion is anywhere close to unified on the matter. But Monaghan wondered why finance and consulting bear the brunt of criticism, pointing out, “We have no problems with people going to medical school or law school, which are both also professions with their own problems.”
And while this article can’t claim to be scientific, the stories of the alumni interviewed reveal a more varied picture of the industries in question than we might otherwise be exposed to on campus.
Many alumni have managed to turn their post-graduate employment in consulting or finance into something more their own. Given their hands-on experience, there’s room to add their two cents to the complicated discussion of money, ethics and plain confusion that we’re all a part of. Hopefully, it’s a valuable two cents.
“My experiences have led me down a path that I didn’t see coming when I was 22, but it’s been a good path,” said Minkus. “It’s opened a lot of doors for me now, moving forward.”
Is this just a flowchart? No, because a flowchart is a flowchart, and this is an adventure. QED.
You wake up with your head pounding and roll over to look at the clock. 10:35 AM. Damn, maybe that last round of Fireball shots was a bad idea, especially because you have class in…
WAIT! It’s a snow day!
You roll onto your back and stare at the ceiling with a prayer of thanks on your lips. E pluribus Linda.Or whoever it was this year.
If you want to fall back asleep, turn to page 4. If you want to drag your ass out of bed, turn to page 2.
Page 2.
Still marveling at your good fortune, you stumble, bleary-eyed, to the shower. After letting the water run for a few minutes, you are about to step in when a thought strikes you: shower beer?
If it’s five o’clock somewhere and you want a shower beer, turn to page 5. If you aren’t yet an alcoholic, turn to page 7.
Page 4.
You wake with your head throbbing at a slightly lower frequency and roll over to look at the clock. 1:09 PM. It’s probably time to get up. But your bed is definitely comfortable. Really comfortable, in fact. Maybe you should just stay here.
If you want to stay in bed like the slug you are, turn to page 10. If you want to drag your lazy ass out of bed and maybe make something of your life, turn to page 2.
Page 5.
You pad down the stairs to the kitchen and open the fridge. Jesus, it smells terrible… but you’re not choosing that adventure right now. Ah, there’s what you’re looking for: a half-collapsed rack of ‘Stones, just waiting to help you greet the new day. You pluck a ripe one and return to the bathroom, holding your beer like a chalice as you stem under the nozzle. Practicing delayed gratification, you wash your hair first, and then crack open your beer.
If your beer just tastes like beer, turn to page 6. But if it tastes like freedom, turn to page 8.
Page 6.
Well wasn’t that wild. Satisfied with your small rebellion, you step out the shower and dry off. Following a breakfast of egg whites and toast, you settle into your favorite chair and crack open not a beer, but Tolstoy’s “War and Peace.” You’re actually on pace with the assigned readings, but what is a snow day for if not getting ahead? 249 pages later, the sun is setting in the west, and you are aglow with half-submerged self-satisfaction. Tolstoy is just so relevant, isn’t he? Everyone in your seminar hates you but may also secretly envy your intellect. Your adventure is over. WKND hopes it was a good one.
Page 7.
You take a normal, beer-free shower. You eat a nice home-cooked breakfast of bacon and eggs, although you break one of the yolks. Nevermind, though, it’s still delicious. You look forward to surfing the web and watching “Archer.” Maybe you’ll even catch up on reading. But realistically, that’s not gonna happen. You are the stereotypic Yale student. In your future low-level job at Goldman, you will help crash the U.S. economy. But for now, your adventure is over. WKND hopes it was a good one.
Page 8.
Three shower beers later, you’ve left a trail of wet footprints from the second-floor bathroom to the fridge in the kitchen, but you regret nothing. The notion of a fourth beer dances at the now-blurred edge of your consciousness… but then the hot water begins to run out, and you decide it’s time to start the day. Later in the day, you wander over to one of the frats, which is having a snow-themed darty of some sort. Everyone brilliantly interprets this to mean “neon/spandex/neon spandex, but with snowboots,” and soon the slush from outside has mixed with that distinctive beer-dirt mixture on the floor to create a truly novel concoction.
Turn to page 9.
Page 9.
Some people in the living room are trying to dance but sliding around in the sludge; others in the basement are playing beer pong.
If you want to play beer pong, turn to page 11. If you want to attempt to dance, turn to page 12.
Page 10.
You wake with your head clear but your soul tarnished by sloth. You roll over and look at the clock. 4:45 PM. It is too late to choose your own adventure. Your parents are ashamed and will have a hard time looking you in the eye next Thanksgiving.
Page 11.
You play beer pong.
If you want to keep playing beer pong, turn to page 14. If you want to try to find something else to do, turn to page 9.
Page 12.
You attempt to dance, as you have so many times before. But the snow-reflected three o’clock sunlight pouring through the windows makes your gyrations embarrassingly public, and you struggle to truly let go.
If you want to keep dancing anyways, turn to page 12.If you are too self-conscious, turn to page 16.
Page 14.
You play more beer pong. After losing three games in a row, it’s about three o’clock and you’re pretty drunk, especially given the three shower beers you had earlier and the fact that all you’ve eaten is half a plate of leftover nachos. You stagger home through the snow and collapse into your bed. Your adventure is over. WKND hopes it was a good one.
Page 16.
You detach yourself from the pulsing throng in the living room and wander over to the keg in the kitchen. As you pour yourself another beer, you look around the room trying not to make eye contact with anyone, but also trying not to look like you’re trying not to make contact with anyone. Soon you are becoming really introspective and wondering why you can’t just let yourself have a good time. As you begin to think that maybe this is all your parents’ fault, you notice that your beer is overflowing, and a girl wearing neon spandex is staring at you. Feeling naked and exposed, you leave the frat and walk back to your house, still trying not to look like you are trying not to make eye contact with anyone. You lie in your bed and look out your window at the snow sparkling in the sun and wonder how man can be so base in a world of such great beauty. Then you begin to cry. Your adventure is over. WKND hopes it was a good one.
Charles Wright is the current Poet Laureate of the U.S., but he hasn’t let that title go to his head. Wright still prefers poetry to politics, and most of his friends are poets — a crowd he’s run with since maneuvering his way into the University of Iowa Writing Workshop as a grad student. In the intervening years, Wright has won a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book award. When Wright came to campus in November, WKND sat down with him to chat about his career arc, his writing process, and advice for aspiring poets and writers. The following conversation has been condensed.
Q: So, I was accepted into the University of Iowa high school writers program, but on a total fluke. I hear you have a similar story. For the Yalies aspiring to graduate study: How does one fake their way into graduate school?
A: Well, I’m not the one to ask that question, because I never got accepted into the school!
I just showed up having gotten into the [University of Iowa] English department, so my name was down, but I never sent in a manuscript. If I had, I would never have gotten in. So I just signed up for the classes and went to the first workshop. Kept doing that for two years. That’s it. It turned out that I told them that I’ve never gotten in — which didn’t surprise the teachers at all— but each one thought the other one let me in. It was very laissez-faire in those days. Not as structured as it is now.I had more fun in Iowa City than in any other place I’ve ever had in America. I really liked Iowa a lot. Anyway, what kind of a fluke was it for you?
Q: Well, I live in Iowa City, and I hadn’t applied to the program because I don’t do creative writing, really, but someone had to vacate their spot, so they called the local school and said, “Do you have anyone who you think could do well at this program?”
A: That’s not a fluke. That’s a good way to get in.
Q: Was there a teacher who believed in you?
A: I don’t know if he believed in me, but there is a certain teacher I believed in very much, a guy named Donald Justice, who was my teacher for two years. The other person, who really ran the program, was a man named Paul Engle. But Don did most of the teaching; Paul was always out trying to raise money. Quaker Oats money. Any way he could get money, and Justice was very good to me. You have to understand to me that I had just spent four years in the army, and I arrived in August for September classes. How dumb is that? But I didn’t pay attention in school, and I didn’t know anything about poetry, so I hung on to every word that came out of Donald’s lips. And they were good words, too, because he was a wonderful teacher, a really good poet, and a really bright man.
Q: I know you spent time in Europe, and it sounds as if that’s where you discovered your love for poetry. And yet a lot of your poems start with you sitting at home, looking out the window. Is it important to travel?
A: I dunno, it’s fun. Or, it was fun. I hate to travel now, because I’m so old, but I used to love it. I spent six out of my 10 years in my twenties in Italy. The first three were in the army, which is where I was reading and thought I was trying to write poems. I wasn’t. So it was good for me, it was very, very good for me.I don’t know if it’s good for everybody else. Anything I say is just about me, I don’t pretend to say what’s good or bad for somebody else.
Q: Do you think you would have found poetry had you not gone to Italy?
A: That’s a good question. I don’t know, I don’t know. I was interested in writing and worked on the Davidson literary magazine, whose hero was the Yale Record. Isn’t that the name of the magazine, the Yale Record? That was the old one, and we thought it was just the greatest. I tried to read stories, but I couldn’t write stories. I just can’t write narrative. So, I don’t know what I would’ve done … probably gone into journalism. I spent a summer as a reporter at my hometown paper, and I liked it a lot. And I had been accepted at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.
Q: Why did you turn down the spot?
A: Well, because I thought I could get into the [University of Iowa] writing program. Also, after a while, the idea of looking into people’s windows, or doing whatever it is that journalists have to do, began to pall on me. I’m not a natural speaker, you know. So, I just pulled out. They were very nice. And that’s what got me out of the army, was my acceptance into Columbia. Yeah, I’d have done that or gone into advertising, I’m sure.
Q: Is there room for more poetry or creative writing classes at American universities? Or are writing workshops a dangerous idea in any way?
A: That’s a double-barreled question! I guess there’s room for more creative writing. It can’t hurt to learn how to write and learn how to read, and that’s what writing courses do.And that’s where writing courses should stay. In the undergraduate curriculum. There are too many graduate writing courses. And this is said by someone whose life was saved by one, informed by one. But that was then, this is now. I find it’s mostly a place to stay off the streets, and to network, nowadays. I mean, they all know all that stuff because they’ve been taking the undergraduate courses, where they should be. I was an exceptional case, because I was a history major. I had never done anything, never had a poetry course, much less a writing course.
Q: Slam poetry, or so-called spoken word poetry, is popular on campus, do you see any relationship between that —?
A: I’ve never been to one. I see no relation at all. I am totally anchored to the page and the sound that is inherent in the language, as it is written and heard in the mind, not through microphone. I mean made up for the microphone.
Q: Your poems, for all their intellectual subtlety, are also immediately gratifying. Is it important for them to give a certain satisfaction on the first read?
A: I hope so, I hope so. But most poetry has to be read a couple of times before you start to see what’s running underneath, you know? I always feel that anything that’s too immediately apprehended is probably not as serious maybe as it should be. That’s probably my fault. But sure, I like people to like my poems. I don’t care if they do, but I like them to.
Q: Nature pervades your poetry. Do you see any role for activism — either for you personally, or in an artist’s responsibility generally?
A: I’m not a politically involved. I’m just not. Back in the sixties they used to say, just writing a poem is a political act. Well, maybe it is, maybe it’s not. But I don’t take on political questions as such, or environmental questions, as such — although I think that how I write about the landscape has something to do with how I think the environment should be. But no, I’m not a political poet.
Q: I read that you retreat annually to a residence in Montana.
A: Yeah, my wife inherited a place up in the mountains in Montana, we go out every summer, spend 3 months out there. I seem to have gotten a lot of my poems written out there. I’ve been going there since 1967. So, that’s a long time.
Q: Does solitude enhance your writing process?
A: It does. I like being alone when I’m writing, although it didn’t always happen that way. When I was younger. You know I taught for 40 years, so I was always involved in that. But solitude is kind of necessary, I don’t mean loneliness, I mean solitude. Where you can get to a place where you can just think about things.
Q: If you couldn’t be a southerner, would you rather be an Iowan, a Californian, or a native of the northeast?
A: Well, I don’t want to be an Iowan [chuckles]. There are too many jokes about Iowa! But that’s why I jumped on it and said I’ve had more fun there than any place in this country. But the northeast would be good, I wouldn’t mind that. I’ve stopped teaching now, so it’s all a matter of nothing.
Q: Is writing difficult?
A: It is now. It used to be easier when I was younger. It’s very difficult now, because I’ve probably written all the things I could possibly have to say at least five times, in five different directions. I don’t want to do it now. It is difficult, and I guess more difficult for prose writers who have to get caught up in the narrative and the structure that’s long and extended, and characters and all that sort of thing. Lyric poetry is different from that obviously. I mean it’s not easy but it seemed more natural than literature. I never had a spell of a year or two where I couldn’t write. I had six months at one time.
Q: What broke through that block?
A: I don’t know, a poem I guess. I don’t know. It was so long ago.
Q: Here are three dreaded words for an interviewee: you once said, “Poetry is our last refuge.” As you get older, do you find it any more or less of a refuge?
A: Well, when I’m doing it, that’s what I meant. When you’re it, it is a refuge from the world around you. And you’re in the world you created, and I still think it’s a refuge in that sense. Teaching poetry or writing poetry won’t keep you from getting shot on the street. Not that kind of refuge. But it is somewhere you go hide, to a certain extent. It’s a hiding place. Everybody’s gotta have a hiding, some way. You’ll find that.
Q: Are many of your friends poets?
A: Most of them are. It just seems to be that way. I once asked Donald Justice, how come all your friends are poets? He said that’s the way it is. Every poet’s best friends are poets, because you see them, you read their work. My best friend is Mark Strand, who was here yesterday. He and a guy named Charles Simić and James Tate are my three best friends, and they’re all poets.
Q: College students interact primarily with college students. What would you say to your fiction-writing, struggling, undergraduate self that a peer couldn’t have told you?
A: I would tell myself, get into the library and start reading. That’s how you’re gonna do that. The gaps in my reading, the gaps in my education, were … But that’s the only way you can learn to write, is to read. To see how it’s done. To see how other people do it. Find stuff you like and try to imitate it. Intimate someone else. Imitate someone else. And pretty soon you’re gonna find out that it has rubbed off on you in various ways, and you start fighting your own weight. But unless you read, you’re not gonna really learn what is acceptable, what will be acceptable to those other than yourself, and that you can’t just say, “I’m so lonely.” I’d say go to the library.
Q: Has anything pleasantly surprised you about your role as poet laureate? I know you were reluctant to take it on.
A: I’m really surprised, how seriously it’s taken by other people. Not myself, but other people. Of course, it is in the library of congress, and oh, oh, you know, it’s not really anything. It’s an honor to have been asked, and you have to do a lot of traveling, which I hate. But, doesn’t help the poetry. In fact, Charles Simić said the year he was poet laureate, he didn’t write a poem, and he writes 100 poems a year. So, I found that it’s not quite as arduous as I thought it might be, but I’ve just started.
“Dà jiā hǎo,” Yale President Peter Salovey said in broken Chinese. “Hello everyone.”
On Oct. 29, 2014, Salovey sat down with Pan Shiyi, one of China’s most influential businessmen and the chairman of SOHO China, a major real estate development company worth over $10 billion. Behind Salovey and Pan, both dressed in dark suits and white shirts, stood two black-clad women prepared to offer ceremonial gifts to the two leaders.
With his three words, Salovey greeted an audience larger than those gathered in a conference room inside one of SOHO China’s futuristic Beijing offices. Rather, Salovey was addressing the broader community of educators, students and philanthropists who would likely take an interest in the gift.
The SOHO China Foundation, established in 2005 by Pan and his wife Zhang Xin to support Chinese education, had just announced a donation of $10 million to Yale in support of low-income Chinese students. This gift was part of a larger $100 million endowment established in 2014 to fund Chinese financial aid at international universities.
“We hope the donations will help Yale admit more Chinese students, and those from modest backgrounds,” Pan announced at the ceremony. “Every person’s potential is like a hidden gem, and education is the tool that unlocks human potential.”
For all the pomp and circumstance of the event — the photo-ops, the official handshakes, the backdrops displaying the SOHO China and Yale logos — the donation, in relative terms, does not amount to much.
According to the University’s most recent financial report, Yale took in a total of $346.4 million in charitable contributions in fiscal 2014, making the SOHO China donation a mere 2.8 percent of Yale’s fundraising total. And the donation was $5 million less than what the couple gave to Harvard earlier in 2014 for the same outlined goals.
Further, compared to Stephen Schwarzman’s ’69 $300 million fundraising campaign in 2013 to establish the Schwarzman Scholars at Beijing’s Tsinghua University, Pan and Zhang’s donation appears even smaller.
“It’s a drop in the ocean compared to what Chinese schools are raising,” said Rupert Hoogewerf, the publisher of the Hurun Report, a monthly magazine best known for its “China Rich List.
But the gift’s significance is not denominated in dollars. Rather, the gift and the reaction to itmay symbolize changing Chinese attitudes about philanthropy — changes with direct implications for Western institutions
With Chinese donors giving more and more to foreign causes, “I just suppose that Yale might want to draw more money from China,” said a prominent Chinese newspaper columnist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to restrictions placed on domestic journalists speaking to the foreign press.
While Salovey did not travel halfway around the globe to merely pick up a check (he was also in Beijing at the time for the opening of the Yale Center Beijing), Yale’s eagerness stands out among its peer institutions. Harvard President Drew Faust, by comparison, met Zhang and Pan in a Cambridge boardroom and signed documents with markedly less fanfare.
But the buzz around Pan and Zhang’s donation hasn’t been restricted to Yale — it has garnered even stronger reactions outside the US.
“Mr. Pan’s donation is nothing…but it has an eye catching effect and has an effect on the people’s feeling in China,” Shujie Yao, economics professor at the University of Nottingham, said. “Each day [students] go to school and they don’t have even basic things.”
Professor Yao joins a multitude of other voices, both within China and beyond its borders, criticizing the SOHO China gift and other high-profile Chinese donations to elite American institutions over the past few years. These philanthropic gestures have sparked a firestorm of debate about Chinese philanthropy abroad, and about where Chinese donors’ loyalty should lie.
No Good Deed…?
The first seven-figure donation to Yale by a Chinese national occurred in 2010, when Zhang Lei GRD ’02 SOM ’02, founder of Hillhouse Capital Management, pledged nearly $9 million to the School of Management.
According to a 2010 Asia Times article, which quoted then-University president Richard Levin, Zhang’s gift was the largest gift to date from a young alumnus and was also the largest gift to the School of Management up to that point.
Despite the apparent act of altruism, not everyone was happy.
In the days following the announcement of Zhang’s gift, China’s state-run Xinhua news agency had to set up a special forum just to accommodate angry debate on the topic
And when China’s “Global Times” hosted a forum regarding the gift, they received more than 1,000 posts as outraged individuals spewed hate-filled accusations mixed with nationalist sentiment.
“Scum, trash, dog feces, traitor,” wrote one commenter.
The Chinese equivalent of Twitter, Weibo, was flooded with infuriated messages. Zhang was accused of “indifference” to the concerns of his own nation and even labeled a “traitor.”
Five years later, students, professors and experts on China reflected about why these types of gifts have struck a chord with a domestic audience.
“I think there is a very strong sense of nationalism among young people, especially young educated Chinese, who are very vocal and are on social media,” said China Insider director France Pepper, a leading consultant on travel and culture in China. “It is, in some way, surprising because you think these kids are going to the university and are outward thinking, but at the same time they are thinking of China and China’s potential.”
This fall, much of the fury that had subsided since 2010 has been scraped raw once again. And with a larger donation, more publicity surrounding the gift, and more Chinese students on American campuses than ever before, the debate regarding nationalism, philanthropy and education appears far from over.
“It’s a very hot topic right now,” Hoogewerf said. “There has been a lot of criticism in the press of [Pan and Zhang’s] gift.”
Hoogewerf said many critics of the SOHO China Foundation argue that the money could have been better directed at the major problems continuing to plague China’s education system.
“I only want to tell China’s entrepreneurs: think about children in China’s West,” wrote one Weibo user. “[They] don’t have enough food and have no shoes to wear in winter. For those students who study abroad, which of their families doesn’t have connections or money?”
Yao said that in terms of primary and secondary education, China remains much less developed than the U.S., and the existing schools that serve low-income students in China remain underfunded.
So even if higher education itself is well supported in China, many Chinese students could “never dream” of attending domestic universities, Yao said, let alone studying abroad.
“And in this particular moment, [Zhang and Pan] pour so much money into Harvard and other schools?”Yao asked.
Still, when engaged in educational philanthropy, there remain compelling reasons for Chinese donors to look abroad.
Alice Sun, founder of a China/Hong Kong education consultancy in New Haven called Ivy Labs, said there is a sense that donations to Chinese universities — which are largely state-run — will not have the same impact that they can have at elite American schools.
“I heard a lot about the mismanagement of money and a lot of donors will have to question, ‘If I donate to a Chinese university, will they manage it well?’” she said.
Aobo Dong, a student at Wesleyan and the executive director of VOCAL Mentorship, a program that assists Asian students in applying to American colleges, said that the perception of rampant corruption among government officials has left Chinese donors skeptical of domestic educational causes. Echoing Sun, Dong said that donors place greater trust in more reputable private universities in America.
But in defending the gift, Zhang, the CEO of SOHO China, avoided the touchy debate regarding the failings of the Chinese educational system. Rather, Zhang argued that her gifts to American institutions were a form of national expression. Representatives for the couple declined to comment for this article.
“It is important for China to be integrated with the rest of the world,” Zhang wrote in a New York Times opinion column published last month. “Our aim is to enable China’s best and brightest to act as a bridge between China and other nations — an important tool for modernizing the Middle Kingdom.”
But whether those ambitious goals will come to fruition is far from certain.
Chnia’s Great Wall in Education
Despite Zhang and Pan’s intent to support China’s most promising students, some critics argue that these types of scholarships are, at best, a waste of money. At worst, they say, the scholarships can inadvertently strengthen the divide between rich and poor.
“The scholarship will only increase Chinese inequality,” Yao said. “The people who are able to study and travel to enter Harvard, they have to be previously from [a] rich family — there is no peasant family that can go.”
Yao argued that to even consider studying abroad, Chinese students must enjoy a level of affluence. Despite the offer of generous financial aid once a student is accepted to an American university, there is little infrastructure in early education to set students on that path.
According to Dong, these scholarships come too late in the admissions process to offset social inequality. He added that since Yale already operates under a “need blind” admissions policy, a scholarship fund may be redundant.
Yet current Yale student Serene Li ’17 said that Chinese students at Yale are already socioeconomically diverse. Many of her fellow Chinese students are on financial aid and receive generous scholarships, she said.
Yifu Dong ’17 said though he does not know any Chinese Yale students from very poor backgrounds, the Chinese students at Yale are not as privileged as people in China often perceive them to be.
And while he did not provide an exact percentage, Yale Dean of Undergraduate Admissions Jeremiah Quinlan wrote in an email that “most” current Chinese students at Yale are on financial aid.
“We really hope, and the donors hope, that this type of gift really raises the profile of Yale in China and encourages more talented Chinese students to apply,” Quinlan wrote in an email. “There are many Chinese students who probably look at our price tag, don’t understand how financial aid works, and decide not to apply to Yale.”
But Dong suggested that Yale’s profile in China hardly needs raising.
He said Chinese students who are admitted to Ivy League schools or other famous colleges are publicly revered and even “worshipped.”
“A lot of Chinese Yalies are in the newspaper, you read about them online, read about their stories, it is like part of the culture,” he explained.
In recent years, dozens of consulting firms have cropped up around China charging upwards of $300,000 for admissions advice and supplemental courses. One Shanghai student made headlines in 2010 when she received a book deal just one week after her acceptance to Harvard.
So if the donation may have little impact on Yale’s attempts to recruit low-income Chinese students, and if the donation will — at most — have marginal influence on Yale’s already considerable fame abroad, critics have speculated about an alternate motive.
The Price of Admissions
Zhang and Pan have two sons, aged 15 and 16, who both study English and go to international schools. With Chinese students facing increasingly cutthroat competition for spots at top American universities, the timing of the SOHO China gift has not gone unnoticed.
“Isn’t Pan just buying an entrance ticket for his son to attend an elite university abroad?” wrote one Weibo user.
Such speculation isn’t unique to the Chinese blogosphere. Li said she initially thought the gift may have been meant to help boost the odds of admission for the couple’s children.
And Pepper said that with a donation of this size, the couple might be seeking some “bang for their buck” — meaning favorable status with receiving universities — especially given that securing a spot at a top school is of the utmost importance for wealthy Chinese families.
“Even though these people are the elite, they are all obsessed with Ivy League schools,” she said. “Education is the top priority of Chinese families and [they] are likely not going to give their money to a hospital in Iowa, for example.
Even if the relationship between donor and administrator may not be as quid pro quo as some cynics have argued, a high profile gift to a prestigious university has its benefits.
Sun said that although she believed the SOHO China gift and similar donations were “from the heart,” major gifts to universities have perks that can ultimately raise admissions chances. She said that students may be able to get exclusive access to such things as faculty clubs and time with professors, in addition to gaining opportunities such as research experience or summer programs.
But Yale administrators denied that the donation carried unspoken expectations.
Yale Vice President for Development Joan O’Neill said in December that the couple’s generosity stemmed from Zhang’s personal experience studying abroad. In the 1980s, she was awarded scholarships to study in England at the University of Sussex and at Cambridge University.
“With the help of financial aid, I went from factory worker to university student, then became an entrepreneur and eventually, chief executive of my own company,” Zhang wrote in her December Times column. “That opportunity to study was the most dramatic turning point in my life.”
Salovey similarly dismissed the accusations leveled against the couple.
“My experience of philanthropists — from the United States and from around the world — is that they make their gifts to Yale and other institutions from their desire to do good,” he wrote in an email. “In this case, Ms. Zhang and Mr. Pan clearly want to help make possible a future in which students of limited financial means can have access to a great education.”
Whatever the couple’s reasons for giving, donating to a university isn’t a guarantee of getting one’s child admitted. Hoogewerf said though preferential treatment for large donors may be more common at less prestigious universities, there is often greater division between the development office and the admissions office at elite schools. He recalled a case in which a wealthy Chinese family donated a large sum of money to the University of Cambridge only to have their child rejected months later.
Giving and Receiving
Despite domestic backlash, the flow of money from Chinese coffers to foreign institutions seems unlikely to dry up anytime soon.
Pan and Zhang, for example, have pledged to continue providing major gifts to leading American institutions. They stated in October that they have set their sights on Duke and Stanford.
With new money fused with new attitudes, China may be entering a golden age of charitable giving — exemplified by the SOHO China donation, the similar donation by Zhang Lei in 2010, and most recently, a $350 million gift to Harvard from a Hong Kong foundation this September.
“There are a lot of relatively young entrepreneurs who are fortunate enough to create spectacularly successful businesses in China,” said Yale School of Management professor Stephen Roach, a senior fellow at Yale’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs and the former chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia. “Younger wealth tends to have a different approach towards philanthropy and giving back to society.”
Pepper agreed, saying that though large-scale donations to institutions have been a very American and European concept, these charitable principles are now starting to become ingrained in Chinese society.
And in light of the growth of Chinese philanthropy, the pomp and circumstance surrounding Yale’s acceptance of the gift takes on a new significance.
If Chinese donors present a major source of new income for Yale and other American universities, Yale’s gesture may have been meant to entice more donors.
“If [Yale] is not trying to tap into sources of wealth internationally, they are making a mistake,”said Richard Hesel, a principal at Art and Science Group LLC, a firm that advises colleges and nonprofits.
He added that Yale’s decision to “flatter donors in a public way” might be intended to offer prospective benefactors the promise of affiliation with a prestigious university.
Yale, for its part, acknowledges the potential benefits of courting foreign money, and has seen recent success in doing so.
“Yale has made a commitment to engaging donors around the globe for many years,” O’Neill, the Vice President of Development, wrote in an email.“A number of significant gifts from non-U.S. donors in the past year, while not at the magnitude of Harvard’s $350 million gift, are testament to the growing success of those efforts.”
Though China currently ranks eighth globally as a source of foreign donation to US universities, CEO Zhang Xin argued these attitudes are changing in a big way — for Yale, for Harvard, and for the world.
“I believe that the year 2014 is a turning point in Chinese philanthropy,” she wrote in her NYT opinion column. “This tradition is finally getting the impetus it needs to flourish.”
As Chinese philanthropy looks west, American institutions will look east ready to receive. Those in China may not be so enthusiastic to see money flowing out their country, even as it remains plagued with problems.
But for Chinese donors, even when seven-figure philanthropic gestures and glitzy ceremonies provoke harsh domestic criticism, charity abroad may be worth the price.
I don’t remember the first time I heard “Tangled Up In Blue.” Bob Dylan was one of those artists I grew up with, like Woody Guthrie and Paul Simon, and it was my mother’s favorite song of his. “Tangled Up In Blue” begins “Blood on the Tracks,” Dylan’s greatest album, which turns 40 this week. As a work of musical genius, the song shines especially bright today, having gone untarnished by the decades. It is a work of singular wonder and beauty, and although Dylan wrote great songs before and after “Tangled Up in Blue,” it remains perhaps the closest to perfection he has ever come.
Although the instrumentals themselves are nothing technically notable, they do their job: the guitar’s small circular pattern pulls in the listener, and once the drums and bass kick in a second later, there’s no chance of escape. There’s a certain calm to this song, partly a result of the laid-back groove and partly from Dylan’s voice, which sounds smooth and refined in a way that it never had before, echoing with a sort of omniscience. He sings with the weariness of a man who knows he has seen all there is to see; he carries supreme confidence in his own awareness. This might be Dylan’s finest vocal: He abandons both the rough-hewn folk-singer persona of his early career and the electric rockstar he played in the mid-’60s, when his voice, full of scorn and spite, crashed and broke in cresting waves upon the protests of viciously hostile crowds. No — this is Dylan in total, quiet command, and his voice rings with an indelible permanence through the song and the entire album.
Despite the song’s sublime sound, its greatest strengths lie in its lyrics. Dylan is the modern Bard, and this is his masterpiece. His lyrics ramble from a tumultuous Brooklyn Heights to a seedy Midwestern strip club, from the Great North Woods all the way down the Mississippi to Delacroix, from the past to the present and back again, switching at whim between the first person and the third. Each verse is a vignette of incredible power and vividness, and the unforgettable details jump out like embers shining in the dark. “I just kept looking at the side of her face/In the spotlight so clear,” he sings, carrying the pain of loss and the joy of rediscovery in two short lines. Or maybe the grim resignation of departure weighs heaviest: “We drove that car as far as we could/Abandoned it out West/Split up on the docks that night/Both agreeing it was best.” These lyrics create images far greater than the words themselves. They evoke an entire era — the glorious, glamorous 1960s, full of revolution and madness and aspirations to utopia, quickly fading from view in the cultural chaos of the mid-1970s. It is a hesitant lament to a time most of us never knew, whose legacy remains uncomfortably uncertain.
But in some sense, it’s wrong to talk about “Tangled Up In Blue” as a single song. Dylan has officially released at least four versions of the track, and bootlegs of other live performances abound. And each time he performs it, something different emerges — maybe he’s tweaked the lyrics a bit, or changed the melody around, or decided to add one instrument and remove another. The album version of “Tangled Up In Blue” has a certain hope to it: Even though his relationships have fallen apart over the years at the mercy of cultural shifts, there’s still some unreached promised land out there. On his European tour in 1984, he changed around most of the lyrics, and while the essential message remained unchanged, the images are richer and darker. He and his lover still encounter each other at a strip club, but this time the experience is uncomfortably visceral: “I could feel the heat and the pulse of her/As she bent down to tie the laces of my shoe,” he sings. In this version, sailors come close to drowning, and widows go penniless.Dylan claims he likes this version best, and maybe that’s because the visions are eerier. They’re starkly uncompromising; they carry more of the ages with them.
But Dylan’s greatest reinterpretation of his own song came before he decided to alter the lyrics. On June 7, 1978, at the Los Angeles Coliseum, he played a version of “Tangled Up In Blue” so profoundly haunting as to be an entirely different work altogether. Gone is the powerful strumming; absent is the gleaming twinkle of hope. Instead, a soft guitar slowly marks the beat behind a mournful, beautiful interplay between the organ and tenor saxophone. No light seeps into this version of the song, no chance of reunion or redemption. The lyrics, now, are in the third-person, as Dylan distances himself from the events, a conscious attempt to put it all behind him. Perhaps, in the middle of the national tumult of the Carter presidency, Dylan just couldn’t bear the heavy burden of the memories of previous years. Perhaps he needed to move on, reinvent his music and persona, change his clothes, his hair, his face. Whatever happened, happened, this version says — it is irretrievably past.
But time must go on, as it does, and the present never ends. For me, one of the later lyrics in the original version hits hardest: “The only thing I knew how to do/Was keep on keeping on/Like a bird that flew/Tangled up in blue.” Is there any better expression of solidity and endurance? Dylan’s world has collapsed around him, the friends he once loved have moved on, he can no longer recognize this placed called America. Never mind, though — he’ll keep on keeping on.
And that’s all you can do when you hear this song. At first listen, “Tangled Up In Blue” might not sound so remarkable, but as you listen to it more and more, as the lyrics light their slow-burning fuse in your heart, as Dylan’s voice etches his words into your soul, and as the characters appear increasingly alive, this song becomes real like few others are. Its inescapable story lives on in the mind or somewhere deeper, as integral to human experience as anything Shakespeare or Yeats ever wrote, and the many reinterpretations only expand its reach. Eventually we all get tangled up in blue.
“Imagine your secrets in a box. Everyday you have the choice of what do with them,” began Frank Warren, the founder of PostSecret. PostSecret is the world’s largest ad-free blog and an ongoing community art project, updated weekly with anonymous postcards displaying secrets sent from all over the world. From whimsical stories to somber confessions, the diverse postcards sent to Warren’s home address have drawn a consistent and sizeable readership, prompting a play of the same name and a best-selling book series.
Warren visited Southern Connecticut State University’s John Lyman Center last week as part of PostSecret Live, an interactive multi-media show that allows him to publicly share some of the 500,000 secrets he’s received.
I have followed PostSecret since my teen years. The project’s aims — sharing secrets and building community around the healing power of revealing them — made a lot of sense when my world consisted primarily of pre-calc, prom and pimples. And though PostSecret Live did not resonate with me as the site once did, it was still an emotionally powerful and well-intentioned performance.
Most striking about the PostSecret project is the way it turns a private and emotional process into a visceral and shared one. This particular strength was further showcased in PostSecret Live, where interaction with the audience and visual displays augment Warren’s discussions.
Warren asks the audience questions, breaking down the wall between audience and performer: Members of the audience reacted to his queries, interacted with audience members nearby and shared their secrets in an open mic session at the end of the night.
Warren successfully created an atmosphere of mutual respect in which the audience felt comfortable but also compelled to share their secrets. Similarly, the audience maintained an appropriate tone and attitude while listening to open mic participants.
A series of voicemail recordings played to the audience provided a particularly climactic moment. The voicemails included a grandmother singing an off-tune happy birthday, a grandfather congratulating a grandchild on a college acceptance and a brother calling to simply share an article with his sister. But the sign-offs — “I will see you soon,” “ I love you” and “Miss you” — were haunting: These voicemails were the vestiges of people that had since died, moved away or otherwise become unreachable.
Despite its intense moments, the show provoked as much collective laughter as it did personal reflection. Warren moved from a discussion on suicide, something often indirectly or directly implied in the secrets sent to him, to a joke about a man considering suicide. And while I’m still not sure how I feel about this particular instance, the general success of humor in PostSecret Live reminds us that the confidential can often be the most laughable.
Dealing with such a touchy subject, it’s easy to fall into clichés. But if anyone has earned the right to be cliché, it is Frank Warren. He describes wandering the streets of Washington D.C. soliciting secrets; he claims that PostSecret ultimately reminded him of one of his own long-forgotten secrets; he believes that secrets are “the currency of intimacy.” When Warren asserts that “We think we keep secrets, but really it’s the secrets that keep us,” he’s not pandering to the audience — he truly believes what he says.
Still, it is easy to doubt the enduring power of the confessional open mic at the show’s closing. Though sharing secrets might seem valuable and cathartic for those at the microphone, it is not an assurance of resolution or final emotional peace, and it feels misleading that the show suggests otherwise. Secrets often involve ongoing negotiation for genuine reconciliation. My hesitations about this aspect of the performance are likely to some extent a reflection of my own discomfort in addressing intense emotional issues in public venues.
PostSecret’s success capitalizes on the opportunity provided by social media — it gives people a venue and immediate audience for thoughts, feelings and inquiries. As shown by the many Yalies who use Yale PostSecret to share secrets, humorous moments and personal demons, we sometimes need to say things that we feel we can’t say publicly. It’s a need that, by definition, few recognize. And for all its imperfections, PostSecret Live succeeded by acknowledging the need to say the unspeakable
A life-size, maniacally-grinning, chainsaw-wielding man waited opposite the gallery entrance at the Yale School of Art’s Comprehensive Undergraduate Exhibition. His cheerful expression, drawn in charcoal across four wooden boards by Saybrook’s Perry Holmes ’17, invited his viewers to relax, take a deep breath, enjoy. This nonchalance added immediate levity to the exhibition, which featured work from every student from every fall semester art class. Perhaps the chainsaw wielder’s grin dictated the easy atmosphere within the gallery, as students and faculty wandered past the work of undergraduate artists in stolen minutes between squares on their iCals.
The Director of Undergraduate Studies for the art department, Lisa Kereszi, loosely curated the exhibition, grouping the work by courses. But none of the art on display was labeled with the course title, professor’s name, or artist’s name. At first, I found myself annoyed, craving more information. I am accustomed to a museum or a gallery where, at minimum, the name of the piece and the artist accompany the work itself. But as I reflected, I realized that this omission of labels proved fitting to showcase a vast variety of student work. Although born of necessity rather than a curatorial vision (she did not have the time to make labels), Kereszi’s label-less curation led the audience around the gallery and created the exhibition’s laid-back attitude. Student visitors to the show had often been members of the fall classes, and this format prohibited them from bee-lining to their own work. Without clear boundaries between classes, the exhibition asked us, the audience, to interact with all of Yale’s undergraduate artists as a collective.
And what this collective displays is a remarkable variety, in both the range of media explored and the personal style of the artists. Painting professor Sam Messer described the exhibition’s unifying thread, and the overarching teaching philosophy of Yale’s art department, as “visual thinking.” Motivated by the process of visual thought rather than the product, the art department and the Comprehensive Exhibition focus more on what the students have to say than the precision with which they say it.
With so many students having so many things to say, personal voice proved a refreshing continuity throughout the show. I found myself marveling at the diverse ways students interpreted a portrait assignment fora photography class. Although the assignment seemed rudimentary, the portraits ranged from a gestural photograph presumably captured using a long exposure, to a clean and arresting emotional image of a heavily made-up woman. Within one assignment, students created bold and emotional pieces, no two of which were alike.
Like these portraits, the typography portion of the exhibition stood out for the diversity of interpretation within one assignment. Students experimented with text from Italo Calvino, a modernist Italian writer, treating the very lettering as a malleable character to de- (and subsequently re-) construct. They interpreted his text in vastly different ways, bringing humor, subtlety, geography and full experimentation. In one of the works, Calvino’s text assumed a topographical landscape. In another, the words “Alive” and “Dead” vied for space in the middle of a stark, broken composition. Simply curated, the 24 works hung in an evenly-spaced grid. This construction avoided distraction, allowing the pieces to operate uninhibited.
Another example of the loose, expression-driven approach to understanding the visual thought process came in the small and dynamic compositions from Messer’s “Painting and Time” class, which he pointed out to me. Students had less than two hours to complete each in-class assignment in locations ranging from YSO practice to the Peabody Museum to the pool at Payne Whitney. I admit to having initially overlooked these small, haphazard works. I was too caught up in my own conceptions of what “deserves” to go in a show. After a lifetime of going to museums and galleries, I expected the work hanging on walls to be finished, finessed, something closer to an aesthetic ideal. But the paintings from Messer’s class explored the journey of creating art: linking mediums to subject matter, experimenting with changing light in a landscape, or rendering motion in a still image. As a result, the small paintings proved to be loose and energetic mood studies of location.
As I left the gallery, I turned for a once-over glance at the exhibition. Again, the chainsaw man’s grin confronted me, and I almost offered a little salute. Perhaps the real source of his humor was his direct contrast with the neutral still life compositions common to most introductory drawing classes. Even within one course or assignment, students used fundamental techniques as springboards to render moments of their own lives in image. The result? A visual kaleidoscope of diverse and delightful personal narratives and styles.
About halfway through Tuesday’s concert in Woolsey Hall featuring cellist Yo-Yo Ma, the audience started to laugh. Ma, proper in an orange tie and round glasses, sat onstage with Aldo Parisot, a professor at the Yale School of Music and the University’s longest-serving faculty member. Between pieces from Bach and Haydn, the two had what had been billed by press releases as a “lively and informative conversation.” Instead of something predictable, though — with prepared questions and friendly sips of chilled water—Parisot added a bit of absurdity. The 94-year-old yelled into the microphone, interrupting and answering questions that weren’t asked. It felt spontaneous and messy in a way that Ma’s resume, including more than 15 Grammys and appearances from Carnegie Hall to Sesame Street, often doesn’t.
At one point, cutting off Ma as he began a question, Parisot waved his arms and shouted, “I told you, time does not exist! It’s an illusion!” Even though the “conversation” turned into an ad hoc stand-up routine, what Parisot said felt true, especially after Ma lifted his bow off the cello’s strings at the end of the night. Time is an illusion when Yo-Yo Ma plays — not because of his treatment of each note, but because he knows how to demand the attention of his listeners. A concerto feels as if it has flown by in seconds, and as classical music tries to expand its audience and establish a footing with young people, that transcendent effect is worth much more than double-digit gold trophies.
Benefiting the School of Music’s cello program, Tuesday’s performance let the cellist flex his Ma-scles with a duet, an unaccompanied suite and a concerto. He played the first, Jean-Baptiste Barrière’s Sonata in G major for two cellos, with Yale cello professor Ole Akahoshi. The light glinted off the two instruments, making them look like small amber jewels reflected in the shiny black stage, but their sound filled the space. The two passed baroque melodies back and forth, friendly and cordial. Then, aggressively, Ma began the third movement with a strong, low note like an unexpected punch to the face. (The audience giggled then, too.) Akahoshi replied with as much force, and the duet ran off until the last notes, when the fight ended with Ma and Akahoshi holding their hands in the air, both winners.
Johann Sebastian Bach’s Suite No. 3 for solo cello, one of the big fish of the instrument’s repertoire, came next. Ma has likely played this piece countless times, and his interpretations of Bach are everywhere; search “cello” on Spotify, and his recordings of the suites will be some of the top results. At Woolsey, each phrase — from the wandering cascades of the Prélude to the folk-like grit of the Gigue — flowed automatically from Ma’s fingers but still consumed his whole body. His feathery hair bounced against his forehead as he threw himself at the strings. Sometimes, he pushed his cello away as if it were too energetic to control.
The same hyper-familiarity came through in the concerto, Joseph Haydn’s first for the cello. Parisot conducted Ma and musicians from the School of Music. The piece has relentless drive and a classical, petticoated bounce, and Ma’s version was wickedly quick and expressive. He attacked each phrase, swelling before immediately pulling back, only to pounce on the next with more speed. While colorful, his emphases made it difficult at times to grasp what the music’s details tried to say. Intricate passages passed by in blurs, and while I could marvel at his athleticism, I didn’t have time to appreciate what had happened seconds before.
Despite its resultant whiplash, Ma’s style has hidden advantages. Just as Parisot remarked about timebeing an illusion, Ma is able to package big, complex pieces into digestible bursts. Whether a short, lively duet or a 20-minute piece, his performances always feel immediate and alive, and those qualities are crucial for much of classical music. They make even slowly unfolding pieces, like a six-part cello suite, accessible to the shortest of attention spans. They are the reason for Ma’s success with everyone, from musicians to presidents to children.
In the middle of the Bach, as if I hadn’t already been convinced, Parisot’s comment made sense again. Between bow strokes, a police siren began to wail behind Woolsey’s dim walls. For a second, the sound seemed alien, as if I had never heard it before. It took a second to break free from the magnetic pull of Ma’s playing to recognize it. But when the sound faded, I was sucked right back in.
He hands his two frayed hardbacks to Renate Recknagel, who takes record of them and tells him he can keep them for two weeks. Carrillo asks when the books were last checked out. “1969,” Recknagel replies, nonchalant.
Carrillo’s eyes get a little wider. “I’ll take good care of them,” he promises. Recknagel smiles, he does not look worried.
I am alone with the two of them in the Institute Library — a 189-year-old membership library on Chapel Street, sandwiched tightly between a tattoo parlor and Nim’s Jewelry Store. Formerly known as the Young Men’s Institute, the Institute Library has occupied this building since acquiring it in 1878.
I walk into the reading room and turn on the ceiling lamps by pulling the dangling tassels that hang at eye level. They evoke antique furniture and dust. Many visitors have characterized the library as “frozen in time,” or an access point to the past, and in some sense this is true: The last person to check out Carrillo’s books did so more than four decades ago, and the reading room is silent, dark and decidedly old. But it is not dead; signs of life stir. The tassels sway whimsically for several minutes after I pull them, like a hypnotist’s watch. And what of the books?
Enticing subjects call out from the thicker spines on the shelves: “The Power Game,” “The Money Culture,” “Justice.” “Mind,” “Habit,” “Plato.”There are biographies, too: Shakespeare, Thoreau, Truman, Kennedy, Oprah and two each on Barbara and Laura Bush.
I pull out an album of Institute Library documents from 1826–1896. Article I of the Institute’s Constitution appears again and again, in recorded speeches and in frayed newsletters: “The object of this institute is mutual assistance in the attainment of useful knowledge.”
***
Fewer than 20 membership libraries like this remain open in North America. Founded in the 18th and 19th centuries, before the advent of the public library system, they provided a means for the middle class to pool resources and gain access to reading materials.
In the beginning, members would donate their own books and pay 25 cents per month to gain access to a borrowing collection as well as a community. But the need for this sort of library diminished as the public system grew, causing the demise of nearly every single subscription library in the nation.
Richard Wendorf has edited two books on membership libraries in the United States. There has been, he says, a “dramatic” decline in what was once a pillar of intellectual life for the middle class.
This makes sense; after all, why would someone choose to pay for a library with a smaller collection than one they have free access to? It is almost more surprising that any membership library has held on.
The Institute Library has done so only by constantly finding new ways to serve its lasting mission. Over its nearly two-century life, it has functioned as a library as well as a debate hall, a lecture space, a social spot and a classroom.
Following the foundation of the New Haven Public Library in 1887, book lending at the Institute Library took a backseat to the more communal aspects of its identity, and it became a vibrant space for discourse. Throughout the course of the 19th century, famous American minds like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Anna E. Dickinson and Henry Ward Beecher came to speak. At one point, it hosted between 600 and 700 classes a year as well as regular debates.
But over the course of the 20th century, this activity slowed to a stop. Membership numbers sunk, budgets deflated and outreach slowly diminished. Will Baker, the library’s director from 2011 through last spring, said that this shift occurred gradually as the notion of a library as a place for silence and solitude spread.
President of the library’s Board of Directors Greg Pepe said that when he joined the board of the library in the 1990s, the place was “moribund.” When he became president in 2008, there were only 175 members. But today, he said, there are well more than 500, who pay dues ranging from $25 per year for an “Apprentice”-level membership to $125 a year for “Patron” status.
Pepe and others credit this revitalization largely to Baker.
“For a good part of the ’80s and ’90s, the place just sort of sat there,” longtime New Haven resident, Institute Library member and Deputy Chief Communications Officer for the Yale Office of Public Affairs and Communications Michael Morand ’87 said. “And then Will came in, and it was like he threw open the doors and shouted, ‘We’re here!’”
Baker collaborated with the Board of Directors to breathe new life and money into the organization. He opened the space up to the public with events, fundraisers, guest speakers, programs and a new gallery on the third floor, which had been closed for 40 years.
Baker, the Board and members agreed — although Baker said that some met the idea with hesitation — that books alone could not keep the Library alive.
Although Morand said that books “always will be core in what distinguishes this from a coffee shop or a performance hall,” he added that “it became clear that they are not enough.”
In fact, Morand said that “library” might not be the best word to describe the Institute Library’s activities today. Rather, he suggested the term “athenaeum,” which connotes intellectual discourse and a community of learners in addition to a research and reading space. It’s a name that other membership libraries, like the Boston Athenaeum, have adopted.
“The value of membership is not merely in the printed texts,” he said. “It’s really a mental gymnasium.”
Pepe believes people yearn for the social interaction and intellectual exchange that the revitalization has fostered.
“To have 300 percent growth in our membership over the last four to five years means that there’s still a place for us to have meaningful conversations within the fabric of our city,” he said.
The library’s balance sheets back up his assertion that the new approach has attracted new attention: In a period of just a couple of years, the Library’s revenue — the money made from membership, fundraising and gifts — went from $6,700 to about $110,000.
“There was something really heroic about that 19th century mission,” Baker said. “We just had to rediscover what it was.”
***
Perhaps the most successful new program is Amateur Hour, curated by acclaimed writers and New Haven residents Jack Hitt and Joshua Foer ’04.
The program brings in often-eccentric experts to speak on a wildly varying array of fields: There has been a been a vampire hunter, a master origamist, a phony psychic and the inventor of a made-up language called “Ithkuil.”
And Pepe recalled the shocked — and, for many, convinced — looks of awe around the room when a visiting Harvard physicist described his theory of the possibility of time travel.
At another point, a husband-wife team of taxidermists from Massachusetts drove in to give a talk to a sold-out crowd. Armed with their knowledge and a set of carcasses, the couple sat before the crowd, perhaps in the very spot Dickinson or Douglass occupied 150 years before them. With their backs to books that hadn’t been checked out since 1969 or 1935, they began to stuff the dead bodies. Jaws dropped.
These strange spectacles have attracted a diverse but dedicated following. Shizue RocheAdachi ’15, who is the audio editor for Amateur Hour, said that the typical crowd for a show is a combination of “middle-aged patrons who sit in the front, and then a significant number of bedraggled-looking twenty-somethings.” Hitt says his audience is drawn from the “NPR crowd.”
RocheAdachi, for one, got involved through her work with the Yale Farm, which contributes to the Institute Library’s now-annual pig roast (another initiative of Hitt’s).
During the several hours necessary to prepare the pig, RocheAdachi told Hitt about her previous radio experience. Hitt was in need of an audio editor to record the shows for transcription in the Virginia Quarterly Review, and soon thereafter RocheAdachi began audio editing for Amateur Hour as a volunteer. She now does the work for hire.
As soon as she saw the space, RocheAdachi says, she fell in love. She was drawn to its “slow tempo” and its isolation; despite the library’s proximity to campus, RocheAdachi is one of only a handful of members who are Yale undergraduates. Yet she says there is a “neighborliness” among patrons: After every Amateur Hour, she says, someone approaches her to chat.
RocheAdachi said that she enjoys how the Institute Library connects her to New Haven through a channel other than Yale. And for its part, the Institute Library, under Baker and his successor Natalie Elicker, has made a conscious decision to become a more integral part of the New Haven community.
“The library has really contributed to the renaissance of New Haven,” Morand said, explaining that its presence is one of the cultural assets that make New Haven an exceptional small city.
“In recent years, New Haven has become a sort of ‘collaboratory,’” he added. “By which I mean there’s a real culture of people coming together and cooperating, and of cultural organizations supporting each other.”
Last year, the New Haven Review merged with the Institute Library and is now an official library publication, a relationship that Pepe called “perfect.” KickBack, an LGBTQ support group for local teenagers and young adults, now has its weekly meetings in the building.
All of this collaboration makes for a more social space, which Baker says was his original goal.
He recalls one lecture by the leader of Ballet Haven, a local non-profit offering rigorous ballet classes for at-risk grade schoolers. An Institute Library member, a female engineer, attended the event and met one of Ballet Haven’s young dancers, a Kenyan immigrant who aspired to become an engineer herself. They organized a coffee date.
“The library should be a social space that encourages serendipitous interaction and coincidences,” Baker said. “These people came together and made connections and shared ideas. And who knows? Hopefully that young girl and the woman who spoke with her are still having coffee.”
Mutual assistance in the attainment of useful knowledge: The library’s mission endures.
***
On the third Thursday of every month, the Poetry Institute — another local group — hosts an open mic and poetry reading in the Institute Library. They have done so consistently for the last seven years, although Mark McGuire-Sanchez, one of the Poetry Institute’s hosts, suspects that they may have missed just one, because of weather.
On this Thursday, there are close to 40 gathered in the reading room. Maybe half a dozen of us are under the age of 55. Institute Library volunteer Frank Cochran LAW ’69 is in the front row, and he tells us about the library, encouraging everyone to apply for membership and donate to the capital campaign.
“The place was a really venerable institution until about 1910,” he says. “And then it stalled a bit — until very recently.”
He says it’s “a place for books, and not for Kindle readers,” although he’s sure to add the caveat that plenty of new literary material has been added in recent years. Then he sits down, and the open mic begins.
The poems are riddled with references: to Darwin, the Brontes, General Patton and El Greco. In his own poem, Cochran recalls listening to jazz while reading a book checked out from the Institute Library. Gazing at the stacks behind him, I wonder which book it was — and how long it will be until the next person checks it out.
