The Brown Reader

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  Contents

  Preface

  Judy Sternlight

  THE BROWN AESTHETIC

  In Brunensis Speramus

  Sean Kelly

  Sun Under Cloud Cover

  Jeffrey Eugenides

  Train Rides

  Lois Lowry

  Invisible Histories

  Rowan Ricardo Phillips

  Bartleby at Brown

  Jincy Willett Kornhauser

  Indirection

  Donald Antrim

  Bending the Letter

  Brian Christian

  CAMPUS LIFE

  A Campus Tour: My Life in Poetry at Brown

  Nicole Cooley

  The Day President John F. Kennedy Died

  Susan Cheever

  You

  Amity Gaige

  BDH Editor Soars, Stumbles, Snags a Wife

  M. Charles Bakst

  Number One Tofu Scramble with Johnny Toast

  Robert Arellano

  That October

  Christina Haag

  How Brown’s Food Changed My Life

  Dana Cowin

  The Net

  David Levithan

  Love is a long, close scrutiny

  David Shields

  ACADEMIC LIFE

  Higher Learning

  Marilynne Robinson

  Syllabus (Annotated)

  Rick Moody

  My Own Core Curriculum

  Marie Myung-Ok Lee

  Your Dinner with Susan Sontag

  Joanna Scott

  The Place of Lucky Accidents

  Dawn Raffel

  A Doctor Poet?

  Christine Montross

  Cursing My Way to Enlightenment

  A. J. Jacobs

  The Entropy and the Ecstasy

  Mary Caponegro

  DIVERSITY

  What Are You, Anyway?

  Amy DuBois Barnett

  Mix Tape

  Andrew Sean Greer

  The Wheel of the Fuji Goes Round

  Dilip D’Souza

  How Brown Turned Me into a Right-Wing Religious Conservative

  David Klinghoffer

  Townie

  Robin Green

  The Dyslexic Brain Kicks Ass

  Jonathan Mooney

  Neat-Hairs

  Ariel Sabar

  Beautiful Girls

  Kate Bornstein

  SELF-DISCOVERY

  Sleepwalking at Brown

  Meg Wolitzer

  Help Me Help You (Help Me)

  Lisa Birnbach

  Jump Shots

  Bill Reynolds

  Faith and Doubt at Brown

  Krista Tippett

  Did I Really Found Production Workshop?

  Richard Foreman

  Residential Life

  David Ebershoff

  POLITICS

  Escape from the Planet of the Apps

  Jeff Shesol

  Talking ’Bout My Generation

  Ira C. Magaziner

  Creating Change: Black at Brown in the 1960s

  Spencer R. Crew

  Need-Blind Now!

  Sarah Shun-lien Bynum

  The Times

  Joan Hilty

  INSPIRATION

  To Be Young, Indignant, and Inspired

  Pamela Constable

  And Yet Again Wonderful

  Alfred Uhry

  My Honorary Degree and the Factory Forewoman

  Edwidge Danticat

  Is playwriting teachable? (the example of Paula Vogel)

  Sarah Ruhl

  How I Became a Freelance Writer at Brown

  Mara Liasson

  In Troy There Lies the Scene

  Madeline Miller

  Giant Steps

  Afaa Michael Weaver

  Acknowledgments

  Sources of Quotes

  About the Contributors

  Permissions

  About the Editor

  Preface

  JUDY STERNLIGHT

  In anticipation of Brown University’s 250th anniversary, I returned to Providence at the start of 2013 to discuss the creation of this anthology with members of the Brown community. We talked about some of the remarkable writers whose voices, opinions, and life choices had been influenced by this singular Ivy League institution (and how some of those students had influenced the university right back), and we agreed that a collection of original pieces by these alums, recalling their college days, would be a great way to commemorate Brown’s sestercentennial.

  Being back at Brown for the first time since my graduation in 1982 was fascinating and surreal. I discovered that some favorite landmarks—Jake’s coffee shop on Thayer Street where I used to study, and the funky vintage clothing stores where I’d found silk bed jackets and rainbow-striped stilettos to enhance my waif look—were long gone. I recognized the outlines of College Hill, but some of the renovated buildings clashed with my expectations. Still, I found touchstones everywhere: the Rock, the John Hay Library, and Carrie Tower appeared just as I remembered them. And there was a vital energy in the people I encountered on my stroll through campus that filled me with a profound sense of recognition.

  When I caught sight of the Ashamu Dance Studio in Lyman Hall—bang! I time-traveled back to Julie Strandberg’s modern dance class. I was a skinny dancer, warming up to a recording of Vivaldi (or a pair of live drummers) as Julie, graceful and muscular, drifted among us, calmly adjusting our positions as we stretched. The studio was brand-new in 1979 and the sprung wood floor still smelled fresh. Sunshine poured through the big, square windows, warming the floorboards under my bare toes. Names and bodies and faces came rushing back.

  I was rehearsing a duet with my future housemate Barbara to the song “Planet Claire” by the B-52s. We wore one-sleeved, polka-dotted unitards (mine purple, Barbara’s pink) and our synchronized New Wave piece was greeted with raucous applause at the annual Faunce House dance concert . . . One year later, a performance at Faunce House would find me in despair; I had just split up with my rock-musician, law-school-bound boyfriend when I was cast as an old cockney hag in George Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara. I chose to embrace the misery, blackening my teeth with theatrical wax to match my raggedy costume, while sharing a dressing room with actresses in beautiful gowns.

  My years at Brown were filled with dramatic mood swings. But while I was emoting up and down, I was also learning. I focused intensely on the performing arts from practical, technical, historical, and philosophical vantage points but I also explored psychology, sociology, and creative writing, and learned the art of collaboration through Production Workshop, the thriving student-run theater.

  Some students were very adventurous, taking full advantage of the freedom of the New Curriculum (a system that has been described as Escher-like) and the option of Satisfactory/No Credit (S/NC); they took big chances in studying subjects they knew little about or combined disparate interests into cohesive paths of study. Examples in The Brown Reader include Christine Montross, who combined poetry and medicine; Brian Christian, who paired his computer science background with creative writing; and Marie Myung-Ok Lee, who concentrated in economics, fell in love with a US history class, and ultimately became a novelist.

  My common thread was a keen interest in human behavior and a passion for storytelling. This dual focus, which intensified in my classes at Brown, would one day help me to nav
igate the various stages of my career in theater, communications, and publishing. At Brown, I learned from gifted professors, but I was also inspired by the independence and idiosyncrasies of my classmates. This gave me a lifelong hunger to work with bright and intuitive people who are experts at different things—which is one of the greatest rewards of being a book editor.

  In January 2013, as I peered through the windows of Ashamu, I imagined class after class of Theatre Arts concentrators moving through that airy, sunlit studio over the years, pursuing their dreams, while I was off living my life in New York, forging my own path to good storytelling.

  * * *

  Working on this anthology has given me the chance to collaborate with an extraordinary group of writers and creative artists whose essays invite us to see the world—and Brown—through their eyes, over the past few decades. Alternately hilarious, poignant, subversive, and thought provoking, the cumulative effect of these pieces, as one early reader told me, is a kind of love letter to the humanities.

  Filled with vivid historical details from the past sixty years, The Brown Reader takes an intimate look at what these students’ academic passions were, where they lived, what they thought of the food at the Ratty, whom they fell in love with, and how they engaged with what was happening in the world around them. At the same time, it follows the sweep of Brown’s evolution over the years, as the university responded to student protests and changing times, initiated new programs and policies, and fostered what Donald Antrim calls “a philosophy of education that embraces agency and autonomy: You are among mentors and your peers, the University seems to be saying to its students, and you are nevertheless independent, singular, autodidacts in a way . . .”

  Some of the recollections in this anthology shed negative light on Brown at different points in time, while others offer rave reviews or poke fun at the school. This lack of whitewashing—a willingness to convey the bitter and the sweet, the outrageous and the very personal—strikes me as an especially Brunonian approach that should resonate with anyone who has spent time at the school. I was surprised by the number of transfer students who landed in this collection. But it’s an indication of how many of us carefully chose Brown, and sometimes fought hard to get there.

  Limited by time, space, and authors’ prior commitments, we knew it would be impossible to include all of the professional writers who deserved a place in this collection. Our aim was to gather a diverse sampling of recollections from writers who attended the university from the 1950s to the present—inviting them to help articulate (as Jeffrey Eugenides puts it) “what makes Brown Brown.”

  Because of our focus on professional writers, readers will see an emphasis on the humanities and arts in this anthology and few pieces on science, mathematics, or sports. We regret this omission but hope that these contributions will invite each reader to revisit—or anticipate—their coming-of-age years.

  Marilynne Robinson writes, “I have come more and more to realize that the trust I placed in Brown was very graciously answered by the trust Brown placed in me.” We each took away something different. And whether we realized right away what we had learned or it took some time to discover it, our educational journeys at Brown continued to shape us long after we had walked through the Van Wickle Gates at commencement.

  THE BROWN AESTHETIC

  The Brown aesthetic, if we can call it that, is a very loose translation, I would argue, of the New Curriculum: more loose-limbed, more playful, more interdisciplinary, harder to define, at its worst silly (in 1974, my freshman roommate attended a lecture by Buckminster Fuller about the spiritual properties of the geodesic dome and spent all of November chanting in a teepee) and at its best mind-bending, life-altering, culture-challenging.

  —David Shields (’78)

  Brown remains to this day the environment where I met more original, driven, creative people at higher density than any other place I have ever been.

  —Ayad Akhtar (’93)

  I met [Nathanael] West at Brown after he transferred from Tufts in ’23. He advanced daring notions. One of them was that we ought to disguise ourselves with ticking aprons and walk into the John Hay Library, where there was an elephant folio of Hogarth. We’d carry table legs. West’s idea was to nail the folio onto the table legs, and if anyone stopped us, we’d say we were moving a coffee table. I pointed out to him the nails would spoil the volume, so we dropped the scheme. Who wants a Hogarth folio with nail holes?

  —S. J. Perelman (’25)

  In Brunensis Speramus

  SEAN KELLY

  Sun Under Cloud Cover

  JEFFREY EUGENIDES

  The Princeton Reader: It was my senior year rowing lightweight crew. Our last regatta of the season, on beautiful Lake Carnegie, was against Harvard, and boy, did we want to beat those Harvard guys!

  The Cornell Reader: It was the middle of winter. My boyfriend had just dumped me. I was failing applied math. I went out to the Gorge and stared down at the beautiful black pit.

  The Harvard Reader: One thing we liked to do after meetings at the Crimson was go for a drink at Grendel’s and try to guess whose initials were carved into the bar. Was “J.A.” James Agee or John Ashbery? Was “B.B.” Bruce Babbitt or Benazir Bhutto? We could do that for hours!

  The Brown Reader: There was this guy freshman year named Ted Zimmerman. He had a beard already, which impressed me. He liked to listen to free jazz—Anthony Braxton, people like that—while warming a brandy snifter of Courvoisier over a big hippie candle. I thought it was pretty cool to have a brandy snifter in your dorm room. Or brandy, even. Ted was into Nietzsche, too, the late, poetic stuff. Whenever he said something, even if it was about his toaster oven, he’d say, “Thus spake Zimmerman.”

  I’d never met anyone like Ted before. I used to stop by his dorm room to talk to him, but he never seemed interested. Finally, he explained why. “You’re just blah,” he said. “In fact, that’s what I’m going to call you from now on. Blah.” After that, whenever Ted Zimmerman saw me, he’d say, “Hello, Blah.” I loved that about college. That people were willing to be rude to your face, but in a charming and even friendly way. Finally, when we were seniors, Ted came up to me and used my real name.

  “Why aren’t you calling me Blah anymore?” I asked.

  “Because you aren’t Blah anymore,” he said. “You were Blah when you came to Brown. But you’re not Blah now.”

  The Columbia Reader: Oh, God, I don’t even remember. It wasn’t like I spent any time on campus. That would have been twee. I was in the city, man! Why would I go to some dorm party and suck foam out of a keg when I could go downtown to the Mudd Club? My whole time at Columbia I never ate once in the cafeteria. I’m pretty proud about that. Seriously. If I was hungry I just went home and had Rosaria cook me something. Do you remember that time we got wasted and stuck those cold cuts to the walls and Rosaria came at us with that spoon? That spoon was terrifying! And then she’s chasing Whoogie around the dining table and Whoogie’s going, “Señora! Por favor! Señora!” That was hilarious!

  The Cornell Reader: This was before they put up the protective fence. In those days, you could lean over the railing and stare down into the Gorge. It called to me. It said, “Your boyfriend’s going to be so sorry.”

  The Brown Reader: Yeah, I knew John-John. I was in a play with him. Senior year. Short Eyes by Miguel Piñero. Ever see that? “Short eyes” is what they call child molesters in prison. Worst thing you can be. In the play, the molester’s white, and the rest of the cast, the other prisoners, are people of color. Most of us had never acted before. The director recruited us. Came over to the frat and asked if we wanted to be in it. She needed big guys, she said, and we were all on the football team, so.

  I got to play this cool dude named Iceman. And I had this three-page monologue where I had to jerk off to Jane Fonda. “Janie! Janie, baby. Come get this long dick big black buck fuckin’!” I can still remember the lines. You ever see Barbarella? Jane Fonda in Barbarella was l
ike my Stanislavksi Method.

  Anyway, it’s opening night, and guess who’s in the audience, because Kennedy’s in the play? Right. Jackie O. She’s there to see her little boy. So before the show, when we’re in the dressing room, I say to John, “Hey, John, I was thinking of changing my monologue tonight. You know, I don’t have to jerk off to Jane Fonda. Not tonight.” And Kennedy just stood there, until he got it. And then he goes, “No way! No way, man!” And we all broke up.

  John-John was really cool. I remember I asked him once if he wanted to be an actor—because he was good. He had the looks, too. No doubt. But he said he didn’t think acting gave enough back to society. That’s what he told me.

  When he died in that plane crash, oh my God—I still can’t believe that. To have all that going for you, the lineage, and that photo of him saluting his father’s casket, to be part of history, to get married to a beautiful woman and then crash your plane into the ocean? That just overturned my whole conception of things. I thought, John-John’s dead and I’m alive? John-John never got to have kids, and I do? He never got to live his life, and I do? How is that even possible?

  The Dartmouth Reader: My dad went here, sir. And my grandfather. Yes, sir. They both played intramural lacrosse, as do I. I have especially enjoyed the intramural sport program during my time here at Dartmouth. It allows students such as myself, who have a deep and abiding interest in athletics, and who believe that athletic competition is “character-building”—but who, for one reason or another, such as the fact that my legs are slightly different lengths, sir, which makes it harder to run—to still get out there on the field and work up a sweat. Also, the air in New Hampshire is pollution-free, which I appreciate from a pulmonary standpoint. Yes, sir. Premed. My dad was a physician also. And my grandfather. I’m not sure, sir. I guess I’d like to open up a small family practice, maybe even right here in Hanover. But the economic realities of today are different from those of olden times. For instance, malpractice insurance is just crazy! My father says the lawyers are going to drive all the doctors out of business until there’s no one left to perform heart bypasses on the lawyers, so then the lawyers will all die and it’ll be safe to practice medicine again! He was just kidding about that, though, of course. My point is, as much as I would like to open a small family practice, the financial reality going forward is that I’m probably gravitating toward anesthesiology, due to the high income and the regular schedule. I’d like to have a family of my own someday, sir. Three or four kids. That’s correct, sir. Future Dartmouth grads. I could field a whole squad.