Catch a Fire

“Slave driver, the table is turned; Catch a fire, so you can get burned.” – Bob Marley

I am crouched on the edge of Port-au-Prince rooftop, a hooded figure with a blunderbuss and a rusty machete strapped to my back. A throng of white men in frock coats and silk stockings bustles by below, some on their way to a nearby slave auction. There, a line of shackled men stands on a platform, under posters reading “Nègres À Vendre”—“Blacks For Sale.” It’s broad daylight, and my rooftop ledge stands only a few feet off the ground. Yet the men below don’t seem frightened. It’s possible they can’t believe their eyes: Black assassins aren’t quite commonplace in colonial Saint-Domingue. Whatever the reason, their loss is our gain.

TRIAL: Eulogy for a Cosmonaut

Notes from 21 South Street is delighted to present the second installment of highlights from the Harvard Advocate‘s upcoming TRIAL issue. Below, Noah Pisner ’14 records an excerpt from his features piece, ‘Eulogy for a Cosmonaut.’  

TRIAL: Aniseed in sand

The Harvard Advocate is proud to announce the upcoming launch of the TRIAL issue! For the next few weeks, we’ll be publishing a series of interviews, recordings, and essays highlighting works by our undergraduate writers and professional contributors featured in TRIAL. Notes from 21 South St. readers, look forward to an exciting taste of what will be in this issue. 

Below, listen to Zoë Hitzig ’15, outgoing publisher, reading her poem, “Aniseed in sand,” which is published in this edition of the magazine. After making this recording, Zoë and Kevin Hong had an in-depth discussion about the piece; an abridged transcript of the interview is published here. You can subscribe to The Harvard Advocate here. 

–Moeko Fujii ’15

Marginalia: Listening to “The Snow Man”

The advent of winter always brings Wallace Stevens’s “The Snow Man” to mind. Reading it this time around, I have been fascinated by the relationship between the poem’s lines and their surrounding space. Just as Stevens directs our attention toward the silence that accompanies the snowy season, an emptiness that asserts itself in its negativity, so he asks us to listen more closely to the “stuff” before and after each line and stanza.

Stanza, in Italian, means “room.” In “The Snow Man,” Stevens gives us five rooms; each room has its own white space around it, its own silence. Yet the poet does not close the door at the end of each stanza — rather, a single sentence runs through every room, a draft through an old house. There is a unique tension in this poem, one that pits pause against flow. The reader, straining to bridge one clause with the next, is resisted by a “nothing that is.”

Marginalia: Told by an Idiot, Signifying Nothing

You, You, You…, Jung Lee, 2010
Image courtesy of http://design-milk.com

Letters have started to pool at the bottom of my backpack. The alphabetical kind. They lie on the surface of jagged, shrapnel-like scraps of paper and were once part of The Sound and the Fury. Perhaps the printing house of my edition disliked the book and chose an especially brittle paper for it, knowing it would disintegrate in my hands as I read it. Hundreds of pages fell out and splintered when they should have folded; it seemed like pre-programmed self-destruction happening out of sympathy for the Compson family. I no longer own a copy of The Sound and the Fury.

But I’ve been carrying around its remains all semester. I sometimes find pieces lodged between leaves in my notebook, or occasionally stuck to my toes while I study. They show up everywhere, clinging to objects I transfer from one bag to another, or leaping into my hair in the process. Every time I put a book, notebook, or object of any other kind into my bag, I further pummel the already tortured fragments that haven’t made a run for it. By the end of the semester, the pool may be indistinguishable from the sand that hitches a ride in my pockets after a weekend retreat.

Marginalia: Faye Zhang

By Faye Zhang ’17

Introduction: Marginalia

Le Philosophe lisant, Jean-Baptiste Chardin, 1734. Image courtesy doudou.gheerbrant.com

Notes from 21 South Street is happy to present its winter theme: Marginalia. Krithika Varagur ’15 introduces the theme; visit the blog to read more on marginalia in the coming weeks.

What compares to the shame of rereading? Returning a year, month, or week, to a book you rather liked the first time around, you feel a twinge of shame that the first pages’ metaphors are so freshly wonderful. You blush to realize that the comic subplot had entirely evaporated from your memory. Rereading the seminal (you thought) novel of that discontented summer, you seriously question where your atrophied memory places you within the populace; when every page seems so resolutely new, just what from this text had affected you so? Nabokov said that “one cannot read a book, one can only reread it,” but that’s cold comfort for the prospect that your remembrance of Portrait of the Artist may be as detailed as, and less accurate than, its Cliffnotes.

Fall 2013: Robbie Eginton

The Harvard Advocate is proud to announce the launch of its Fall 2013 issue! Below, listen to Robbie Eginton reading his poem, “Fum,” which is published this edition of the magazine. I was also thrilled to talk to him after making this recording; an abridged transcript of the interview is published here. You can subscribe to The Harvard Advocate here.

– Kevin Hong ’15

Picture This: Photographic Media in the Harvard Advocate

The history of photography in the Harvard Advocate is an ongoing and rich one, a confrontation of the enduring question: How does the image find its place in a literary magazine? To commemorate the launch of The Harvard Advocate’s Winter 2013 issue, “Origin,” we have traced the emergence and changing role of the image in the Advocate and the ways in which the photographic image has been read on the page.

Although photography had emerged in print in the early twentieth century, photographs only first began to appear in the magazine during the fifties and sixties as illustrative content and as advertisements.  A portrait of T.S. Eliot was included in the centennial issue, used as a visual reference to one of the Advocate’s most esteemed alumni. All of these examples speak to the then secondary, supplementary nature of visual media to the magazine.

Origin is Here

The Harvard Advocate is proud to announce the launch of its winter issue, Origin. Below, photographer Finbarr O’Reilly tells the story of Origin‘s cover photo. Origin launches today; you can subscribe at www.theharvardadvocate.com. Learn more about O’Reilly’s photography at www.finbarr-oreilly.com.

From 2,000 feet above the flats of Senegal’s Sine Saloum peninsula along Africa’s West coast, shallow circular holes scooped from the earth by salt miners resemble craters punched into a lunar landscape. Brackish water seeps into the troughs from the surrounding ocean and, tinted by bacteria, mirrors the midday sun in pools of red, yellow, blue and green — a jumbled planetary Damien Hirst spot painting.

My vantage point is from an Ultralight “plane,” which is more like a bicycle with floppy canvas wings and a propeller on the nose. There are no doors, just a motorbike-style windscreen and the noisy rush of air shaking the frame of this flimsy sky machine.

From this height, tiny stick figures can just be made out, bent laboring at their tasks beside the swimming pool-sized holes. Smaller white mounds of salt dry under a blinding sun that burns black skin even blacker. From up here, I can’t see the sweat on the brows of the workers – mostly women, some with babies strapped to their backs – nor the cracked skin of hands and feet rubbed raw by millions of tiny, jagged crystals. The corrosive power of the salt eats through metal pans used to scoop the saline water, turning them first to rust, then flakes, then dust.

The women down there gather salt by hand into 110-pound sacks, which sell for about $2 or are traded for sugar with neighboring Gambia, where salt is mainly used to preserve fish in areas without electricity. Trade is informal and vendors elude corrupt tax and customs officials by slipping through the maze of mangrove swamps along the liquid border, exchanging goods between wooden canoes in the hidden shallows.

The scale of my aerial view dwarfs such toil on the salt flats leading out to sea, a view interrupted only by clusters of ragged palm trees that shade thatched village huts dotting the coastline. Out there, the sea, too, reflects the sun, glinting hard and white over a vast, rippling emptiness. But far below my feet, in those murky pools, color glows from the earth. And people scratch a living from it.

By Finbarr O’Reilly