This weekend, I attended Baker College’s production of The Comedy of Errors. BakerShake, as it’s known, has been a Rice University tradition since 1970. The actors prepare a Shakespeare play for 6 weeks and present it in Baker’s elegant commons (seen below). The Comedy of Errors was the first comedy they had performed in a while, and I was excited to see it. I don’t know much about theatre, but I wrote down my rudimentary thoughts here.

The play was overall really fun for me to watch. The acting was well done, and many of the cast members had a gift for comedy. A highlight for me was the actor who played Dr. Pinch, who was hilarious. More specifically to BakerShake, I think that Baker was a really special place to perform Shakespeare. The commons set the tone perfectly for the show. The stage (or rather, section of ground with audience members on couches on both sides), had the intimate appeal of dinner theatre without the cheesiness. Furthermore, the cast members, since they didn’t have a backstage, sat around the stage, reacting to what was happening while in character. This added to the vibe of the play, which was that Shakespeare does not need to be taken seriously. We felt free to laugh loudly, react to things that happened, and interact with the cast. The characters sat on audience members’ laps, tossed us props, and even took an audience member’s ringing phone and improvised an impressive couplet about technology on the spot.

​I really enjoyed my first BakerShake, and am considering participating next year. Be sure to be on the lookout for BakerShake when it returns next spring!

In a Station of the Metro
 
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
                       
Ezra Pound, 1885 - 1972
 
 Fall semester of my freshman year, I decided to get my feet wet in the English department by taking and introductory course on the rise of Modernism. One day we spent the better part of fifty minutes discussing Ezra Pound's In A Station of the Metro, shown above.

After class, I met my mom for lunch. She saw my print-out of the poem, a page on which the tiny body of the piece itself was dwarfed by my notes and scribbles, and she was curious. I recited the poem for her and she became confused.

“That’s it?” She asked, disliking it immediately, “The whole thing?”

I said yes and she could hardly believe it. She had many questions. Did we really spend the whole class discussing the poem? Was there something wrong with the poet? Why would anyone care so much about something so small? We spent the entire lunch talking about those three lines and what they might mean. I could hash out all the arguments I had to offer about the weight the poem’s diminished length, about Modernism and Pound’s role in establishing the school of Imagism, but none of those things could bring my mom to peace with it.

It might be worth mentioning that my mother is a petroleum engineer who loves romance novels but has never developed a fondness for poetry. She didn’t care about the historical significance of the piece and I didn’t try to justify it. Our joint analysis of the poem isn’t something I would want to put in an essay for any of my English classes, and yet every time someone asks me why I care so much about what I study here, I want to point them towards Pound and In a Station of the Metro.

This life is full of moments that linger and echo in strange ways. The conceptual entanglement of perception and meaning suggested by twenty words written a century ago can resonate throughout the narrative of your life indefinitely without resolution, or pass through you in an instant. My mom and I spent that afternoon going back and forth about the poem, and she took great pleasure in going home and sharing it with the rest of the family, most of whom are fellow poetry skeptics. She brought it up for weeks after our lunch, and still mentions it often when I visit home. I credit Pound with igniting a contrary passion for poetry in her that I doubt any other piece could have sparked. And after all this time and discussion, I still don't know if I like the poem itself, and neither does she. But my mother called me a few days ago and asked if I remembered the name of ‘that crazy little poem’, and I knew I wanted to write about it, to express a little gratitude and appreciation for the bizarre and beautiful literary forms that make my life stranger, richer, and better by existing in it.

So if any of you have stubborn mothers or relatives who claim to dislike poetry, maybe have them read In a Station of the Metro. See what they have to say.

Written by Cara B. 

As we get into the final grind of the school year and welcome the summer with wide, open arms, here are some beautiful quotes of literature to bear in mind to get us through these final weeks. Let them inspire you, motivate you, or simply serve as a good read before you begin your wonderful day:

1. “We can never give up longing and wishing while we are thoroughly alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger after them.”                                                                         
-George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss

2. “I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. and when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.” 
-Frank Herbert, Dune

3. “We must have ideals and try to live up to them, even if we never quite succeed. Life would be a sorry business without them. With them it’s grand and great.”                                                             
-Lucy Maude Montgomery, Ann of Avonlea

4. “If you are interested in something, no matter what it is, go at it at full speed ahead. Embrace it with both arms, hug it, love it and above all become passionate about it. Lukewarm is no good. Hot is no good either. White hot and passionate is the only thing to be.”                                                                                           
-Roald Dahl, My Uncle Oswald

5. “Cherish your friends, stay true to your principles, live passionately and fully and well. Experience new things. Love and be loved, if you ever get the chance.”
-David Nicholls, One Day

6. “And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.”           
-John Steinbeck, East of Eden

7. “You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.”   
-David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

8. “Nurture your mind with great thoughts. To believe in the heroic makes heroes.”
-Benjamin Disreli, Coningsby
 
9. “You need to learn how to select your thoughts just the same way you select your    clothes every day. This is a power you can cultivate.”
-Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

10. “Nothing is random, nor will anything ever be… In the end, or rather, as things really are, any event, no matter how small, is intimately and sensibly tied to all others… And, when all is perceived in such a way as to obviate time, justice becomes apparent not as something that will be, but something that is.”
-Mark Helprin, Winter’s Tale
 
11. “‘Why did you do all this for me?’ he asked. ‘I don’t deserve it. I’ve never done anything for you.’ ‘You have been my friend,’ replied Charlotte. ‘That in itself is a tremendous thing.’”
-E.B. White, Charlotte’s Web
 
12. “People are capable, at any time in their lives, of doing what they dream of.”
-Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
 
13. “ ‘Are you ready?’ Klaus asked finally. ‘No,’ Sunny answered. ‘Me neither,’ Violet   said, ‘but if we wait until we’re ready we’ll be waiting for the rest of our lives, Let’s go.’”
-Daniel Handler, The Ersatz Elevator

Written by Sarah S.

Once asked to write a full story in six words, legend has it that novelist Ernest Hemingway responded: "For Sale: baby shoes, never worn." In this spirit, Smith Magazine challenged writers to explore a new way to tell stories when they published a novel called Not Quite What I was Planning: Six Word Memoirs from Writers Famous and Obscure.

Every page is packed full of six word phrases that strive to tell the story of your life—some part of it or all of it—in exactly six words. Smith Magazine believes six word memoirs are a powerful tool to catalyze conversation, spark imagination or simply break the ice. Whether they are happy, sad, or just plain silly, writing and reading six word memoirs offers hours of entertainment.

Here's some of my favorites:

Her dreams kept her reality warm.

I still make coffee for two.

A crush on John Kransinski. Unrequited.

Springing forward and I'm already behind.

Some cross-eyed kid, forgotten then found.

Grandma's candy jar was always full.

Sounded much better in my head.

Most powerful words: thanks and sorry. 

Too much vanilla, not enough chocolate.

My second grade teacher was right.

You could spend a lifetime brainstorming.
​
So this weekend when you have a little free time, give six a try—and make your words count.

by Ellie Mix ('20)

I’ve long been fascinated with the Zeitgeist, particularly how greater artistic and political movements affect and are affected by schools of writers. I am interested to see the literary community’s reaction (although that word might be too direct, acute) to the unreality subscribed to by so many Americans; a deluge of delusions, levied only by free press and vigilant truth-seeking, seeps through the cracks of the Oval Office on a daily basis. I’m picturing Steve Bannon at the base of the Hoover Dam, the hilt of his pickaxe brandished with a capital B, and the barrier that bridles those bigoted, nationalistic, hegemonic impulses—those that we hold, at arm’s length and with head turned, to be self-evident in the depths of American consciousness—begins to crack.

In my high school’s survey of American Literature (aka White Male Literature from the United States) we read Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Miller, Pound, and Eliot; and, in a loose pairing with our American History course we learned about World War I, stream-of-consciousness, abstract art, recapitulation, prohibition, the decadence of the 1920’s…all of the historical and theoretical phenomena that shaped their work. It was during my freshman year of college that I took my first steps on that well-tread path to the Beat Generation. Yes, I do have a dog-eared copy of On The Road, and no, I do not idolize the Beats or pretentiously listen to jazz while sipping pour-over coffee and planning a road trip funded by some distant great aunt’s estate. But, I recommend the novel to anyone worried about what to do with their life (i.e. a freshman not sure what to major in, or a senior not sure where or how to get a ‘real’ job) for lines like these: “I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till I drop.” Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar has a similar passage, the one about the fig tree—but, here, I’ll digress from my inner tempest…those inimical cyclonal forces of Senioritis and pre-post-graduation malaise…in order to return to my ‘real’ subject: the fin de siècle and the French Symbolists (Rimbaud, Verlaine, Mallarmé, Baudelaire.)

While I have owned a collection of Rimbaud’s poetry since my Beat-Generation days, I had not actually worked through any of it until a few weeks ago. I was writing an essay on Wallace Stevens’ use of synesthesia. Some of you might be familiar with the term on a psychopathological level, but the French Symbolist poets assigned literary and theoretical valences to the term almost as soon as it had been coined by psychoanalysts. In medicine the term describes the phenomenon of experiencing a sensation in one part or system of the body produced by stimulus to a different part or system of the body. For example, someone listening to Brahms might see colors; an auditory stimulus eliciting a visual response. However, in literature, synesthesia applies mostly to metaphors and descriptive language. The French Symbolists used the term to describe the affective sensation of descriptions that cross-reference and entangle the natural order of the senses. I turn to scholar Lauren Silvers from the University of Chicago, who frames an explanation of synesthesia from the psychoanalyst Théodore Flournoy: “Flournoy understood that synesthesia was not just the result of psychophysiological ‘association’ induced by certain classes of stimuli (such as numbers and words); rather, more fundamentally, the experience of synesthesia pointed to the physiological holism of the body: ‘First of all, from the physiological point of view, each of us is a model republic in which all parts are interconnected, and in which ‘everything touches everything else.’”
           
Consider some of these great sentences:
 
            From A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway:
“In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels.”

This is a beautiful sentence, although self-contradictory. If the pebbles and boulders are submerged in the river, then how can they be dry and white in the sun? The visual stimulus of the pebbles and boulders in the river evoke a sense of dryness in the tactile senses.
 
            From As I Lay Dying, Faulkner:
“My mother is a fish.”
 
Clearly his mother is not a fish, but the phrase not only clues us in on the logic operating inside Vardaman’s head, it also conjures the smell of a decaying body.
 
And because I am vain, I will leave on a quote of mine that I found while researching for this article:
“Like the conch shell echoing the rush of blood within the ear, the senses submerge the immensity of the ocean.”
 
The crossing of senses requires abstraction to understand, and contrary to the beliefs of Romantic poets abstractions can offer complex representations of truth beyond the capabilities of the natural world.
 
Silvers quotes Guy de Maupassant from his recollection of experiencing synesthesia in the works of Baudelaire: “I asked myself how a modernist poet, from the symbolist school, would have rendered the confused nervous vibration that had just seized me, and that which seemed to me—to be frank—untranslatable.” I believe that all of us who write strive to achieve the affect that Maupassant describes.

I also believe that it is time that we as a literary community re-claim the unreality that has infected our political discourse. A faction of the current conservative has applied the principles of synesthesia in their creation of the mythic “Great America”—you’d be hard pressed to get an exact answer as to when and what the “Great America” was. History is always alive, always under revision; history is a narrative that shapes the present while reconfiguring itself to forge the future. This narrative of a lost “Great America” has captivated millions of Americans, and understanding their attraction to this myth is essential in the effort to combat its more destructive connotations. Consider the Alt Right’s misinformation, conspiratorial beliefs, and dismissal of measurable facts; these falsehoods only deepen the affective response of their constituents…much like how synesthesia can affect a reader. They’re telling a story, and we have to tell a better one. We have to reveal that their ideology was borne from a misstatement (possibly a joke) made by high school English teachers everywhere: that there is no “capital T” Truth. We have to demonstrate the power of subjectivity through storytelling, and re-assert the authority of objectivity. When there is video evidence that proves President Trump is lying, you can’t weasel out of it with an excuse about ‘what he really meant.’ When statistics, gathered in a reasonable manner, show something to be true, then one should not spread contrary information. The distortion of objectivity in politics results in “Alternative Facts,” but the distortion created by representations of subjectivity in literature has a different effect. Because literature relies on distortion, and often it is the shading of a subject’s lens that can reveal human-truths mired in ideology, political predilection, and bigotry. Human-truths are the things that we know through feeling: ideas of morality and social justice, and how shitty President Trump’s tailor is. “Capital T” truths are things like statistics on climate change, statistics on crime and immigration, the number of murders committed by refugees. Those are things that we cannot, and should not alter, because they undermine the credibility of the collective story we are telling. This story belongs to all of us, and we must fight for it. It is the story of America.
            
Written by Caleb S.

​About a year ago, I gave into the geekiest of geeky daydreams, becoming the Dungeon Master of a Dungeons & Dragons campaign with my friends. I know, I know - you’re already cringing. Why am I writing about my weekly nerd-session of pretending to be fantasy characters and rolling dice? Well, because as the leader of the session, I’ve had to learn quite a bit about the original form of storytelling: oral storytelling.
 
There’s been a huge surge in types and forms of oral storytelling over recent years, but I just wanted to bring up a few. Games like Dungeons & Dragons (Tabletop Role-Playing Games is the categorical titles) requires its players to form the story as their playing, partially assisted by some props around the table, but mostly through a collaborative engagement with the imaginary. As the Game Master, it’s my job to bring my players into a space that exists in my head and allow them to navigate the world and people in it as seamlessly as possible. This is a challenge enough when you’re writing, and you have time to put tape on the holes and put up some lights in the dark hallways for the reader, but I’ve found it incredibly difficult and revealing to have to give complicated details on setting and occurrences while speaking. However, as a result, I am now better able to come back to my writing and elaborate more precisely on the details of written spaces, and I understand real dialogue and interactions now, and I can see into parts of literature that I previously found relatively obscure.
 
Now, I’m not saying that to be a better writer, you necessarily have to role dice around some figurines for a few hours (although it’s crazy fun to do so), but I would recommend trying out oral storytelling of any form. Other examples? Podcasts and some YouTube videos fall into the category of oral storytelling, where the audience members have to interact just with the voices of other people and a few visual props if needed. It becomes a completely different experience to have to convey things out loud, and I would recommend it as a sort of taste that can build your improvisational and detail-oriented palates. It’s as simple as telling a ghost story or a really elaborate joke – but the form is different, and difference will teach you more about storytelling in general, no matter what your success may be.
 
Written by Erika S.