INTRODUCTION
With the unfortunate rise in popularity of such publication as InTouch, Us Weekly, Star and People, many adolescents hope to become celebrities to get their names strewn across these glossy rags.
In the sultry, slow, even-toned raps his fans have come to love, Cam tells the story of his escapades with a fine young piece and how he changed her life by hitting the bottom of her punani. His voice rides cleanly over the lyrics he spits, even when they somehow don’t actually rhyme.
‘Reading,’ as describing a certain activity of eye-sliding-over-page, with eye recognizing ink blobs corresponding (by means of whatever neural calculus) either (1) to something like second-order phonemes, and therefore to certain aural centers and therefore to speech-parts of the brain, which ‘articulate’ meaning to other parts, or (2) to something like second-order morphemes, and therefore to certain visual centers, and therefore to picture-parts of the brains, which ‘project’ meanings to other parts, or (3) to some combination of (1) and (2)[1]—well, ignore that or bracket it, because I have 1,000 words and a little over, say, ten minutes to argue for long and arduous works of literature, their import and glory—and, specifically, for the particularly long and particularly arduous recent novels of Roberto Bolaño and David Foster Wallace.
Abraham “looked toward Sodom and Gomorrah, and toward all the land of the plain, and beheld, and, lo, the smoke of the country went up as the smoke of a furnace” (Genesis 19:28). Matteo Garrone’s horrifying film Gomorra depicts a sun-bleached Campania engulfed in a conflagration of mafia violence where one could easily mistake the smog of illicit industry for the brimstone of divine retribution. The Neapolitan mob is known as the Camorra, phonetically inviting the allusion to the Biblical exemplar of collective evil, and the film succeeds in making it an apt comparison.
Four years ago this June, Shirley Tilghman told Princeton’s graduating class:
During your time at Princeton, many of you have been moved to speak out on issues of social and political importance, from the moral significance of a pre-emptive war, to the pros and cons of senatorial filibusters, to the needs of low-wage workers on our campus…As you prepare to leave Princeton, I trust that the social and political consciousness you have cultivated here will give you the conviction and the courage to take a stand against tyranny and injustice wherever it arises.
This sounds like a pretty standard sentiment for a university president to express at a commencement ceremony but does it accurately reflect the manner in which Princeton affords its students to build a social and political consciousness?
I want to tell you about this year; I want to tell you about what’s happened. I want to tell you about what went down in “Gossip Girl” and about what’s real and what’s fake, about how time passes in Princeton, about what mattered.
This past Sunday, three of the Nassau Weekly’s best-trained sabermetricians compiled data from Princeton Facebook in order to rank the graduating class of seniors in an objective and accurate manner according to a single metric: notoriety. This was not hard. No computer programs were required, although they might have helped. All the team had to do was log in to facebook.princeton.edu, run an Advanced Search for the class of 2009, and copy one piece of information from each of the 1,198 profiles: Profile Views.
The 1998 Lincoln Town Car Every Lincoln Town Car manufactured from 1981 to 1997 has a functionless red strip running the length just above its rear bumper. On a highway at night, this strip is dull, unreflective and visible. In … Read More
The Alex Adams award was established in 2007 in memory of its namesake, Jay Alexander Adams. It provides financial support to undergraduates who elect to spend two months of their summer producing an original work of art. Halcyon Person ’10 was one of the two recipients chosen last spring. What follows are excerpts from her project, for which she spent the summer in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, conducting interviews with members of her father’s and grandfather’s generation who had worked at the since closed Jones & Laughlin Steel Mill.
Empire of the Sun is an up-and-coming indie/electronic duo with a particularly fitting name. The 1984 novel that Luke Steele and Nick Littlemore drew inspiration from is a tale of disoriented youth and immense freedom being closed in on by hostile forces. In a similar manner, Empire of the Sun’s debut album, Walking on a Dream, explores the territory of youth and depravity as they confront the pains of reality.
So, to briefly memorialize the show for now: it’s a play about a play–a construction called, thanks again to ‘kipedia, a “mise en abyme”–about Edgar Alan Poe.