Brown Alumni Magazine>Arts & Culture>A Story Stripped to the Bone

A Story Stripped to the Bone

As a Friend by Forrest Gander (New Directions).

By Beth Schwartzapfel
May/June 2009

For his girlfriend's birthday, Les, the protagonist of Forrest Gander's first novel, As a Friend, hangs a horse skull from the ceiling, douses it with lighter fluid, and sets it on fire. "It was the most beautiful thing I ever saw," she recalls. "The slow liquid-blue flame in the shape of a horse's skull flowering into a new dimension, turning slowly on a string in the dark." This image is like the whole novel in one stroke: creepy and haunting, lovely and strange.

Les is a poet, a land surveyor, a charmer, and a liar. He keeps a wife on a farm in Missouri, lives with his girlfriend, Sarah, in Arkansas, and seduces barkeeps and folk singers on the side. Still, his childlike earnestness and his wide-ranging brilliance and wit are irresistible. Even those who hate Les love him. His friend Clay feels towards Les equal parts awe, eros, and envy. "It was as if he'd come from a place where excitement wasn't taken to be a reverse indicator of intelligence and where it was normal to mention Cocteau and blue channel catfish in the same sentence," Clay says. "The opal blackness of his eyes was magnetic."

"There's that phrase of Samuel Johnson's that I really love," says Gander, an award-winning poet and professor of English and comparative literature at Brown: "'rammed full of life.' I'm of course drawn to—we're all drawn to—figures like that."

The triangular relationship between Les, Sarah, and Clay becomes toxic, and the story's denouement—Les's suicide by three gunshots—comes early in the story. The fallout from his death and the traces of his life that live on in his friends' memories and in a taped interview with a reporter make up almost half of the book. "What interests me," Gander says, "is what comes afterwards—what's on the side of the stage, those elements of friendship that are so complex: sexual attractions and jealousies and awe and competition and love."

Les resembles the real-life Frank Stanford, an Arkansas poet and sometime land surveyor who died in 1978 after shooting himself three times. Back then, Stanford was living with poet C. D. Wright, who is now the I. J. Kapstein Professor of Literary Arts at Brown and Gander's wife. Stanford's death was "the beginning of the germ of the novel," says Gander, who started it about twenty years ago and returned to it periodically, amongst seven volumes of poetry and other writings. "This was one way of telling [Stanford's] story, and one way of dealing with my complicated relationship with him," Gander says.

As a Friend is a story stripped to the bone—106 pages of gestures and sketches. "All the secondary, tertiary worlds of characters and friends I had to eliminate and focus on a very limited set that I could intensify," Gander says. "That's what poetry does. You can intensify and open up small things."

FORWARD>Schmooze>How Do You Say ‘Charge It’ in Yiddish?

How Do You Say ‘Charge It’ in Yiddish?

By Beth Schwartzapfel
April 22, 2009

Chalk it up to the recession; it’s making all of us behave in unexpected ways. The Workmen’s Circle/Arbeter Ring, a not-for-profit organization founded a century ago by socialist, Yiddish-speaking immigrants, recently launched its own credit card. With the organization’s logo in the upper-left corner, the Visa Platinum card offers new users the standard 0% annual percentage rate for the first six months. The Workmen’s Circle gets $50 whenever someone signs up and makes his first purchase, and then 0.3% of whatever the cardholder spends after that. “It’s such an easy way to share with the Workmen’s Circle/Arbiter Ring and continue our mission of progressive and cultural Jewish identity building,” the Workmen’s Circle’s executive director, Ann Toback, told The Shmooze. “I thought it was a win-win all around.”

The cards are issued by UMB Financial Corporation and marketed by the online company CardPartner, which helps small organizations and not-for-profits create customized credit cards.

What would the labor union-organizing generation that founded the Workmen’s Circle think about this new nod to consumerism? “Times have changed,” Toback said, “and the organization is changing with the times.”

Providence Journal>Books>‘Stealing MySpace’ recounts the battle to control the popular Web site

‘Stealing MySpace’ recounts the battle to control the popular Web site

By Beth Schwartzapfel
April 19, 2009

I thought MySpace was so . . . 2006. Everyone I know has defected for Facebook and left her MySpace profile to molder, un-updated, into obsolescence.

Apparently not. According to the web research firm Hitwise, although Facebook’s numbers are indeed on the rise whereas

MySpace’s are on the wane, MySpace is still the Web’s most popular social networking site, according to several different metrics. In February, more than 70 million people logged onto MySpace to groom their own personal homepages, upload pictures and video, browse through and link to friends’ pages, and post messages.

Which is good news for Julia Angwin, who has written a thorough new book called Stealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in America. Angwin, a Wall Street Journal reporter, has painstakingly detailed every crucial conversation, every rise and fall in stock price, every lavish party and influential blog post in the history of MySpace, from its start as a side project in a shady Los Angeles Internet company to its current place as the crown jewel in Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Interactive Media. The book is an excellent historical record but a somewhat dry read.

Stealing MySpace opens with the meeting in which Murdoch and the chief executive of Intermix Media — then MySpace’s parent company — sealed their gentlemen’s agreement. As was widely reported at the time, Murdoch’s News Corporation spent $580 million to purchase Intermix. (Angwin reports that when stock options and promised salaries are taken into account, the deal was actually worth more like $750 million.)

Intermix, which had only recently disentangled itself from several investigations into its spyware division, and whose most profitable venture was a wrinkle-cream business, was not exactly a prize. But it owned a majority stake in MySpace, and because of a complicated ownership agreement, Intermix could sell itself out from under MySpace’s feet. Which, in July 2005, is exactly what it did.

Still, the high-stakes backroom dealings between News Corp, Intermix, and other companies (like Viacom) that were angling to buy MySpace, make up only 27 pages of the book. Since Stealing MySpace would seem to be about precisely that dealmaking, its remaining 100 pages feel a little aimless; once the deal is done, there is little narrative tension to propel the rest of the story forward. That the story ends 2 1/2 years after News Corp’s acquisition seems arbitrary.

What’s more, the characters are not portrayed as sympathetic, three-dimensional people with real lives, but rather as game pieces in business deals. People are the beating heart of any story — it’s a heady mix of ego, idealism, greed, ambition, and a million other human qualities that make any deal go down (and that make investors buy stock, and that make an entrepreneur found a company, and on and on), and a book provides an author with the space that a newspaper article does not to showcase these complicated motivations. The fact that Angwin doesn’t do so makes the book read less like Barbarians at the Gate than like, well, The Wall Street Journal.

The American Prospect>Inconvenient Contraception

Inconvenient Contraception

For millions of women, getting birth control is a laborious process. Would making the pill an over-the-counter drug be the best policy fix?

By Beth Schwartzapfel
March 17, 2009

Last week, birth control for college students got cheaper. An "affordable birth control" provision in the 2009 appropriations bill, which President Barack Obama signed last Wednesday, restored an incentive for drug makers to offer college health clinics discounts on the pill (the longstanding incentive had been inadvertently eliminated in a 2005 deficit-reduction bill). Still, even when it's cheaper, birth control will continue to be two things: inconvenient and thoroughly tied up with the medical system.

A trip to the doctor. Time off from work. A waiting room. A pap smear. A co-pay (assuming you're insured, of course). A trip to the pharmacy. Another co-pay. Then, finally, your birth control: 28 little pills, packaged in foil and plastic, standing between you and a pregnancy you don't want.

If you are one of the 11.6 million women in this country who relies on the pill to prevent pregnancy, this scenario, or some variation on it, has played out in your life again and again. It may not have to be this way.

"A pap smear is important. The pill is important. There's not really a connection between the two," says San Francisco gynecologist Dan Grossman. "It's a very paternalistic attitude to say, as a physician, we have to hold women's pills hostage -- you can't get your contraception until you get your pap smear."

England's National Health Service recently announced that later this year it will launch a pilot program to allow young women in two London neighborhoods to buy birth control over the counter after a brief consultation with a pharmacist. The London program is modeled after a pilot program that was conducted in Washington state between 2003 and 2005, in which 26 pharmacists throughout Seattle safely provided hormonal contraception -- the pill, patch, or ring -- to almost 200 women without a prescription. A similar study is being planned for California.

Now, a group of doctors, pharmacists, researchers, and advocates have received a grant from the Hewlitt Foundation to fund a working group that studies the feasibility of making oral contraceptives available over the counter: as easy to purchase as aspirin. According to the reproductive-health think tank the Guttmacher Institute, nearly half of women will experience at least one unintended pregnancy by the time they're 45, and almost a third will have had an abortion. Part of the reason for this, those in the working group say, is that the barriers to birth control are simply too high.

"It's harder and harder to access contraception care if you want it, here in the U.S.," says Grossman, who is a senior associate at the nonprofit research organization Ibis Reproductive Health, which coordinates the Working Group. "Non-use of contraception is going up among people who don't want to be pregnant, especially among vulnerable populations, like poor women and women of color." The group's hypothesis is simple: If birth control were easier to access -- fewer medical gatekeepers, less inconvenience, and lower cost -- more women would use it. If more women used it, there would be fewer unintended pregnancies.

Fair enough. But is it safe? What effect would a switch to over-the-counter status have on poor women's access to the medication? And if women were no longer required to get birth control from their doctor, would they still go for their annual exams?

The pill has been exhaustively researched, and most doctors agree that it poses almost no risk of serious side effects for the vast majority of healthy young women. But estrogen (one of two main ingredients in most forms of the pill) can slightly increase risk of heart attack or stroke among older women who smoke and women who have high blood pressure, diabetes, and a handful of other conditions -- so doctors prescribing birth control have long screened for these conditions.

"I think the doctor's got to be a gatekeeper," says Michael Cackovic, an instructor of obstetrics and gynecology at the Yale School of Medicine. The doctor should "not necessarily decide who gets to be on the pill and who doesn't but [should] at least make sure patients understand the risk. I have prescribed [the pill] to patients that are smokers and over 40, but after we've had the conversation."

Grossman instead argues that a clearly worded and easy-to-understand label is enough to let women screen themselves. "If you go through the list of all of the medical conditions that can make pill use dangerous, everything on that list except for [high blood pressure] is information that we get from a woman's history -- from what she tells us," he says. "You don't need a doctor to determine whether you have them." As for blood pressure, "educating women and making that service available," in places like self-screening kiosks in pharmacies, might be a better approach than requiring a doctor's visit as a prerequisite, he says.

"I'm personally convinced that there are not safety issues in taking oral contraceptives over the counter," says Sharon Camp, president and CEO of the Guttmacher Institute and a member of the Working Group. "For most of the people in the reproductive-health field, the issue of safety is probably not the biggest one. It really is, will an over-the-counter product be affordable for women who now get low-cost or reimbursed drugs? That remains to be seen." Camp's concerns stem from an earlier fight for over-the-counter access to emergency contraception, also known as Plan B.

Most insurance plans -- including most state Medicaid programs -- only cover prescription drugs. So when the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) finally approved the Plan B switch in 2006, millions of women suddenly found that the medication was no longer covered. At the same time, without insurance companies to bargain it down, the price of the medication jumped from roughly $27 to as high as $50.

"If we don't address that, but [if] we make the pill available over the counter, we will have made it more accessible to women who already have good access to health care, and less accessible to women who don't," says Amy Allina, program director at the National Women's Health Network and a member of the Working Group.

The Guttmacher Institute recently released a policy brief that said that at least 4.2 million women use visits to publicly funded family-planning clinics as their primary source of medical care. Clinics like Planned Parenthood become what the brief called "safety net providers." What would happen if they disappeared? "You don't want to say that you're requiring women to come in and get pills on prescription as a way of forcing them to get health-care services," Allina says. "But if women aren't coming into the clinics otherwise, and don't get those services, that's not good for them and eventually could lead to the loss of the clinics."

Still, an application to the FDA to make the over-the-counter switch is more of a long-term goal than an immediate plan. Grossman is hoping for 10 years, and part of the goal of the Working Group is to identify all the outstanding questions and answer them with research. Before it would approve a switch, for instance, the FDA would require "labeling comprehension" studies, to make sure the average user would be able to understand the instructions on over-the-counter packaging. They would also perform "actual use studies" to see if women would follow the instructions in the real world. Some of the research is either ongoing or being planned. "One of the lessons that I feel like we learned from the long battles over emergency contraception at the FDA," Allina says, "[is] that, if we ask the kinds of questions that we may think are above and beyond what the FDA should require, but are the questions that people in the community are concerned about -- and we can answer them -- it makes it easier to get past the political opposition."

But the precautions may not even be necessary. The Obama administration's proposed overhaul of the health-care system might make for an entirely new playing field by the time enough research has been conducted to actually move the process forward. Perhaps, in 10 years, poor women will have affordable and accessible access to health care, leaving Working Group members and other reproductive-health advocates to weigh the proposal on its merits alone.

Brown Alumni Magazine>I Will Be Heard!

I Will Be Heard!

For decades Catherine Wolf ’72 AM, ’74 PhD worked as an IBM scientist getting computers to understand better how humans think. Then she was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease. Now she must rely on computers to tell other people what’s inside her own head and heart.

By Beth Schwartzapfel
March 13, 2009

When I first meet Catherine Wolf, she is sitting in the living room of her house at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac in suburban Westchester County, New York. She wears an elegant velour pantsuit with matching brown flats. Nearby are two cats, two dogs and an oversized couch. Pictures of her family are everywhere: framed shots of her with her husband, Joel '73 PhD; their daughters, Erika and Laura; and, most abundantly, pictures of their two-and-a-half-year-old grandson, Ellis. There are at least thirty snapshots of him on the wall, and on a nearby table sits a digital frame with a rotating series of images of his smiling face. Outside the windows, the street is blanketed with snow.

On the day I visit her, Wolf is browsing Facebook, to which she recently became addicted. As a successful psychologist and researcher with decades of experience working at nearby IBM, Wolf has always been quick to pick up on new technologies. In fact, she's had a role in developing a lot of new technologies herself, from automated talking bank tellers to gadgets that convert handwriting to type.

But when Wolf clicks through the internet, she must do so with painstaking slowness. Confined to a wheelchair, she sits as still as a mannequin. Of the hundreds of muscles in her body, she can move only a handful. She breathes with the aid of a ventilator. Yet she types, talks, browses the Web, writes poetry, sends and receives e-mails, conducts research, and peppers the local paper with letters to the editor. She does all this using only her eyebrows.

On a tray attached to Wolf's wheelchair sits a laptop, emitting a soft but steady bong, bong, bong. It is the tether that connects her to the world outside her head. The tones it emits are the sound of the cursor moving through rows of letters on the screen. "Hello," the laptop says, shortly after I walk in, and then, some seconds later, "How are you?"

The voice is Wolf's. She recorded the greetings seven years ago, before she lost the ability to speak. In addition to a few key phrases, she recorded the names of her family members as well as some favorite jokes. (Question: "What's green and hangs from trees?" Answer: "Giraffe snot.") She wishes she had recorded more.

Wolf has curly red hair and expressive eyes framed by tortoiseshell glasses. She can still move her eyes and curl part of her mouth into a surprisingly bright smile. Her home-health aide places a chair for me beside Wolf's wheelchair so I can watch her type. It's unnerving to look over her shoulder this way. The image of a modified keyboard, in yellow, is arrayed in front of her. It has six letters to a row, plus punctuation, arranged like this:

e a r d u v .

t o i l g k ,

n s f y x q '

The cursor highlights one row of letters at a time. When it arrives at the row containing the letter Wolf wants, she raises her eyebrows. Click. The cursor then moves along the letters in that row, highlighting one at a time. When it falls on the letter Wolf wants, she raises her eyebrows again. Click. A T appears in a box at the bottom of the screen. Then Wolf starts again. A black band across her forehead lifts each time she raises her eyebrows, triggering an infrared switch mounted near her head. Bong, bong, bong. Click. Bong, bong, bong. An h appears.

After about a minute, Wolf has typed this is a scanning key... I see where this is going and say, "Ah, I see," but Wolf doggedly finishes that last word, typing b-o-a-r-d. She then waits until the cursor arrives at a particular icon and raises her eyebrows one more time, prompting the computer to read the sentence aloud. This time the voice is not hers but that of the computer: female, soft, and kind, but tinny and inhuman.

One of the great ironies of Cathy Wolf's life is that she built her career on the study of human speech, gesture, and handwriting. Compared to computers, humans are messy, complicated communicators, and Wolf's six patents and more than 100 journal articles and textbook chapters are all aimed at teaching computers to understand us better. But since amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS)—also known as Lou Gehrig's Disease—began claiming her ability to speak, gesture, and write a dozen years ago, she has developed a whole new relationship with language. After leaving IBM on long-term disability in 2004, she began writing poetry. Her poem "Words" was published in the magazine Neurology Now in the fall of 2007. In it, she describes how she types:

Very,

Slow,

Ly,

Moving my head to the rhythm of beeps

Thankful for each tiny movement

Concentrating letter by letter

Squeezing each word out with gargantuan intensity

Like an ancient chiseling words in Aramaic

I will be heard!

The ability to speak is a remarkable thing. That we can move our lips and tongues into certain shapes and force air past our vocal cords in a certain pattern, that this will convey the contents of our heart or make another person laugh, is one of those human mysteries we rarely think about. We all instantly understand hullo, yo, hey, hi, or howdy to mean more or less the same thing, but to a computer these words, like the wave of a hand, are just a mass of disparate data. At IBM it was Cathy Wolf's job to help computers make sense of such things.

At the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Wolf worked as a research psychologist, designing and testing the interfaces between humans and machines. Collaborating with computer programmers, Wolf observed people in their workplaces to determine how a machine might be used in real-world situations. She led focus groups and tested mock-ups and program prototypes on potential users. One of the last projects she worked on at IBM was a technology called the Conversation Machine, which allowed users to do their banking by talking to a computer over the telephone. (User: "What's my checking balance?" Conversation Machine: "Your checking balance is $925.00. What else can I do for you?")

Wolf loved her work. She finds language endlessly fascinating, and it was exciting to be on the cutting edge of new technologies. She "was always a person who defined herself by her work," says her husband, Joel, an IBM mathematician. "I work pretty hard, but when I retire, I'll be ready to say, 'I'm done.' But she's the kind of person who would probably have never retired."

Wolf continued to work long after she became ill. When she could not use her hands anymore, IBM supplied an aide to help with many everyday tasks. To type, while she still had use of her neck, "I wore a reflective dot on my forehead whose position was detected by the head mouse," she says. "I pointed with my head to the letter I wanted and dwelled on the letter I wanted for a specific time to select it. At one point, I used a switch under my foot and showed up at IBM meetings with one shoe on."

It was in 1996 that Wolf first began noticing problems with her left foot and calf. "She went to a lot of foot doctors and then orthopedic doctors and then neurologists," Joel recalls. With every possible diagnosis, Joel recalls, they would think, "'Oh God, I hope it's not that.'" Then, "'Oh God, I hope it is that, because if it's not that, it's that.' And then when you get to the end of that string, the worst thing you could possibly have is what she had. She went from being a runner to being barely able to walk within a few years."

ALS is a neurological disease that attacks the motor neurons, the cells that the brain uses to communicate with the body's voluntary muscles. Over the course of three to five years, people with ALS progressively lose the ability to move their fingers and toes, their arms and legs. Then they lose the ability to speak, to turn their head, and to swallow food. When the diaphragm and chest muscles give out, they can no longer breathe. They die.

Although it was identified more than 100 years ago, scientists still don't know what causes ALS. There is no effective treatment and no cure. The only thing that can prolong life is a ventilator, which allows patients to continue breathing. But it does not slow the progression of the disease. To prolong life for too long raises the specter of becoming "locked in," of losing the use of every last muscle until patients are trapped inside their own bodies, fully conscious but unable to communicate, unable to blink yes or no, unable to signal when something is wrong, unable to say, Enough. I'm done.

Wolf is among a tiny minority of patients in this country—about 5 percent—who choose to have the surgery to connect them to a ventilator. The emotional and financial cost, to the patients and their families, is too high for most.

"My wife has a will to live that probably exceeds 99 percent of the rest of the world," Joel says. "Her will to live is more than just the desire to be alive; it's a desire to live a full life. As Cathy herself puts it, "as normal a life as possible despite ALS."

Which is why, after finally leaving IBM, Wolf realized that "something meaningful had to replace work." She became involved with PatientsLikeMe, an online community that provides a forum for people with ALS and other illnesses to share information about their experiences and to keep up with the latest medical developments. PatientsLikeMe offers users the opportunity to assess their condition by taking the ALS functional rating scale, or ALSFRS, at regular intervals. Wolf decided to answer the ALSFRS questionnaire:

Compared to the time before you had symptoms of ALS ... have you noticed any changes in your speech? She could no longer speak. Zero points.

Have there been any changes in your ability to swallow? She hadn't swallowed in years. Zero points. (When saliva pools in her throat, she types cmx with her scanning keyboard. The computer says "coughing machine," and one of her health aides suctions out her mouth and throat.)

And on and on. Cannot walk or move my legs. Zero. She couldn't turn herself over in bed or adjust the blankets without help. Helpless in bed. Zero. She couldn't breathe without a ventilator. Zero.

"I was offended," Wolf explains. "I felt it didn't reflect my abilities."

As a research scientist, Wolf's reaction to her rating was to question the methodology. The instrument, she reasoned, was too crude to provide much insight into a patient's true condition. "There's something in psychological testing called the 'floor effect,' when the sensitivity of the measure isn't low enough at its lowest levels," says neuropsychologist Paul Wicks, the research and development director of PatientsLikeMe. "She was trained as a psychologist, so she asked, 'Can we fix this?'"

She and Wicks teamed up to develop what they call the ALSFRS-EX, an extended version of the rating scale that accounts for the changes that people with ALS experience long after they hit the floor of the standard scale. "Accurate ways to measure ALS are important research tools to help slow the disease," Wicks says. "In traditional clinical trials, which is what the scale was originally designed for, you tended not to recruit people who were very, very sick. Unfortunately that means that people like Cathy, who has lived with ALS for twelve years— who are really the most interesting—are not eligible for the trials" because of their low rating.

Wolf and Wicks recruited more than 200 PALS users to help them devise ten new questions for judging abilities that the earlier scale ignored: computer usage, finger and toe movement, and mobility. On the original scale, for instance, if you require a wheelchair, your score on the walking measure is zero. "For my money there's a big difference between being in a wheelchair you can control yourself and a wheelchair where you have to be pushed around," Wicks says. "And there's a big difference between that and being so weak that you have to be in bed all day."

After analyzing the statistical sensitivity of the ten questions, they settled on three new scale items that focused on the use of fingers, the capacity to show facial emotion, and the ability to get around inside the house. Wolf, Wicks, and a third researcher then coauthored a scientific paper to introduce their new scale. It was published in the March issue of the European Journal of Neurology. "I am most proud of that paper of all my publications," Cathy says.

Wolf's interest in language dates back to her undergraduate days at Tufts, where she read a book by Noam Chomsky proposing that humans are hard-wired for language. "I thought that having an innate capacity for something as complex as language was remarkable," Wolf says. "After all, language distinguishes us from other animals."

Her interest coincided with an early interest in computers, long before they became a ubiquitous part of everyday life. In 1967 she met Joel, then an MIT mathematics student, via one of the two computer services (they squabble over which) that were the precursor to internet dating. "She was very pretty, very intelligent," Joel says. "She had a great sense of humor. She was a very good dancer. I'm a very un-great dancer, but I liked to watch her dance." The couple married in 1968, and both began working toward their PhDs at Brown shortly after, he in mathematics, she in psychology.

Cathy Wolf's interest in language led her to Peter Eimas, the Fred M. Seed Professor Emeritus of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences, whose pioneering research demonstrated that infants have a far more sophisticated understanding of language than was previously thought. (Eimas died in 2005.) Wolf's research extended Eimas's findings by comparing the way children of different ages perceive particular linguistic nuances.

Wolf's daughter Laura says her parents remember graduate school as a time of hectic contentment. "Sometimes," she says, "they would share a gallon of ice cream for dinner because they were too busy to cook."

Later, cooking became a favorite family activity—Laura still makes the Thanksgiving apple pie each year under her mom's watchful eye—but Wolf never appreciated it as much as she does now, when she can eat only through a feeding tube. She still remembers in vivid detail her last meal, which she ate in 2001 and described in a poem titled "Last Supper":

chocolate mousse

the essence of chocolate

fresh fruit salad

with sweet blueberries, tangy raspberries

and mellow cantaloupe

pumpernickel roll with raisins

and sourdough French bread

baby asparagus sautéed al dente

mashed potatoes spiked with piquant garlic

poached fillet of salmon served with creamy dill sauce

my last supper

food!

aromatic!

textured, tasty on the tongue!

now bypasses my mouth and nose

a bland substance for survival

In "First Snow," a poem she wrote in 2006, she recalled Sneaking cafeteria trays out under bulky parkas/To slide down College Hill/The trays navigating by the avocado moon. In the same poem, she fast-forwards many years, to Rolling soggy snow with husband and daughters to build a teetering snowman/The tallest on the block.

The outdoors was another Wolf family passion. Cathy and Joel often took their daughters into the mountains and to the sea. "We have a lot of good adventure stories," says Laura, now twenty-eight. "Like getting caught in our tent during a lightning storm, and the dog capsizing our sailboat." Cathy also loved to run; on her fortieth birthday, she took first place in a 10K race, her first. Her daughter Erika, who is now thirty-two, went on to become a professional ballet dancer. She still remembers practicing waltz steps down the hallway with her mother.

Here is a day in Cathy Wolf's life, in her own typewritten words: "I get up at ten thirty. At the computer usually by one thirty. Read email, check PatientsLikeMe, work on various projects until nine or ten, watch PBS News Hour and Daily Show, go to bed at midnight." Her aides lift her from her wheelchair with a mesh-and-metal pulley and settle her in a hospital bed in what used to be the family room. (I sleep alone now/Not by choice but by disease.) She has to sleep with her bed at a forty-five-degree angle to keep from choking. A nurse must watch her closely all night; if Wolf wakes up and needs something, the only way the nurse will know is to see her eyes moving.

Wolf's family says she is angrier than she often lets on. And sadder. How could she not be? "There have been times in her life when things have been low," Erika says, "but there's always been something big coming up to live for: somebody's graduation, the birth of my son.

"Now it's all about my son."

Erika doesn't know exactly what her son, Ellis, understands about what's wrong with his grandmother, but he loves to sit on her lap. He is exceedingly gentle with her tubes and machines. He calls her "grandcat." His favorite pants are the ones she picked out for him. He calls them his "grandcat pants."

One day Erika visited her mother with her son. Outside, the sky was overcast. The familiar bong, bong, bong of the laptop was the sound track to the conversation between Erika and her mom.

"It's grey outside," she painstakingly typed, "but Ellis is the sun."

Brown Alumni Magazine>Arts & Culture>Doing It the Hard (Right) Way

Doing It the Hard (Right) Way

By Beth Schwartzapfel
March 13, 2009

Jeff Prystowsky '06 started his music career riffling through Providence dumpsters for cereal boxes. He and Ben Knox Miller '06 would cut and fold the cardboard into CD covers and then silkscreen them. The art fit the rustic, handmade ethos of their band, the Low Anthem. "People would write us e-mails—'I ordered your record today, and I got Apple Jax! That's my favorite cereal! How'd you know?'" Miller recalls with a laugh. "We did everything the hardest possible way, but it was an aesthetic choice."

Those choices are paying off. Without shedding its homespun aesthetic, the Providence-based band is building a sizeable audience; it won the Boston Music Award for Best New Act in December, and NPR broadcast Low Anthem's "To Ohio" as its Song of the Day in early January. In February, Rolling Stone featured the band in their "Breaking Artist" column, which introduces musicians on the rise.

Band members Miller, Prystowsky, and Jocie Adams '08 met in Brown's music department, where they studied composition under Professor of Music Gerald "Shep" Shapiro. Before Adams joined the band, Miller and Prystowsky put out Low Anthem's first full-length CD, the 2007 What the Crow Brings. It revived themes as old as American roots music itself and gave them a modern story: "Sawdust Saloon" is about a soldier leaving not for the Civil War, but for Vietnam. The eleven intimate tracks sound as if they might have been recorded on the creaking porch of that sawdust saloon, or at the senior prom in a dying coal town. Miller practically whispers the lyrics, making even rock songs sound like lullabies. You can hear Prystowsky's fingertips walk the neck of his upright bass. The CD was voted Best Album in the Providence Phoenix's 2008 Music Poll, which gave it a leg up in the Boston polls.

Adams joined Low Anthem in late 2007, and in September 2008 the trio released Oh My God, Charlie Darwin, which has the same authenticity and heart as Crow, but a wider musical range. Gospel influences are apparent, and an occasional Tom Waits–like growl complements plaintive folk tunes. Miller sees Charlie Darwin as a more interrelated collection than What the Crow Brings. "We think of it like a book. All the songs are leaning on each other," he says. Vin Scelsa of the influential New York City folk radio station WFUV listed Charlie Darwin as one of his dozen favorite albums of 2008 (alongside works by Bob Dylan and Brian Wilson).

Miller, Prystowsky, and Adams play guitar, bass, and clarinet, respectively, but on Charlie Darwin each plays at least half a dozen instruments, including such obscure, old-timey ones as the pump organ and the rack harp. Miller usually brings to the band a musical idea, or a sketch of some lyrics."Always the songs come as just this little skeleton," he says, "and then they become what they are when these guys get involved."

So far, the band members have continued to do almost everything themselves, from booking shows to recording, producing, and promoting their albums. They recently hired a manager, Kate Landau '08, but Prystowsky still goes to the post office each morning to mail out the CDs people have ordered from the band's website. The covers are still hand-silk-screened—each copy of Charlie Darwin is part of a numbered series—only now they're done by an independent printing outfit, and, no, they're no longer made from cereal boxes.

The success of Charlie Darwin has drawn the interest of record companies, and the band's next album, which they're working on now, may be the first one that they don't release themselves. "It would have to be a record company that basically acknowledges the success that we've been able to achieve on our own," says Miller. "What are they going to say? 'We'll get you such and such.' Well, we already got that. It's a good position to be in."

New York Times>Green Inc>Greening the Prison-Industrial Complex

Greening the Prison-Industrial Complex

By Beth Schwartzapfel
March 3, 2009

Instead of reporting to the laundry or the kitchen or the boiler room, a Washington state prison inmate, Robert Knowles, reports to the compost heap. Mr. Knowles is taking part in a “green work” program at the Cedar Creek Corrections Center. Inmates grow organic produce, compost the prison’s food waste, take part in ecological research projects with a nearby university, and even produce honey from the prison’s own hives.

The Washington State Department of Corrections boasts 34 LEED-certified facilities, with 923,789 square feet of LEED-certified space added in fiscal year 2008 alone.

Washington is not alone. It seems several states are busy rethinking the old concrete-box approach to the nation’s prisons — home to more than two million Americans — and high on the agenda are energy efficiency and other “green” upgrades.

This fall, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation announced 16 new green retrofitting projects, which they estimate will save $3 million in energy costs each year. The state already has solar power fields at two facilities, and plans to build six more in the coming year. A new $176 million juvenile detention facility in Alameda County — home to Berkeley and Oakland — recently became the country’s first jail to receive LEED gold certification.

Other green projects — from wind turbines to biomass boilers — have been announced by Departments of Corrections in Virginia, Nevada, and Indiana.

Mike Callahan, the physical plant director at the Putnamville Correctional Facility in Indiana, says the facility’s biomass boiler alone, which burns scrap wood from the prison’s pallet industry, has saved $6,300 a day in gas bills.

And the opening, in 2005, of Federal Correctional Institute No. 3, in Butner, N.C., marked the first LEED-certified federal prison. Scott Higgins, chief of design and construction at the Federal Bureau of Prisons, said that all new projects — including new federal prisons in the works in Alabama, Mississippi, and West Virginia — will be LEED certified, “unless some really weird things show
up.”

Ken Ricci, of Ricci Greene Associates, is currently working on a new $120 million detention center in downtown Denver, which the company plans to submit for LEED certification.

“There’s a recognition that sustainable, or ‘green’ design, is actually a plus for a population that’s confined 24 hours a day,” Mr. Ricci said. “Environment cues behavior. If you treat people like animals, they behave like animals.”

Mr. Ricci, who heads a sustainability committee as part of the American Institute of Architects’ Justice Architecture group, says design elements that earn LEED points, like daylighting and access to views, also improve security. “If you treat them like human beings — that is to say, there’s daylight coming in, the noise level is at a normative level — therefore your adrenaline level goes down, therefore your stress level goes down, the inmates feel safer.”

Still, not everyone thinks the new trend in prison design goes far enough.

Raphael Sperry, a San Francisco-based architect and green design consultant, is heading up a Prison Design Boycott Campaign at Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility. “Sure, saving 50 percent on energy when you’re locking people up is a savings,” he says. “But not locking them up at all would be a larger savings — and would also address social justice concerns.”

Ms.>National Reports>Lullabies Behind Bars

Lullabies Behind Bars

In a few innovative prisons, babies find a safe haven with their moms.

By Beth Schwartzapfel
Fall 2008

Reprinted in Utne Reader, March/April 2009

It's midday on a recent Tuesday, and Rachael Irwin, 27, scurries across the floor on her hands and knees, playing peekaboo with her 10-month-old daughter, Gabriella. The baby’s big blue eyes dance with delight. Like many children her age, Gabriella is in day care. Unlike most children her age, though, Gabriella is in prison. She and her mother are participating in the Bedford Hills (N.Y.) Correctional Facility’s nursery program, one of only nine programs in the country that allow incarcerated women to keep their babies with them after they give birth.

Nationwide, nearly 2 million children have parents in prison. The number of those with incarcerated mothers, in particular, is growing exponentially: A recent report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics found that the number of minors with mothers in prison increased by more than 100 percent in the last 15 years.

“These children are sort of victims by default,” says Paige Ransford, research assistant at the Center for Women in Politics and Public Policy at the University of Massachusetts (UMass) Boston, and coauthor of the recent report “Parenting from Prison.” Most of the children go live with grandparents or other relatives; one in 10 is placed in foster care. About half are separated from their siblings. These children are prone to a whole host of social developmental difficulties, and are more likely than their peers to be in trouble with the law later in life.

In the case of women who enter the system as mothers-to-be, the usual excitement of pregnancy is replaced with a sense of dread. The choices that, on the outside, are understood to be a woman’s right—such as where and how to give birth, and whether or not to breastfeed—are transferred from the woman to bureaucrats and officers at the state Department of Corrections (DOC).

Of the 115,308 women incarcerated in the U.S. as of 2007, some 4,000 women—4 percent of women in state custody and 3 percent in federal— were pregnant when they entered prison. In the vast majority of cases, babies are removed from their mothers immediately after birth and placed with relatives or in foster care. However, a small but growing number of states are recognizing that the mother-child bond formed in the first few months of life is crucial to the child’s development, and that the bond need not be broken.

“We’re definitely seeing more states grapple with what it means to send women to prison, some of whom are pregnant,” says Sarah From, director of public policy and communications for the Women’s Prison Association (WPA) and coauthor of the agency’s forthcoming report on prison nurseries. Eight states now have some sort of program to house female offenders together with their newborns, the newest being Indiana. The West Virginia legislature recently passed a bill establishing a program in its correctional facility for women, which is slated to open in 2009.

These programs vary widely in the length of time babies are allowed to stay with their incarcerated mothers and in the services provided while they’re in prison with them. South Dakota’s program allows babies to stay for just 30 days—with the mother in her regular cell—while Washington state allows children to stay for up to three years with their mothers in a separate wing of the prison. The Washington facility offers a federal Early Head Start program for prenatal health and infant-toddler development, and partners with the nonprofit Prison Doula Project to provide doula services to the women during and after pregnancies.

Originally started way back in 1901 when the prison was a state reformatory, the Bedford Hills Program is the oldest and largest in the country, with its own nursery wing and space for up to 29 mother-baby pairs. Women live with their babies in bright rooms stuffed with donated toys and clothes. During the day, while the women attend DOC-mandated drug counseling, anger management, vocational training and parenting classes, their children attend a day care staffed by inmates who have graduated from an intensive two-year Early Childhood Associate vocational training program.

Although the idea of babies living the first months of their lives behind bars is sad to contemplate, many experts say that the alternative—separating them from their mothers—is far worse. “If a woman is serving a short sentence and can look forward to a life with her child…so much research addresses the importance of that early bonding relationship,” says Sylvia Mignon, associate professor and director of the graduate program in human services at UMass Boston and coauthor, with Ransford, of the “Parenting from Prison” report. “The reality is, an infant does not know that she is in prison. All she knows is that she’s getting the warmth and love and attention of this wonderful being called mom.” Among women serving sentences of more than a decade, however, there is no clear consensus on what’s best for the child; the Bedford Hills program generally only accepts women serving sentences of five years or less. “We don’t want to create a bond that’s guaranteed to be broken,” says the children’s center program director, Bobby Blanchard.

Unlike in the general prison population, doors in the program are never locked; inmates must be able to come and go freely in order to warm bottles, do laundry and comfort crying children out of the earshot of other sleeping babies. Rooms are decorated with photographs and handmade posters that say things like, “Loving yourself is something to be proud of!” Danielizz Negron, 23, rocks her 4-month-old son, Jeremiah, while he naps in a stroller. She was six months pregnant when, after a year of fighting burglary charges, she accepted a plea deal and turned herself in. “If I had not known about this program, I would not have came in. I would’ve been in Mexico somewhere by now,” she says, only half-joking.

As the number of prison nurseries continues to grow, some caution against becoming overly sanguine. Prison nurseries are wonderful programs, says the WPA’s Sarah From, however “we shouldn’t be looking to build more prison nurseries, but rather work in the community to put less women in prison.”

The Nation>Your Valentine, Made in Prison

Your Valentine, Made in Prison

By Beth Schwartzapfel
February 12, 2009

With Valentine's Day approaching, perhaps you're planning a trip to Victoria's Secret. If you're a conscientious shopper, chances are you want to know about the origins of the clothes you buy: whether they're sweatshop free or fairly traded or made in the USA. One label you won't find attached to your lingerie, however, is "Made in the USA: By Prisoners."

In addition to the South Carolina inmates who were hired by a subcontractor in the 1990s to stitch Victoria's Secret lingerie, prisoners in the past two decades have packaged or assembled everything from Starbucks coffee beans to Shelby Cobra sports cars, Nintendo Game Boys, Microsoft mouses and Eddie Bauer clothing. Inmates manning phone banks have taken airline reservations and even made calls on behalf of political candidates.

Still, it's notoriously difficult to find out what, exactly, prisoners are making and for whom. Most of the time, inmates are hired by subcontractors who have been hired by larger corporations, which are skittish about being associated with prison labor. Paul Wright, an expert on prison labor with sources inside many prisons, has broken many labor stories in his newspaper, Prison Legal News. It hasn't been easy. "As a general rule, you'll have an easier time finding out who Kim Jong Il's latest mistress is than finding out who these guys are working for," he says. (Starbucks, Nintendo, Eddie Bauer and Victoria's Secret did not return requests for comment; Microsoft declined to comment.)

Advocates of prison labor programs describe the arrangement as win-win: inmates keep busy and stay out of trouble, and employers get low-cost labor with little or no overhead. But critics, from labor unions to prisoner rights advocates, raise a host of concerns about exploitation and unfair business competition.

In 1979 Congress created the Prison Industry Enhancement Certification Program (PIE), which provides private-sector companies with incentives to set up shops in prisons using inmates as employees. States offer free or reduced rent and utilities in exchange for the decreased productivity that comes with bringing materials and supplies in and out of a secured facility and hiring employees who must stop working throughout the day to be counted and who are sometimes unavailable because of facility-wide lockdowns.

Prisoners are often grateful for the work; when the system is working, they can learn marketable job skills and save money. "It provided a sense of independence," says Kelly DePetris, who worked for eight years in California state prisons at Joint Venture Electronics, doing everything from assembly to administrative jobs to materials control.

"You don't have to ask people for things," she says. "I have a son, so it was nice to send home money to help with little things--school clothes, things like that." As a Joint Venture employee, DePetris made about $1.74 per hour after deductions, compared with the thirty cents she estimates she might have made working in the prison laundry. When she was released last May after serving fourteen years, she had saved $16,000, with which she bought a used car, clothes and health insurance. "It's really come in handy," she says.

Relatively speaking, PIE accounts for a tiny fraction of the number of inmates in US prisons and jails. Some 5,300 of the 2.3 million inmates nationwide work for private-sector companies. "It's a small piece, but it's a significant piece" of the overall prison labor system, says Alex Friedmann, who served ten years in a Tennessee prison in the 1990s and worked making Taco Bell T-shirts in a PIE silk-screening shop.

PIE rules stipulate that work must be voluntary, that workers be paid a wage comparable to what free-world employees doing similar work are paid and that the program not compete unfairly with companies on the outside. But labor unions and companies on the outside have argued that this is impossible: there is no way for a company that pays no rent to compete fairly.

Talon Industries was a Washington State-based water-jet company whose competitor, MicroJet, had a PIE shop inside a state prison. Rick Trelstad, a partner at Talon, contended that his company shut down in 1999 at least in part because MicroJet consistently underbid him for work. (He and an association of his colleagues successfully sued the Washington State Department of Corrections to shut down the local PIE program, but voters reinstituted it last year.) Lufkin Industries, a Texas-based maker of tractor-trailer beds, claims it was run out of business because its competitor, Direct Trailer & Equipment Company, paid only one dollar per year for factory space in the local prison and so was able to offer much lower prices for the same product.

David Lewis, vice president and general manager of Joint Venture Electronics and Kelly DePetris's former boss, acknowledges that the setup has been great for his business. "They get no holiday pay. They get no vacation pay. There's no medical, dental: all that's paid for by the state," he says. What's more, if the company has to downsize, as it did recently, laid-off prison workers have few other places to look for work. When business picks up again, employees who on the outside would have found other jobs are still in prison, just waiting to be rehired. The waiting list for work at Joint Venture is up to 200 people long.

Advocates for prisoners' rights take issue with what they see as an inherently exploitative situation. Courts have consistently found that prisoners are not protected by the Fair Labor Standards Act. So they may not unionize. They can't agitate for better wages or working conditions, because any threats to walk off the job would ring hollow--where would they go?

What's more, by law, as much as 80 percent of PIE employees' paychecks is deducted for room and board, taxes, family support, victims' compensation or charity. The National Correctional Industries Association, the nonprofit organization that certifies PIE programs, found that participants kept only about 20 percent of their wages in the past two quarters. Friedmann, for instance, worked for two years in the late 1990s in the silk-screening shop. He estimates that after deductions for fines, fees and other charges, he left prison with $30. "So while businesses get rent-free space, prisoners are paying for their 'room and board,'" says Prison Legal News's Paul Wright, who himself served seventeen years in a Washington prison. "Prisoners pay their boss's rent."

So this Valentine's Day, if your shopper's conscience leads you to check labels, don't bother looking for "Made in Prison." Of all the hundreds of goods and services produced by prisoners with taxpayer subsidies, only one is labeled as such: a line of jeans and denim work shirts made at the Eastern Oregon Correctional Institution. It's called Prison Blues.

New York Times>The City>Composing Songs for the One That Got Away

Composing Songs for the One That Got Away

By Beth Schwartzapfel
February 1, 2009

SOMETIMES the songs are plaintive. Other times they are fuzzy and electric. One song is described as a “carnivalesque rock song.”

In all, there are 16 tracks and counting. And when Patrick Shea, a 31-year-old singer-songwriter from Ditmas Park, Brooklyn, lays them down, he is thinking about one thing: “Moby-Dick.”

This is Callmeishmael.org, a blog that Mr. Shea began in October. His goal was to write one song for each of the 136 chapters in “Moby-Dick,” Herman Melville’s sprawling 1851 classic, which tells the story of the ship captain Ahab and his haunted hunt for an elusive white whale.

Combining literary analysis with eclectic musical taste and a dark, clear baritone, Mr. Shea posts a new song each week.

Among the fans of Mr. Shea’s creations are Meg Guroff, the editor and publisher of the annotation Web site Powermobydick .com.

“I think it is a completely awesome thing to do,” Ms. Guroff said, “and I really like his music. People have written music about ‘Moby-Dick’ before, but I haven’t heard of anyone writing one song per chapter. It just seems like a very apt and obsessive response to this book about obsession.”

Another possible fan might be President Obama, who lists “Moby-Dick” as one of his favorite books on his Facebook page.

The song about Chapter 112, titled “The Blacksmith,” features an eerily echoing electronic heartbeat; the accompanying commentary is a 500-word reflection on labor, communal life, death and rebirth.

“As industry collapses, the very fabric of domesticity crumbles,” Mr. Shea writes. “Workshops and factories are the basement foundation of family life; the labor within its heartbeat.”

By contrast, the song about Chapter 2, “The Carpet-Bag,” is a sweet acoustic pop number with a catchy hook and the recurring lyric “I’ve never had the money you got/ To be on the inside,/ To find me a home.”

Mr. Shea, a sixth-grade teacher and the frontman for the Brooklyn-based duo the New Fantastics, said he came up with the idea for the blog over the summer. He had set two goals for himself over the break — to read “Moby-Dick” and to write a new song every day — and as time passed, he said, “the tasks slowly merged.”

Though he began with Chapter 1, he has otherwise chosen chapters at random. Melville in many ways was “the first postmodernist,” Mr. Shea wrote in his first post, “so I think he’d approve.”

The author might also have approved of a New Yorker seeking to keep his most famous work alive. Melville was born in the city and he died here, and worked for a time as a customs inspector on the New York docks.

More than 150 years on, during stormy economic times, Ishmael’s advice in Chapter 23, “The Lee Shore,” still resonates. Stay close to shore only during good weather, he warns; a ship near the shore during a storm will be dashed on the rocks. Mr. Shea writes: “Distilled to a pop song, I think this is all a way of saying enjoy the fair weather but let it go when you need to. How better to enjoy good times than to dance? How better to dance than to dance ‘The Lee Shore’?”