BRIEF THOUGHTS ON SELF-EFFACEMENT
by Rhian Sasseen on May 10, 2012
Lately I have been thinking of what a priest once told a distraught Anne Sexton: “God is in your typewriter.” I think of this whenever I sit down at my computer with the intention to write.
I reread Kafka’s “The Hunger Artist,” a story, most literally, of starvation. And something more, though – the body dwindling into nothing, all in the pursuit of one specific perfection, a mastery of art. In the moment of perfection, all identity ceases. The artist is erased, and what is left? – The work itself.
I would like to be a book. Read the rest of this entry »
I WILL NOT VOTE FOR OBAMA AGAIN
by Rhian Sasseen on May 2, 2012
Of course I remember Election Night 2008 – I was eighteen and it was my first, and my entire house was crowded into our Smith College living room, not a Republican among us. We waited, tense, worried that our efforts – all the campaigning, all the sloganeering – would come to naught. We who had come of age during the Bush years: what we wanted, and what we had been promised, was “change.”
When it happened – when Obama’s victory was announced – our house president, an otherwise sedate former deb from Texas, leapt onto the couch, jumping up and down in excitement. Outside I could hear screams and whoops and car alarms; at one point, my phone buzzed. “Girls are streaking across Chapin Lawn,” a friend had texted, and in that moment I half-felt like stripping down myself. We had done it! The young had voted in droves, in numbers not seen in years; the mood was ecstatic. And so we waited for neo-Camelot to descend.
I won’t deny that there was a naivety to all of this, an extreme optimism fueling our votes. But optimism is what accomplishes change; perhaps we gave ours too freely. I am twenty-one now, and about to leave Smith College; in six months time it will be my second national election. I will not be voting for Obama again.
THE INSTA-NOSTALGIA OF INSTAGRAM
by Rhian Sasseen on April 15, 2012
On the screen the image appears in faded reds and worn-out yellows, creased and crinkled like an old Polaroid found in a parent’s long-forgotten photo album. Oversaturated, a little fuzzy – the chance of film, you might think. But this is not an image scanned and flattened for the computer; it is Instagram, and this photo has always and only ever existed digitally. The supposed imperfections – the colors, the cracks – are the result of an iPhone app specially made to swath the photos of the digital age in a haze of carefully calibrated nostalgia. A simulacrum of the past, and Facebook just bought it for a billion dollars.
MEMORIES OF GROWING UP CATHOLIC (FOR EASTER)
by Rhian Sasseen on April 8, 2012
1. Ash Wednesday, and after Mass all the schoolgirls crowd into the bathroom, to examine the marks on our foreheads. “You’ve got more than me,” one of the older girls complains to her friend, and she jostles back; I am watching this exchange from the corner, where I am thinking of the ashes on my own forehead. Remember that thou art dust, and to dust thou shalt return. I am nine and to me the older girls seem incomparably mature; they are thirteen.
I LOVE BETTY DRAPER
by Rhian Sasseen on March 28, 2012
“The worst mother on television.” “Such a whiner.” “Boring.” “Crazy.” “What a terrible mother.” “Ugh, Betty.”
Is it safe to say that Betty Draper is one of the most hated characters on television? The above comments, culled from various message boards and real-life conversations, indicate so. She is petulant, childish, and emotionally immature. She does not lavish attention or praise upon her children; often, it seems as though she doesn’t really care for them at all. Throughout the series, she has beautiful houses, beautiful clothes, beautiful things; she is lucky, she is frustrated. Sometimes her hands shake uncontrollably.
And fifty years ago, that could have been me.
FOUND BOYS
by Rhian Sasseen on March 16, 2012
We are still only beginning to enter a new era. The last decade still functions as a sort of hangover, gloomy, of things past: 2012 is only now starting to define itself in such a way that today, when I watch television shows and movies from the late 90s and early 2000s, I am suddenly struck by how out-of-date all of the characters look and act.
Netflix’s Instant Watch feature is a boon to all college students, myself included. It is senior year and I now actively avoid most parties. One night of my weekend is granted to friends, but the other remains sacred, a time for me to pour a glass of wine and lounge freely in my room, totally alone save for my Netflix subscription. Last night was one of those nights, and I ended up spending a few hours watching the British cult comedy Spaced. Yes, it was quite enjoyable – but my God is turn-of-the-millennium man-boyhood beginning to look old-fashioned.
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LADY COLLEGE: A MANIFESTO
by Rhian Sasseen on March 7, 2012
By now the Barnard-Columbia clash concerning Obama’s commencement speech has veered from the annoyingly competitive to the downright vile. I won’t type out the horrifyingly misogynistic comments here, but as another soon-to-be-graduate at a fellow Seven Sisters college, all I can say is that displays like this consistently reaffirm my decision to attend a women’s college.
I took early to feminism: at twelve I read The Bell Jar; at thirteen, The Feminine Mystique. My teenage years were spent idly driving through my West Coast suburban town blasting Bikini Kill, Sleater-Kinney, and Le Tigre while attempting to sneer at any soccer mom that crossed paths with me. I doubt that anyone in my graduating class was surprised when I applied early decision to Smith; I read my acceptance letter in our high school’s English department office and, as I vaguely recall now, screamed, “I’m going to the same college as Gloria Steinem!” But before I hit “send” on the Common App – even after, even upon my arrival – I will admit that I doubted.
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“MAKE IT NEW”
by Rhian Sasseen on March 2, 2012
All of the hype about Simon Reynolds’ Retromania a few months back annoyed me, admittedly because it seemed to me to be yet another case of an older generation commenting on and disapproving of the young. Last night, though, I found myself scrolling through the Guardian‘s “New Band of the Day” feature and was somewhat horrified by No. 1,213, J.D. McPherson. Reynolds might have been on to something.
There is an element of fetish to all art, I’d argue – it is the mythic and the iconic that feeds our interest and need for it – but McPherson’s retroactive glorification of 1950s rock’n'roll borders on the stultifying. According to the Guardian, everything on his record was “was played on guitars, piano, upright bass and saxophones and recorded using analogue equipment, including vintage microphones and a 1960s Berlant tape machine,” and one can hear it on the track given, entitled “North Side Gal.” This song stands testament to a complete lack of creativity on the part of its creators; it apes the musical conventions and language of the era it so desperately attempts to glorify that by the song’s end I felt as though I had heard the aural equivalent of a zombie.
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THE AGE OF THE MOLE
by Rhian Sasseen on February 21, 2012
Perhaps if my mother had been a better Catholic she would have kept me on track towards Confirmation, ignoring my tear-strewn face and heated opinions concerning the morality of abortion after she picked me up one day; as it were, she wasn’t and isn’t. Instead, she listened to my pleas and pulled me out of class, granting me a laptop for my thirteenth birthday that led to a very different kind of transcendence: the music of Shiina Ringo.
RE-TWEETING THE PRESIDENT
by Rhian Sasseen on February 9, 2012
A slightly different version appears in The Sophian.
“After all,” a friend says during a class discussion, “These days, it’s like…if it’s not on Facebook, did it really happen?” No to trees, empty woods and other philosophical clichés: these days, the public mirror of the Internet provides enough existential fodder for anyone preoccupied with the question of their own existence.