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June 1, 2009

Help wanted

Laurence Shatkin, AM’71It’s June, and a brand-new group of Chicago graduates is jumping into the job market with ABs and résumés in hand. Career adviser Laurence Shatkin, AM’71, author of The 200 Best Jobs for College Graduates and Great Jobs in the President’s Stimulus Plan, discusses job prospects for the Class of 2009:


QandA_QDrop.jpgBefore the financial crisis, what were the best jobs out there for new graduates? Have things changed?

QandA_ADrop.jpgNursing is a very hot field—it was before the economic downturn and it still is now. A lot of high-tech jobs have been booming, and although they took a bit of a hit just like everything in the economy, they’re starting to come back. Systems analysts, computer-network and database managers—those high-tech jobs have been doing very well.

QandA_QDrop.jpgFor a typical Chicago grad with a bachelor’s degree, what are some opportunities?

QandA_ADrop.jpgSocial and community service managers—these are people who manage agencies that have a social mission. This might be something that someone with a humanities or social-science background might go into. Public relations specialists—people with a flair for writing would find this interesting and valuable. Substance-abuse and behavioral-disorder counselors is an interesting one—people who have empathy and are good at communicating with others. Actually, a lot of people go into this who have a past history of substance abuse, but I wouldn’t recommend that someone develop an addiction in order to prepare for it [laughs]. In business, jobs for accountants, auditors, and loan officers are expected to come back once the economy comes back.

QandA_QDrop.jpgWhat sources do you use to predict future job growth?

QandA_ADrop.jpgThe best projections we’ve got in this country are from the U.S. Department of Labor. They have an Office of Employment Projections, and that’s what I rely on for these projections of job growth and job openings.

QandA_QDrop.jpgHow will the recession force new graduates to adjust their expectations?

QandA_ADrop.jpgThere are fewer openings, and so the competition is going to be greater. There’s even going to be some competition from people in their 60s who normally would be retiring now, whose 401(k)s have taken a real plunge and so they have to go on working longer. Roughly 50 percent of graduates got jobs in their field last year, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers. This year it was down to half of that, so it’s a big difference.

QandA_QDrop.jpgWill salaries be lower?

QandA_ADrop.jpgI don’t think salaries will be dramatically lower, but they may be a little bit lower because employers have their pick of candidates. The main problem is going to be finding a job, and a lot of people are going to have to compromise and take something outside of their field. Some may start up a new business—throughout American history, this has been one of the ways innovation happens. Some people will go to graduate school and build up skills and stay out of the job market for awhile. Yet another thing is to go into some service opportunity such as the Peace Corps, Teach for America, or AmeriCorps, which have expanded quite a bit. I can’t overemphasize how valuable those are for building experience that employers are going to value.

QandA_QDrop.jpgYou have a BA, MA, and PhD in English. Do you have any special advice for English majors?

QandA_ADrop.jpgI would say keep your options open. Don’t think that you have to do what you see your professors doing out there. Realize that your skills can be applied in a number of different occupations or pursuits. And it also helps to have a broad range of interests. Know something about technology, for example. Know something about economics and the way the world works and not just literature and the humanities.

QandA_QDrop.jpgShould everyone’s back-up plan be to move in with Mom and Dad?

QandA_ADrop.jpgThat can be a back-up plan, but sometimes it doesn’t work out very well. Sometimes there are conflicts. Sometimes Mom and Dad are down on their luck too, and it isn’t feasible. I’ve heard of moms and dads who are moving in with their kids.

I would say in general about careers, it helps to have a back-up plan. While you’re still in school, you should have a Plan B in mind. When you applied to a college, you probably had a safety school that you applied to, and you might also have a safety career in mind, and take a few courses so you’ll be ready for that one as well.

Elizabeth Station


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RELATED READING

June 3, 2009

How to pass the time

Ever wonder why flashback, a staple of so many novels and short stories, can seem so artificial in movies? The action stops as the camera zooms in or the screen goes wobbly, and suddenly we reawaken in the distant past. “Flashback is one of the great gifts of fiction,” said poet and short-story writer Stuart Dybek, a device that allows writers to begin a story as close to the end as possible, “a fulcrum to escape the tyranny of cause and effect.” But “it’s the F-word in film.” The reason, Dybek said, has everything to do with “temporal mode”: fiction belongs to the narrative mode; film is captive to the dramatic.

In a talk last Wednesday in Classics 110, Dybek, the 2009 Kestnbaum writer-in-residence, explained to an audience of faculty and students that film and theater, however illusory, mimic the experience of real time in a way that fiction never does. To break that spell and travel back in time against the forward momentum of the action on screen or on stage takes a director as masterful as Federico Fellini or a playwright like Arthur Miller.

Meanwhile, “there is no real time in fiction,” Dybek said. “It’s impossible.” Even reading a story aloud does not create a sense of time passing. Nor does dialogue—though it comes closer. “In fact, what the hell time is in fiction is absolutely mysterious.”

And what about poetry? Some critics say Dybek’s own fiction often sounds more like verse than prose, and he told last week’s listeners that in the “lyrical mode”—where poetry operates—time may not exist at all. “You can fly, you can travel as you do in dreams,” he said. “In poetry we don’t follow the clock.”

Lydialyle Gibson

June 4, 2009

Phoenix Pix: Alumni Weekend, Day 1 (Thursday)


The tent has gone up on the lawn of the Alumni House, and the events of Alumni Weekend 2009 are officially underway. Here's a selection of photos from day one. See you on campus!

Photos by Dan Dry.

Submit your best University of Chicago-themed photos to Phoenix Pix.

June 5, 2009

Phoenix Pix: Alumni Weekend, Day 2 (Friday)

Alumni Weekend is off to a good start. The sidewalks are full of smiling alumni toting bags with schedules and goodies and students finishing up their finals. Here's a selection of photos from day two. We hope to see you on campus!

Photos by Dan Dry.

Submit your best University of Chicago-themed photos to Phoenix Pix.

June 7, 2009

Phoenix Pix: Alumni Weekend, Day 3 (Saturday)

From the Alumni Procession through campus and celebration of achievement in Rockefeller to the picnic and party in Ratner, campus was hopping Saturday. Here's a selection of photos from day three of Alumni Weekend.

Photos by Dan Dry.

Submit your best University of Chicago-themed photos to Phoenix Pix.

June 12, 2009

Phoenix Pix: Spring convocation, 2009

Spring convocation, 2009

Photos by Dan Dry.

Submit your best University of Chicago-themed photos to Phoenix Pix.

Unspeakably hilarious

headshot-arika.jpg

Language lovers beware: Philadelphia-based author and linguistics expert Arika Okrent, PhD'04, is not your average polyglot. Forget pig latin. She knows Klingon.

Okrent traces the history of Klingon and 499 other dreamed-up languages in her book In the Land of Invented Languages that New York Times crossword editor Will Shortz describes as "a lively, informative, insightful examination of artificial languages—who invents them, why, and why most of them fail."

Due to the book's popularity among the Magazine's editors, we asked Okrent to pull together a list of some of her favorites. As they say in Esperanto, gxuu! (Enjoy!)


Ten interesting words from invented languages

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p2846
INVENTED LANGUAGE: Cave Beck's Universal Character (1657)
"hired mourners at funerals" In 1657, this concept was apparently a subject of conversation important enough to be deemed worthy of a "universal" number word.

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cepuhws
INVENTED LANGUAGE: John Wilkins's Philosophical Language (1668)
"shit" While this word could be translated by a common profanity in English, doing so would obscure the fact that each letter in the word refers to a conceptual category that helps lay out the "true" meaning of the word. Cepuhws is "a serous and watery purgative motion from the consistent and gross parts (from the guts downward)."

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lxmsgevjltshevjlpshev
INVENTED LANGUAGE: James Ruggles's Universal Lanugage (1829)
"179 degrees 59 minutes and 59 seconds of west longitude within one second of reaching 180 degrees west" Now that's a word!

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dosifasol
INVENTED LANGUAGE: Jean Sudre's Solresol (1866)
"coffee" Solresol was based on the seven notes of the musical scale: do re mi fa sol la si. Words that are similar in meaning start with the same notes. So if you want milk and sugar with your coffee, you must also ask for dosiredo and dosifasi.

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pük
INVENTED LANGUAGE: Johann Schleyer's Volapük (1879)
In Volapük, pük means "language." It comes from the English word "speak" but it's hard to tell (vol, means "world", so Volapük is "word language.") Unfortunately, it looks a lot like a different English word. And even more unfortunately, it shows up in various other words related to the concept of language: püked – "sentence" and pükön – "to speak."

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birdo
INVENTED LANGUAGE: Ludwig Zamenhof's Esperanto (1887)
"bird" Esperanto is a hybrid built from a mixture of roots from existing natural languages, but it's predominately based on Romance languages. So when you see one of the English-based words, it stops you in your tracks, like an old friend dressed up in a disorienting costume.

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radíidin
INVENTED LANGUAGE: Suzette Haden Elgin's Láadan (1984)
Láadan was a language designed to capture the unique perspective of women. This word means "non-holiday, a time allegedly a holiday but actually so much a burden because of work and preparations that it is a dreaded occasion; especially when there are too many guests and none of them help." Tell it, Sister.

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qIvon
INVENTED LANGUAGE: Marc Okrand's Klingon (1984)
A body part of some kind. Not further identified. All we know is that there is a left one.

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slicka
INVENTED LANGUAGE: Logical Language Group's Lojban (1989)
"cradle" What it really means in this language of logic is "x is a cradle made of y, holding z, rocking at speed a through positions b."

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pona
INVENTED LANGUAGE: Sonja Elen Kisa's Toki Pona (2001)
Toki pona is a "minimal language that focuses on the good things in life." It has only 118 words, so words are used in multiple ways. Pona can be a verb ("improve," "fix," "repair," "make good"), an adjective ("good," "simple," "positive," "nice," "correct," "right"), a noun ("goodness," "simplicity," "positivity"), or an interjection ("great!", "cool!" "yay!"). Pona!

Arika Okrent, PhD'04


RECOMMENDED LINKS

cover-arika.jpg

June 16, 2009

The other Booth

“I believe calling someone an organizer is the most flattering thing you can say,” Heather Tobis Booth, AB'67, AM'70, told a group of 20 activist students last Friday while discussing her own “life in the movement” and offering tips for campus and community work. Booth has been an organizer for more than 40 years and while at the University was the founder of the women's collective JANE, a group that provided anonymous abortion services.

The first flyer Booth ever handed out, she said, was about ending the death penalty. She was 13 years old, in New York City, and terrified: “I was so nervous dropping flyers everywhere,” she said. “I learned how important it is to train people for that sort of thing.” By the time she reached the University of Chicago in the early '60s, Booth was prepared; within a week she staged a sit-in with fellow students to protest the city's school segregation. Then she helped organize Chicago’s Freedom Schools, free learning centers that taught empowerment and techniques for social change. As the head of Friends of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, she went to Mississippi to respond to the “sanctioned lynching” of three young African American men.

“Back on campus,” Booth said, an acquaintance was accidentally pregnant and suicidal. “I didn’t know it at the time,” she said, “but three people discussing abortion were considered conspiring to commit murder." Booth found a doctor who would perform an abortion. A month later, another woman contacted her about the doctor. And then again. The underground abortion service known as the JANE Collective was formed and ultimately served more than 11,000 women throughout Chicago. “I wasn’t even thinking about it as something political,” she said.

Women's issues hadn't been widely politicized; for instance, contraception was not considered a right at the time. Booth was once searched for contraceptives upon returning to the dorm after “parietal hours,” designated hours after which female students were required to be home. The dorm managers assumed she was engaged in "illicit" activity, when in fact she had been comforting a friend about a breakup. Booth was outraged, she said, not by the curfew or the fact that contraceptives were contraband, but at being suspected of having them. “That was a different time,” she said.

Booth encouraged the students to change the world through organizing. She cited three principles from the manual of the Midwest Academy, a "training institute for the progressive movement," which she founded: organize in a way that gives people a sense of their own power, fight for concrete changes, and work to change the relations and structure of power. Now organizing a national grassroots campaign to “regulate the financial industry,” Booth can’t foresee how successful her current project will be, but she believes the economic crisis may make the time right. “You can’t create a movement,” she said. “You can only seize what’s there.”

Shira Tevah, AB’09

The embedded video is a selection from Jane: An Abortion Service by Nell Lundy and Kate Kirtz (1996).

Phoenix Pix: June 15-19, 2009

Alumni Weekend 2009

At the Alumni Weekend convocation, the Rockefeller crowd cheers for the award winners.

Photo by Dan Dry.

Submit your best University of Chicago-themed photos to Phoenix Pix.

Goolsbee’s Colbert rapport

Austan Goolsbee reported for mockery on Monday’s Colbert Report, the first Obama administration official to submit to the faux-O’Reilly treatment. “I’ll ask him if his arm gets tired from throwing money at problems,” Colbert said. “I wonder if he came up with ‘tax’ or ‘spend.’”

After he listed Goolsbee’s titles—“one of the chief economists on the president’s economic-recovery advisory board and a member of the presidential task force on the auto industry”—Colbert had a more sympathetic question: “Who did you piss off to get those jobs?”

“You have no idea how close to true that is,” Goolsbee said.

A Chicago Booth professor on leave to work in Washington, Goolsbee wants “to bring a certain humor or style” to the stuffy field of economics. He wisely let Colbert handle the humor, but the aspiring “Muhammad Ali of economic advisers” came equipped with memorable analogies—a la Ali’s floating butterflies and stinging bees.

Responding to the host’s open-minded curiosity—“How will socialism solve things?”—Goolsbee compared the administration’s economic policies to rescuing a child from a burning house. As the heroes carry the kid to safety, “now is not the time to accuse them of kidnapping.”

Colbert granted him the rhetorical territory, then appealed to Goolsbee on an emotional level: “Which do you love more, taxing or spending?”

Jason Kelly


RECOMMENDED READING

June 19, 2009

Spidey meets who?

Spider-Man #583Is it just me, or does the Obama character in Spider-Man #583, “Spidey Meets the President!” look absolutely nothing like our commander in chief?

The Obama issue got a lot of attention when it came out last year, from the New York Times to the Colbert Report. (In the episode “Obama Spider-Man Comic Bribe,” Stephen Colbert left a signed copy on his bookshelf to try to entice Obama, an admitted Spider-Man collector, to appear on his show.) But no one pointed out what seemed to me the obvious. The Obama character in the comic—and there’s also an Obama imposter who is revealed as shape-shifting villain the Chameleon—looks like... well, I don’t even know. So I turned to Dan Raeburn to enlighten me.

Raeburn, a lecturer in creative writing at Chicago, is the author of Chris Ware (Yale University Press, 2004) and several other books of comics criticism. (Yes, there is such a thing as comics criticism.) In Raeburn’s professional opinion, “the cover is somewhat of a likeness. That’s Obama if he packed on a few pounds.” Cover artist Phil Jimenez, Raeburb says, “at least knows how to do a photo swipe”—a direct copy of an existing photograph. “But the interior art is by a guy named Todd Nauck, who can't draw at all.”

A crucial plot point is that no one can tell the two Obamas apart. That makes it hard to understand why both Obamas not only don’t look like Obama, but also “they don't even look like each other,” Raeburn says. “One looks like O. J. Simpson on steroids, while the other looks like Grace Jones in man-drag. From panel to panel, the same Obama doesn't even look consistent, i.e., like his own self. He looks different every time, depending on what angle he's drawn from. This is the telltale sign of total artistic incompetence.”

obama-spiderman_both.jpg Perhaps James Nurss would have a kinder, gentler opinion. Nurss, the intrepid owner of Hyde Park’s only comic shop, First Aid Comics, says the Obama issue functioned as his own personal economic-stimulus package. It’s now in its fifth printing. Nurss figures he’s sold more than 1,000 copies out of his tiny, second-floor shop.

“You’d have to ask someone on the Marvel creative team, because they have the talent and ability to make him look exactly like Obama,” he says. “So this was obviously a choice. But Marvel continues to mystify me in their choices. I wish I could be more supportive of some of their decisions.”

Another odd decision was to tack the Obama story on as an afterthought to a regular Spider-Man issue. “It’s not even related to the main story,” says Nurss. “It’s a five-page, bonus backup feature.” As for the story itself, “I was disappointed. I mean, it’s cute. It reminds me of a classic ‘70s story—a really simple, dumb plot.”

For a final assessment, I decided to check in with Hamza Walker, AB'88, associate curator at the Renaissance Society on the fourth floor of Cobb Hall. Walker agreed that no one in the comic looked like Obama, “but I can’t blame that on the older epithet of all black people looking alike, because all of the white characters also look alike.”

Walker stares at the drawings. “Spider-Man’s musculature is so deformed,” he says. “It’s so hyper-stylized. I’m almost focused more on Spider-Man’s ridiculous, overwrought body than I am on Obama. And then the evil twin turns into a hairless albino called the Chameleon, this raceless entity.”

Obama and Spiderman fist bump

But is it degrading for the leader of the free world to appear in a comic book, fist-bumping Spider-Man? Is Obama somehow more subject to kitschification—the comic books, the dancing dolls, the Chia Pets—because he’s black? “These things aren’t being produced by a neoconservative group or as parodies,” Walker says. “They’re loving. He would be the first to laugh about the Barack industry. It just feels light-hearted, and we haven’t been light-hearted in eight years.

“With Obama being elected, there’s genuine restoration of anything being possible,” he says. “It’s so historically significant that he deserves to have a Chia Pet.”

Walker’s description of the Chameleon as a “raceless entity” stuck with me. So I call Nurss back with one last question. Why the Chameleon, when there are so many villains in the Spider-Man universe? Does he somehow mirror Obama’s own shape-shifting nature, his ability to appeal to all different kinds of voters?

“Hmm,” says Nurss. “I like that. It lends more credence to what Marvel did.” Nurss, like Obama, is a friendly, affable guy, and I could tell he didn’t want to say what he was thinking. So I ask him if I’m overreading. He laughs. “I suspect so.”

Carrie Golus, AB'91, AM'93

June 25, 2009

Identity politics

Orit Bashkin’s grandparents came to Palestine from Europe in the ’20s and ’30s. They spoke Yiddish, but when they crossed over the border—where Yiddish was rejected as the “language of exile,” Bashkin said—they picked up Hebrew by necessity. Yiddish became "the language of letters and yellowish photos from family in Europe.” But in the 1980s, when her grandparents befriended a set of Russian Jews, they started to speak Yiddish more often. Her grandmother even began to attend Yiddish theater. They were loyal to the mission of Israel—to create a strong, unified Jewish homeland, even if that meant having only Hebrew books in the house—but “you can never erase a culture,” Bashkin said. “You can never erase a memory.”

Bashkin, assistant professor of modern Middle Eastern history at Chicago, appeared on a June 17 panel with assistant professor Na’ama Rokem as part of a program organized by Jan Lisa Huttner, AM’80, of the Chicago YIVO Society. Both Israel-educated Ashkenazi Jews—descendants from Europeans—the professors followed a screening of a 2005 documentary, Ha Ashkenazim, about the Ashkenazi identity movement in Israel, born of young, nostalgic Israelis who want to rediscover their roots.

Tammy Ben-TorAccording to some of the 20-somethings in the film, Israeli Ashkenazi Jews are thought of as nerdy and weak. Depression and sadness are ingrained in them, and Yiddish is nothing but an outdated language. But one woman, Tammy Ben-Tor (at left), sets Yiddish lyrics to electronica music to try to escape the gloomy language of ancestors who died in the Holocaust and capture the spirit of how they lived: “That’s what I’m interested in,” Ben-Tor says in the movie. “To get their lives back.”

The rich Ashkenazi identity, the part that is not depressing, said Bashkin, comes from this time before the Holocaust, the culture left behind in the shtetls. Still, she said, the film places too much emphasis on ethnic differences between Ashkenazim and Mizrahi (Arab Jews), who are described as warmer, more rebellious, happier. “In my opinion, ethnic identity is much less pronounced today,” she said. “People team together. You can have Hebrew and you can have other things”—Yiddish, for example—“and the state will not collapse.”

Ruth E. Kott, AM'07

June 29, 2009

Hot fun in the summertime

ORSCA summer 2009

Among the throng of sun-soaked students and hyperactive kids, a content father patiently waited. With a small child in one arm and another by his side, he was firmly entrenched in the long lunch line that snaked around the eastern half of Bartlett quad. Free food, free entertainment for him and his family, and a beautiful early summer day—he looked happy.

Then the child holding his hand suddenly broke free and dashed off, answering the siren call of a nearby water slide. He took a step out of line to chase her, but then changed his mind, making a half-hearted cry for his wife and resuming his place in line. Free ribs can do that to you.

Indeed, hundreds were drawn to the Bartlett quad to kick off summer with the Office of the Reynolds Club & Student Activities (ORCSA). The Friday afternoon event was catered by the Hyde Park Barbecue and Bakery, formerly known as Orly’s, and two large water slides, which offered some complications for ORCSA volunteers.

“The very first girl on the very first run of the day sort of went down the slide wrong,” said David Muff, ’10, as he manned his post by the large, inflatable blue slide, corralling kids’ excitement just enough to get them to form a line. “And as she got to the bottom, all the water at the base sort of came spilling out, and the thing partially collapsed. So I had to refill it. Off to a good start.”

The event otherwise went off without a hitch, as attendees sought shade after finally obtaining their plates stacked high with barbecued ribs, chicken kabobs, salad, and dessert. The man behind the pig-out was David Shopiro, U-High’69, who has run Orly’s in Hyde Park for nearly 30 years and recently changed the place’s name, interior, and offerings. Judging by the lines, the barbecue and baked desserts were a hit—Shopiro brought enough to feed 400 people, but 90 minutes in there wasn’t a clean plate left, and he was nearly out of the more than 500 ribs he had prepared. People lined up with tiny dessert plates too small to fit the massive ribs they had their stomachs set on.

The event also featured Willy Chyr, AB’09, a balloon artist known for his installation in the Biological Sciences Learning Center and his sprawling, colorful dresses modeled at May's Festival of the Arts fashion show. Chyr sculpted elaborate balloon animals and bright headdresses for the faculty and staff's children who scampered about during the event, sculpting one balloon every two minutes for two hours straight.

With his two soaking children in tow, balloons in hand, the no-longer-hungry father started to walk off. He looked a little tired, like he had gotten too much sun. But at least he got his ribs.

Luke Fiedler, ’10

Third-year students Lim En and Eileen Ting sample the good eats made by Hyde Park Barbecue and Bakery.

Photo by Lloyd DeGrane.

June 30, 2009

The lost tale of the glass eye

Years ago, so long I can’t remember exactly when, I watched a TV documentary about the London Underground's lost and found. Umbrellas in every size and color, of course: but there was also a surprising number of improbable objects, such as artificial limbs. How does one manage to leave one’s leg on the Tube?

At the University of Chicago, where everyone is too preoccupied with intellectual matters to remember their scarves, there are ten lost and founds. The registrar's office is the keeper of the “official” one, but each library and a few other buildings have their own. This past spring I explored the lost things in the Reynolds Club basement.

Scarves, jackets, a gym bag or two, and of course, books. Someone had left behind Volume 8, Nineteenth-Century Europe, from the Readings in Western Civilization series; someone else had abandoned Volume 9. There were textbooks on micro- and macroeconomics; something in Greek that might have been the Iliad; a training manual for animal lab technicians; a printout of an original two-act play, Heat Wave, “a work of fiction based on the very real events of the summer of 1995.” Less expected was a book adaptation of the inspirational Lee Ann Womack song “I Hope You Dance,” CD single included—a jettisoned birthday present, perhaps.

The largest-ever object in the collection, says fourth-year Kathryn Fallon, Student Activities Center manager, was a nine-foot-long oar abandoned for most of last summer. The crew team had forgotten it after a recruiting event and somehow never missed it: “We had to e-mail the crew team to let them know,” says Fallon.

And then there’s the tale of the glass eye, a story I had heard from Jennifer Kennedy, assistant director of the Student Activities Center. As the story goes, last winter somebody sent a letter claiming that during a Halloween concert at Mandel Hall, he had lost a glass eye down a heating grate. “There was discussion about whether or not this was a hoax, because it was just too weird,” says Fallon. “The letter was from France, and postmarked a month afterward, which kind of compounded the weird factor.”

But sure enough, Bob James, manager of Mandel Hall, found an eye in Mandel Hall—“not the whole eye, but the front to the eye,” says Fallon. Still suspicious, they searched the Internet and discovered “the guy had been apparently planting the eyes.”

“Someone was definitely here and dropped off the eye—we don’t know if it was him or an accomplice in Chicago,” Fallon says. “So we mailed him a letter that said, ‘We found your eye!’ but apparently we weren’t either awkward or snarky enough to get on his Web site.”

I tried to find this alleged fake-glass-eye Web site. Usually Google is more than adequate for such junk-culture searches, but I found nothing. Was I using the wrong search terms?

I e-mailed Kennedy, who wrote back with the advice that I ask James, “the man who knows the full story of the eye and is currently its caretaker.” So I e-mailed him a couple of times—no response. I phoned him a couple of times and left messages—no response. I even dropped by the Reynolds Club, but our schedules were off, and I never managed to catch him.

I forgot about it for weeks, then months. I put my notes somewhere. I put my recorder somewhere else. Eventually I had to tear both my desk and my apartment apart to find it all.

I still don’t know what happened with the glass eye. I guess at this point, I never will. “Very little of what comes in is claimed,” Fallon had told me about the lost and found. “And of the people who come back looking for stuff, very few find what they’re looking for.”

Carrie Golus, AB'91, AM'93

About June 2009

This page contains all entries posted to UChiBLOGo in June 2009. They are listed from oldest to newest.

May 2009 is the previous archive.

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