Special 2016 Issue

his past February I was invited to give a lecture at a Duke seminar called “LGBTQ Activism and History.” I arrived a bit late, and each of the dozen or so students had already filled out a name card, a folded piece of paper that indicated their full name and pronouns. I was puzzled for two reasons: First, why state your pronouns? Isn’t it pretty obvious who’s a man and who’s a woman, who gets “he” versus “she”? Second: Two of the students had put down “they, them, their.”I followed suit, scribbling: “Steven. He/him/his.” 

For the past year, I have spent untold hours studying, and sounding out, two pages in an old book: Hans Sloane’s 1707 Voyage to the Islands. It’s a beautiful object, large, leather-bound, full of images of trees and shells and spiders and fruit. But my colleagues David Garner Ph.D. ’14 and graduate student Mary Caton Lingold and I keep coming back to two pages of music—an evanescent fragment offered to us from across the centuries.

Each spring I look forward to seeing the mayapples (Podophyllum peltatum) twist their way up and out of the ground, unfurling like umbrellas and creating a short-statured canopy for imagined woodland sprites. The size of the colony gives me a clue about the quality of soil and moisture in the area. The plants also let me know that box turtles are probably nearby, waiting for the mayapples to ripen.

I’m a novelist, working, published (and broke), and I have a confession: Since Pico Iyer recommended James Salter’s Light Years to me two decades ago, I don’t think I have written a word without that book by my side. It’s my favorite of all his works of fiction, because of its focus on the way men and women interact in the world, because of its sheer lyricism, and frankly, because of its length—a very satisfying immersion. The book follows a family, the way relationships diffuse, dissolve, begin elsewhere.

After thirty years as a public radio reporter and documentary maker, I joined the podcasting stampede last fall, launching Scene on Radio at Duke’s Center for Documentary Studies. Even more than I imagined, I’ve found myself giddy with the sense of liberation that comes with the medium.  

In 64 B.C., during a time of great political unrest in Rome, Marcus Tullius Cicero ran for consul, the highest office in the land. His campaign faced long odds. He was not from one of the aristocratic families that made up the political establishment; outsiders rarely attained the consulship.

If you look at old medical texts, you see a kind of poetry in the naming of things. Some names are nearly onomatopoeic: The rumbling your stomach and intestines makes is called borborygmus. Some names sound like characters in an action movie: The buccinator is the muscle that allows you to pull back the angle of the mouth and flatten the cheek area.

The language of faithful preaching is tensive language—unsettled language, language at the breaking point. For it is language that seeks to speak of God, but cannot fully speak of God. It is the destabilizing language of story and metaphor, paradox and poetry, which gestures toward the space created when language reaches its limits and words collide with each other. The language of preaching, as theologian Karl Barth has put it, is always a “provisional attempt,” never the final word, never controlled by the preacher.

I come from sugarcane and riceGold that never touched the fingertips of my peopleJust blessed their skin a honeyed brownLeft their lips sweet and fruitfulSo I know my tongue got a power to itGives something prolificLike a stream of a currentThe way Kaieteur spreads arms wide to catch me in my dreamsSo when I wakeMy mouth be humming a melodyLike waterfallLike life being made newOver and overWhen I speakIt rains like a floodA quick rushing in airTo tremor the silence

What separates a poem from a jingle? Is a tagline just poetry that persuades us to buy something? Is poetic speech simply an advertisement for something that cannot be purchased? These were the questions that we asked each afternoon in a seminar I taught through the English department here at Duke, “Mad Men/Avant Poets.”

The modern athlete can make more money off the court through endorsements than through competition, and sometimes that means it pays to be bland.LeBron James made an estimated $48 million in off-court earnings this season, more than twice the $23 million salary he was paid by the Cleveland Cavaliers. Serena Williams netted $20 million in endorsements compared to just $8.9 million in prize money. These athletes' marketability—and, in turn, the value of their endorsement deals—is directly tied to their likability. 

It was the stigma of being considered a “blue-jeaned slobbermouth” that drove Marlon Brando to bellow himself hoarse in an Omaha cornfield. Woodshedding for the role of Mark Antony in Joseph Mankiewicz’s film of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Brando was urged by his mother to do classical (read: respectable) work. He joined a largely British cast—including veterans John Gielgud and James Mason—with enough Shakespeare experience to have Brando shaking in his boots.

I attended two conferences, interviewed ten women, met another fifteen remarkable women, and produced twenty YouTube videos in eight short weeks just to answer one question: How do we address online hate speech while maintaining free speech?

When I was four years old, I watched That’s Entertainment!, the time-capsule compilation film documenting the golden age of MGM musicals. I was entranced. My delight was so profound, in fact, that my mom noted the reaction in my baby book, alongside more typical milestones like my height and first words.

Our native tongue is beautiful and expressive, even if it’s not technically one of the world’s  Romance languages. English is, by category, a West Germanic language, and German itself is—at least to our ears—a guttural, aggressive array of dense consonant clusters and fricatives and glottal stops. Like our linguistic cousins, we may lack the flowing poetry of Italian or French, but over time English has inherited the entire world; as anyone who watches the annual Scripps-Howard spelling bee knows, our dictionary boasts diverse origins.

As a social practice that operates through language, law confronts two limitations: The imprecision of words—what the great legal theorist H.L.A. Hart called “open texture”—makes their application to particular instances uncertain. Compounding the problem, limitations of human foresight mean lawmakers cannot see everything the future will produce. 

Young writers often ask me how I found my voice as a writer. This is the question they’ve been taught to ask, the appropriate, million-dollar question, the one M.F.A. programs and English teachers and writing instructors set up as the Holy Grail, over and over again. But as a writer who’s supported herself for twenty years by writing essays, cartoons, TV criticism, radio commentaries, a memoir, book reviews, reactions, recaps, rants, and riffs of every stripe, I find the notion that you have to locate your one true writerly voice patently absurd.

I collect words.” That was the first line of my college admissions essay, written before I had any idea where my lists of words would take me. My essay went on to wax poetic about how I jot down each word that piques my interest. “Sometimes,” I explained, “the impulse to ‘collect’ comes from observing a word perfectly suited to its purpose. ‘Meander,’ for instance, seems to stroll casually from its soft, ’m’… A wealth of vowels keeps it from slipping by too quickly.”

Even his detractors acknowledge that few justices ever have approached the clear, powerful, and evocative writing style that the opinions of the late Justice Antonin Scalia consistently typified.

Intersectionality, a concept that started in academia and became popular among grassroots activists, recently has exploded in broader culture. Today, there’s even a viral YouTube video that uses pizza to explain its meaning. So when Hillary Clinton, on March 6, 2016, tweeted that: “We face a complex, intersectional set of challenges…” it signaled intersectionality’s full entrance into the mainstream.

This might be hard for some people to hear, but English majors are terrible Scrabble players. To win in Scrabble one has to come to terms with the fact that “za,” “aji,” and “yez” are far more useful words than ones you’d know from reading Henry James. Chemists, geologists, botanists, sailors, rare coin collectors, and biblical scholars have far handier professional vocabularies for success. As do neurologists and Perkins reference librarians—or at least that’s what my father-in-law, Marvin Rozear M.D. ’66, and I like to think.

In the home videos my father filmed of my childhood, I am often the star: a skinny, bright-eyed girl, shouting with ear-piercing shrillness in Chinese, running to get back into the camera frame whenever it tries to pan away from me.

If there is a platonic ideal of American politics, it is that of the “great debate”: two opposing sides armed with sharp rhetoric and strong values yet with enough wisdom to concede to the soundest argument. Think of the Lincoln-Douglas debates or fictional orators like Jed Bartlett whose victories are founded on speeches of principled logic. Unfortunately, our political reality may be more like House of Cards (or perhaps Veep) than The West Wing, and communication rarely wins out.

When I was a child, we had a Compaq 286 computer with a green-and-black screen. It didn’t have a mouse, of course; instead, you had to type commands for everything. There were still games for computers in those days, and I loved playing them. With the help of a book of 100 games, in second grade I started writing my own in BASIC, one of the earlier programming languages. I would type the game codes into the computer, run the program, and play the game.

As songwriters, we try to write about the subjects that matter to us. In the early months of 2015, no social issue was more regularly consuming my mind and dominating the conversations within my band, Delta Rae, than the deadly violence against unarmed black Americans taking place in Ferguson, New York, Chicago, and other cities across the United States. Like many others, I was discovering the work of Ta-Nehisi Coates and his articles on the systemic oppression of people of color by way of U.S. housing policy and the penal system.

Word clouds, like real clouds, can reveal or obscure; two people looking at the same cumulonimbus invariably will see different things. Using stories from The Chronicle archives, we created two word clouds from the demands students made in the 1969 and 2016 takeovers of the Allen Building. We wanted to find out whether single words, distilled from the order of sentences and the context of paragraphs, might expose new meanings in the narratives. A Duke historian and a linguist pondered our clouds and shared their thoughts.

I am always trying to find the right word for things. It bothers me when I say annoyed instead of frustrated, or tired instead of exhausted. Perhaps this is a remnant of my childhood, growing up in hot Australia, the place my Chinese parents had settled on for its good education and weather.

The dining hall was packed. Forks clinked at plates piled with lentils and rice. Wooden benches creaked. Someone occasionally cleared his throat. But amid the bustling of seventy-five men, not a single word reverberated off the rafters. In fact, it had been almost a week since any of my dining hallmates had spoken at all. I was at a Vipassana retreat—a ten-day meditation course designed to cultivate mindfulness and equanimity where participants observe, among other things, a vow of silence.

When I speak with my grandfather, my voice stutters as I translate English thoughts into broken Vietnamese. Often, I cannot understand what my grandfather is saying, so I just smile sheepishly and mutter some incomprehensible reply—pretending that it is his hardness of hearing and not my linguistic incompetence that impairs our communication. But on the morning of the day I was to leave my Seattle home to study a nation away in Durham, my grandfather was my final goodbye. He held me and told me he loved me in a voice softened with age: Ông yêu con nhiều lắm.

Facebook can now identify the faces in your photos. Apple can recognize commands you speak into your cell phone. And if you point your phone at a sign printed in a foreign language, Google can instantly translate it into your own.

We didn't need dialogue,” exclaims Norma Desmond. “We had faces!” She’s halfway to lunacy at that moment in Sunset Boulevard, remembering a glorious past before movies added soundtracks, but she has a point.