Bard College Bard Digital Commons Senior Projects Spring 2020 Bard Undergraduate Senior Projects Spring 2020 The Veilmakers Emily Nicole Giangiulio Bard College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/senproj_s2020 Part of the Fiction Commons, and the Social and Cultural Anthropology Commons This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License. Recommended Citation Giangiulio, Emily Nicole, "The Veilmakers" (2020). Senior Projects Spring 2020. 291. https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/senproj_s2020/291 This Open Access work is protected by copyright and/or related rights. It has been provided to you by Bard College's Stevenson Library with permission from the rights-holder(s). You are free to use this work in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights- holder(s) directly, unless additional rights are indicated by a Creative Commons license in the record and/or on the work itself. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THE VEILMAKERS Senior Project Submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature and The Division of Social Studies of Bard College by Emily Giangiulio Annandale-on-Hudson, New York May 2020 1 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This project was completed during a period of great uncertainty in the world, and I have so much gratitude for those who sustained me through it. To Mary Caponegro, for your enthusiasm, your insights, your brilliant conversation. To Yuka Suzuki and Michèle Dominy, for your support of my literary inclinations, for grounding me in theory. To Bernie, for our late-night Skype SPROJ sessions that lit a flame during lockdown. To Julia, for the dinners we cooked that kept us fueled. To all my friends, to all their ambitions. To Ally and Eva, for bringing joy to my life when all else seems bleak. To my parents, for everything. For Jean McHugh… TABLE OF CONTENTS NOVELLA Part I: Mortar Chapter 1 .................................................................. 2 Chapter 2 ................................................................ 15 Chapter 3 ................................................................ 32 Part II: Stone Chapter 4 ................................................................ 46 Chapter 5 ................................................................ 58 Chapter 6 ................................................................ 77 Chapter 7 ................................................................ 90 Part III: Terra Chapter 8 .............................................................. 101 Chapter 9 .............................................................. 113 CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK Introduction .......................................................... 127 The Technocratic Paradigm .................................... 133 Patterns of Modernity ............................................ 144 Concealment and Accountability ............................ 149 Technological Capacity .......................................... 155 Alternative Frameworks ......................................... 163 Redesigning Green Rhetoric ................................... 170 Scale-Making and Science Fiction .......................... 184 Conclusion ............................................................ 191 Bibliography .......................................................... 195 PART I: MORTAR 1 CHAPTER ONE Their “technofantasy” never belonged to me, but I pulled a stitch in my side trying to squeeze into it. The costume I thought apt: a plaid calf-length skirt and peasant blouse folded underneath a corset that I had found in the body-sculpting section of the lingerie aisle. The collegiate jacket with the pleather elbow pads had been bought on a secondhand site the night before. My ribs were crushed and the patterns were not altogether authentic to the Victorian aesthetic, but I felt Mary Shelley-esque. I had even braided my hair in dreary loops pinned to the sides of my head vis-à-vis her portrait. Before I left the apartment, I draped Ivan’s plastic lab goggles around my neck. If I had learned anything from the forums, futurism was as an important of an accessory as nostalgia. Would Mary Shelley have been a steampunker? I wondered as I waited for my pod. My breath sprouted in cauliflower clumps from my mouth. The city in the hard heart of May was a bitter landscape of shriveled passersby and unsmiling building-faces, made matte and gray in the late afternoon light. From the corner of my apartment complex to the far-end of West Avenue, I could see nothing but the neck of the guideway rail carrying pods. They skirted from the murky shadow of the business district into the main intersection before splitting off in every which direction, like beetles scattering from the heel of a boot. The tinted windows hid each occupant, and I imagined couples hunched in their cramped interiors, donned in nineteenth century garments. 2 Horsehair petticoats and collapsed sleeves and poke bonnets for her; frock coats and wide cravats and top hats for him. They gazed out the window, noses low, eyes downcast, as their carriage spirited them to the next opera, the next ball. Their breath fogged the glass; they looked away as they careened through the housing projects. I tucked my hands into my armpits. As the pods zipped past, gleaming darkly with their occupants from another century, I felt even more reassured in my choice of character. The pod I had ordered shuddered to a halt off the curb, headlights blinking a crisp hello. I stepped over a puddle between the pavement and the guideway and folded myself through the open door. “8-4-8 Carroll Street, Mokrina,” I said. The door sealed shut just as the rain began, and I felt the world move beneath me. I watched the droplets dash against the front window into satiny ribbons. Shelley’s gothic burden pulled my shoulders inward as the city passed in streaks of tepid yellow, heavy slate. We shared the bleak summers, the dry winters, the bloody sunsets of The Scream; over two hundred years caved between us, yet we could not be closer in meteorological conditions. But the damp and the dark had been a generative environment for Shelley, for out of that year without a summer in 1816 came the first true story of science fiction. I strained my neck to squint at the sky out the window. No such inspiration transferred to me, it would seem. Every year since the mosquito with the belly 3 full of infected blood feasted on my mother’s ankle had been a year without a summer, and I still did not know what I was doing with my failed academic career. Here I was, seven years into a half-abandoned PhD, attending a party I had discovered in the late hours of the night while stalking the ‘Shindigs & Soirees’ section of GrindingGears.com. The pod shot headlong over the river. Through sheets of rain, I could barely make out the ruins of the two suspension towers of the old Mokrina Bridge. The neo-Gothic limestone arches soared out of the frothing waters, solitary turrets that, though weathered away by storm and wind, remained standing, shepherding ghosts of trucks and trains that no longer had a bridge to carry them. The cables were cut, my mother had told me, when the water got too high. As I hurtled into the shadow of Mokrina on the other side of the river, I could see the first electric tongues of sunset before being swallowed up by the buildings again. # I stumbled into the smoky interior of a nineteenth century London pub. Only, I wasn’t entering from the cobblestoned, piss-soaked streets of the Victorian slums, but from the hallway outside an apartment on the thirty- second floor of a high-rise, uptown Mokrina. Twenty-first century air ventilation sucked the pipe smoke out of the room before the door closed behind me. What was that smell? It was rich and earthy, almost sickly sweet 4 and animal. But there was also a note of burning metal, slightly fishy, somewhat tinny. The hostess raised an eyebrow at me. I wiped my hands, greasy from the rain, on my skirt and reached to shake her hand. “Oh, I’m Margot. You must be Elvira. We exchanged messages on the forum.” “Yes, you’re that researcher! That people scientist!” I forced a grin. “Not quite. I’m a PhD candidate in anthropology at the university. Thank you—honestly, thanks—for inviting me into your home.” “Not sure what you want to study our little club for,” she said, arms crossed over her corset. “But all are welcome here! Oh, and look…you tried to dress up.” I glanced down at my ‘costume.’ It was, admittedly, a sad attempt at the retro-futuristic, hyper-vintage collision of centuries that wallpapered the room and filled its occupants’ lungs. I had convinced myself that dressing as the young authoress was the ultimate reference to the aesthetic, as Frankenstein had embodied the treasured blending of the arcane, the electric, and the engineered with pure nightmare. “I’m Mary Shelley,” I said. Her blank expression told me I had assumed too much in the allusion. “Very antique,” she said with a pink smile. Elvira, who had answered my last-minute request to attend the party, was a tall, confusing weave of old-world textiles and futuristic imagery. Her 5 midriff was stuffed into a front-plated corset that cinched her waist at a painful-looking proportion to the volume of her skirts. Knee-length faux-hide boots, laced up with brass, gear-shaped clasps, poked out front under the layer of brown ruffles in her petticoat. From her high-collared peplum to the teensy bowler hat outfitted with intentionally rusted goggles on her head, hers was the exact look one would come across if searching the Internet for images of the steampunk aesthetic. And I, not quite a wolf in sheep’s clothing, felt decidedly under-dressed. The fishy-metallic scent walloped me in the face as a man holding a smoking pipe passed by. “What’s that smell?” I asked. “Leather and motor oil!” Elvira said. “Rare flavors these days! You got that right—standard e-pipes, but I found these retro-flavored cartridges for a great price.” She breathed in through her nostrils and sighed. “Smells like yesteryear, as we say.” I made a mental note of the scent.