the mani festo issue Back Bay Review Number 3, Spring 2008 Back Bay Review a journal of undergraduate criticism Boston University Boston, Massachusetts Editor Advising Editor Claudia Huang Zachary Bos Staff Editors Faculty Advisor Amanda Cardenas Rosanna Warren Alexandrea Ellis Sandy SooHoo Founding Editors Maggie Howell Emily Nagle, Marcela Nishita Shastri Sapone, Emma Tosch Katherine Sheldon and Shan Wang Danielle Isaacs The Back Bay Review is published annually by undergradu - ate members of the Boston University Editorial Society. All submissions and correspondence should be emailed to [email protected] or addressed to: Editorial Society c/o Student Activities Office One University Road Boston, Massachusetts 02215 Visit our website at http://bu.edu/backbay/ Copyright © 2008 by Boston University Editorial Society and respective authors. Printed by Offset Prep, Inc. 91 Newbury Avenue North Quincy, MA 02171 Cover Design: Claudia Huang and Sandy SooHoo Rear Cover Photo: © Jon Towle Back Bay Review AN ISSUE DEVOTED TO THE HISTORY AND IDEA OF MANIFESTOS Contents 3 Saving the Port Huron Statement From Itself Katie Sheldon 10 SciFaiku: Literary Movement of the Future Nishita Shastri 17 The Snails Strike Back Siv Lie 27 The Churning Tides of Blackwater Ankita Shastri 34 The Dogme Ate My Movie Danielle Isaacs 37 Development Jamie Clearfield Editor’s Note Rather than soliciting reviews and criticisms indiscriminately, we chose to experiment with a manifesto theme. We called for sub - missions in the forms of manifesto critiques, criticisms written in a manifesto style, and, for the truly adventurous, original manifestos. The following six essays were chosen for publication. We were pleas - antly surprised by – as I hope readers will be – the variety of ways that contributors interpreted the theme. Because the Review has a relatively small editorial staff, and because we focused on only six pieces, the editing experience was a very intimate one. The rapport that developed between contribu - tors and editors (in a few cases, editors were also contributors) is one that I hope can be sustained in coming years. I thank all of the editors and contributors for investing so much of their time and of themselves into this issue of the Back Bay Review ; your enthusiasm is infectious. To our sponsors and support - ers – including Ms. Edna Newmark, Ms. Susan Tomassetti, Prof. Rosanna Warren, and Sir Hans Kornberg at the University Professors Program; and Dean David Eckel and Prof. Chris Martin at the Core Curriculum – thank you for having confidence in us. Your support continues to be invaluable. Of course, an editorial note in an undergraduate publication at Boston University cannot be complete without a sincere thank you for Zachary Bos. I extend my greatest gratitude towards your knowledge, kindness, and unending patience. I hope you enjoy this issue of the Review, and, as we are always looking to improve, I welcome your feedback. Claudia Huang May 2008 1 photo by Jon Towle 2 Saving The Port Huron Statement From Itself by Katie Sheldon So, don’t explain that you’ve lost your way, That you’ve got no place to go. You’ve got a hand and a voice and you’re not alone— Brother, that’s all you need to know! –Phil Ochs, “That’s What I Want to Hear” “If we appear to seek the unattainable, as it has been said, then let it be known that we do so to avoid the imaginable.” –Students for a Democratic Society, “The Port Huron Statement” To be a student in wartime is a barely tenable position. It is to live in a fish bowl with only a vague awareness of something lurk - ing beyond the glass, to be simultaneously saved and marginalized from what is always the premier conflict of one’s generation. In later years, this isolation can either be a source of comfort or of pain; I remember my father’s admission one evening that he wished he’d gone to Vietnam instead of medical school, just as clearly as I remember hearing this sentiment countered years later by my high school health teacher who told our class, with pride and relief, about how his qualifying performance on a college entrance exam saved him from the draft and, likely, saved his life. Our position is not a novel one. The frustrations of having all the answers and no way of implementing them, of feeling our gen - eration robbed of its best resources our peers who are either recruit - ed into the military or recruited into the ranks of the wholeheart - edly disillusioned larger public, of feeling at odds with the dominant 3 American culture, even as we fight or prepare to fight a distant enemy, have all, in a sense, been “done before.” Enter Students for a Democratic Society and their revolutionary Port Huron Statement. Students for a Democratic Society was one of the more notori - ous collections of student activists to emerge from the turbulent six - ties. Their jurisdiction became “civil rights, voting rights and urban reform,” as US involvement in Vietnam increased. The organization originated in Ann Arbor, home of Michigan State University, under the leadership of radical local, UMich grad Alan Haber (Miller 26, 38). Haber presciently recruited into the SDS fold a young man who would be of great consequence to the history of American counter - cultural politics: …a student conspicuously lacking in a liberal political background. Their target was the incoming editor of The Michigan Daily and a man destined to become one of the most famous radicals of the sixties: Tom Hayden (Miller 40). Hayden would play the premier role in shaping SDS policy when he served as the primary draftsman of The Port Huron Statement in the summer of 1962, at an SDS conference in Port Huron, Michigan. Photographs of the rustic (Hayden), expansive mess hall where it was painstakingly compiled by committee input, one feels, can hardly do justice to what must’ve been an electric atmosphere, infused with the momentousness of the task at hand. It is a room whose very sight, recalls the familiar din of impassioned argument competing with mealtime; it is a room one can imagine resounding with the simultaneous tedium and excitement of a small-scale model of the democratic process. The central idea of empowerment is emphasized time and again in The Port Huron Statement. Its architects came from the tradi - tions of labor and civil rights activism, and these galvanizing expe - riences no doubt informed their priorities of the idealistic vision of 4 America presented here: We would replace power rooted in possession, privilege, or circumstance by power and uniqueness rooted in love, reflectiveness, reason and creativity. As a social system we seek the establishment of a democracy of individual participation… Unsurprisingly, Students for a Democratic Society sees the uni - versity and its constituents as the necessary catalysts in bringing about such a democracy, which should be doubly empowering for a disenfranchised generation of students, and for those whom they are supposed to help re-enfranchise. In expression within the Statement, however, this insistence gives an impression of well- intentioned oversight, but oversight nonetheless. First, to assume that the sheltered world of university life has anything in common with the real world, as in “That student life is more intellectual, and perhaps more comfortable, does not obscure the fact that the funda - mental qualities of life on the campus reflects the habits of society at large,” (Students for a Democratic Society 335) is utterly false, and disproves itself through the examples given: The fraternity president is seen at the junior manager levels; the sorority queen has gone to Grosse Pointe; the serious poet burns for a place, any place to work; the once-serious and never-serious poets work at the advertising agencies (Students for a Democratic Society 335). Here, we are treated to a survey of occupations that the afflu - ent class can afford to aspire to, but what of those who were kept from higher education by poverty, and can’t gain access to such work? Where does this myopic metaphor university for the real world leave the poor and uneducated, those whom SDS should ide - ally make every effort to re-enfranchise into the political arena? It is also somewhat ironic that a group including “‘trickle-down’ 5 welfare programs” (Students for a Democratic Society 340) in a cri - tique of governmental economic policy, seems to espouse a sort of trickle-down democracy, by asserting that: First, the university is located in a permanent position of social influence. Its educational function makes it indispensable and automatically makes it a crucial institution in the formation of social attitudes. Second, in an unbelievably complicated world, it is the central institution for organizing, evaluating, and transmitting knowledge. Third, the extent to which academic resources presently are used to buttress immoral social practice is revealed, first, by the extent to which defense contracts make the universities engineers of the arms race. (Students for a Democratic Society 373). Another notable discrepancy between doctrine and action is encapsulated in the centrally important lines: “We regard men as infinitely precious and possessed of unfulfilled capacities for reason, freedom, and love. In affirming these principles we are aware of countering perhaps the dominant conceptions of man in the twen - tieth century,” (Students for a Democratic Society 332) which are directly contradicted by the fact that the Weathermen, an American terrorist organization active in the late sixties and