September 8, 2012

From “Spot 297” by K. Lorenzo Gauld

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Every space in the parking lot of Fitzgerald Stadium was numbered, 1 to 400, to allow campus police to easily identify anyone who wasn’t a member of the athletic dept or a VIP to be quickly and efficiently towed. Even on game days, the general public had to park elsewhere; the only way to get a space was to be a member of the football team or to rise up through the ranks on the managerial side.

One space, which would otherwise be #297, is not numbered. No one is quite sure why this is; the earliest mention of such a space is from the 1970s, shortly after the lot was constructed, so it may have been a simple oversight. But from that quirk of fate, a sinister and elaborate legend has grown up around that space.

A player who parks in that unnumbered space, it holds, curses the team to lose the next game.

Painting a number wouldn’t change the essential nature of the curse, the players hold, and as such it is left unmarked as a warning. Obviously not all the players believe the legend, but the pivotal 1986 game is always held up as a counterexample. Edward Mack, who would go on to win three Super Bowls as a professional player and found the influential father-son “Mack dynasty,” was nearly late for the game (due to a tryst, the tale has it). Forgetting the legend, he parked in the only available spot…and the Fighting Pottawatomie (later the Grizzlies) were defeated 12 to 40.

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September 4, 2012

From “Salacious Tour” by Jordan Mosena

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It may not have been as informative as other tours, and certainly didn’t contain the standard boilerplate about “where your success begins” and other consultant-generated slogans. It was mostly the kind of salacious gossip that only 100 plus years of academia could generate.

It also kept people asking for Kay’s tours by name.

“This is the university library. It’s the place where, in the fourth floor men’s restroom, Dr. Hulmann was discovered in a compromising position with a grad student. It got them both fired and divorced, and now they run an organic food store in town.”

“That’s the graduate college. There are study carrels there and every semester or two a student tries to move in. The last one caused a fire by plugging sixteen appliances in the one outlet provided.”

“The plans called for Bickerman Tower to be twice as large as it is, but they shrank it to match the budget. That’s why the restrooms only fit one person and the offices would be condemned for human habitation if the building inspector wasn’t an alumni.”

 

August 23, 2012

From “The Three Sci-fi/Horror Plagues of SMU” by Manual Kass

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As a non-teenager living in a college town and working at a university, I live in kind of a weird anti-reality bubble. Bizarre trends often get this far and no further, freshmen (and seniors) wander about helpless as neonates, and annoyances pile turtle-stack high for anyone who has a limited appetite for bullshit.

We employees maintain our sanity by viciously kvetching about the kids, agreeing that the whole system would be much better off without them (but please continue paying tuition anyway okay thanks bye). That’ll do for some people, but to maintain my own personal sanity in the face of overwhelming teenagers, I prefer to describe things in theremin tones. Evoking the sci-fi/horror gods of old is way more entertaining than just saying that kids are stupid even though the latter is so true that I think it’s rrisen to the level of fundamental natural force (Strong, Weak, Electronagnetic, Gravitation, and Stupid Teenagers).

So when the trend requiring everyone with more than one X chromosome to wear Ugg-brand boots, even in 104° heat, I didn’t just complain about adolescent sheepmindedness. Rather, I deplored the recent invasion of the Anklions from Sororité Prime who were sucking blood from the evolutionarily vulnerable ankle region. Said blood loss also explained most mid-semester test scores from those so parasitized.

The askance ballcaps and part-popped polo protrusions that still form the unofficial uniform for rampant and unchecked male douchebaggery among SMU’s rank and file? It’s actually a first-stage symptom of a degenerative motor-neuron condition: first coordination goes, then color vision, then human empathy. In latter stages the condition leads to host death through douchbaggery, usually through alcohol poisoning or raging STDs, after which the unfortunate will rise from the grave as a zombie and reserve their former station (assuming anyone even notices). Far more merciful to put ’em down semi-painlessly with metaphorical 00 buckshot when the first symptoms appear, right?

I’m still of two minds on the recent trend of wearing things that are not true clothing as true and major clothing: tights, sweat pants, pajamas, wifebeaters, swimsuits, bras, tracksuits, scarves, shawls, and dozens of their quasi-clothing brethren. On the one hand, it could be a manifestation of a neural parasite from a warm planet. On the other, it could be a warning sign of an emergent human subspecies, homo sapiens inappropriatus.

I guess it could also be parasites infecting a new subspecies, but that’s just going too far.

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August 22, 2012

From “A Maddening Scent of Butter” by Lucretia Bauder

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There it was again, heavy in the air. Butter.

He’d smelled it driving onto campus but dismissed it as a trick of the A/C. But now it was everywhere, permeating the outside air and even sneaking in through the various buildings’ ventilation systems and cracked window seals.

Butter.

Maddeningly, no one else seemed to notice. No one else seemed to care. Maybe it was the new diet, making him super-sensitive to wafts of cooking oil from the student union.

Butter.

He had to seek it out. the smell grew stronger toward the central part of campus: maddening, overwhelming. He rounded a corner into the quad and was confronted with a wall of buttery odor stronger than ever before.

And a sign: 1st annual SMU Student Pancake Cookoff.

“Oh,” he said. “That explains it.”

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July 26, 2012

From “Dumpee, Dumper, and Dumpest” by Eric Cummings Jr.

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“I’ve had my share of difficult breakups,” Karen sniffed. “I don’t think I have to tell you how outrageously sexist that notion is.”

“All right then, let’s compare notes,” I said. “Tell me about your worst, most devastating breakup, and I’ll do the same. One example doesn’t make a trend, but it’ll be ‘strong qualitative evidence’ as my professor used to put it.”

Karen set her jaw. “Fine. That would have to be Aaron. He was a musician, and a poet, but it just wasn’t working out and I was leaving to come to SMU. So I talked to him on the stairs in the old house he shared, and…it was devastating. The sadness in his eyes, the way he crumpled as he sat down on the stairs…I felt like a monster.”

“You had to see the look of sadness in his eyes,” I deadpanned. “That’s it? O tragic tale that hath such sadness in it. How did you ever survive a sad and reproachful glance from a person you were breaking up with?”

“I just told you how badly it affected me,” Karen shot back, her eyes burning.

I took a deep breath. “Okay, first of all: it can’t be a bad breakup if you’re the one doing the breaking. Have you ever even been the dumpee and not the dumper?”

“Well, sometimes it was a mut-”

I nodded smugly. “I didn’t think so. I, on the other hand, have never been the dumper, and I think my best breakup was worse than your worst. Want to hear some real angst?”

Karen, continuing to glare, didn’t say anything. She beckoned for me to continue with a sarcastic hand gesture.

“First: Camilla. She decided that the best way to break up would be to agree to every date I proposed and then just not show up, with the coup de grace being when she finally showed up…with someone else.”

“Maybe she-”

“Second,” I said, counting the instances off on my fingers. “Beck. She sent me a Dear John. In the form of a MySpace message. From her new boyfriend’s account, or rather his shitty emo band’s account. The best part is that I’m the one who took her to one of their shows in the first place hoping to impress her.”

“Well, if your music tast-”

“Third.” I was pressing a bit too hard, maybe, but there was no stopping in the heat of a passionate argument. “Steph. Turns out she was still carrying a torch for her ex. She ditched me for him. At the mall. They ran into each other randomly, I have it on good authority that they made out in the food court’s family bathroom, and then left together. I combed the mall for two hours before she deigned to text me. From his cell phone.”

Karen was silent, one eyebrow cocked. “You about finished there, Mr. Lonelyhearts? Maybe, if you like, we could have an actual discussion without all the emotional hand grenades you’re throwing. Or are we done here?”

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June 28, 2012

From “Interview With Œ” by Eric Cummings, Jr.

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I was thrust into a back room, illuminated only by a single overhead bulb. I think Œ sat casually slouched on a folding chair directly beneath it; I’m not sure because the figure there was clad in baggy cargo jeans, an oversized hoodie, a ragged baseball cap, big dark Ray-Bans, and a drawn bandana with a skeletal grin printed on it. It was impossible to tell their age, gender, or anything else about them, other than the fact that some kind of flesh filled those tattered raiments.

“A little theatrical, don’t you think?” I said. One of the others, dressed similarly to Œ, set out a folded chair for me and I took a seat. “If you really wanted to be anonymous we could have talked more on the phone.”

“But you want theatricality, Mr. Cummings,” Œ said. Their voice was distorted by one of those vox boxes you sometimes hear in cheap horror movies, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little disconcerted by it. “You’re enough of a narcissist that you have to see your little investigation as a titanic struggle between you, the hero, and us, the blackest evil. If I were sitting here, ordinary and unmasked, you’d be devastated.”

I stung a little from that observation. “I just want the truth. What is this ‘Project’ you’re working on, and how do all these little bits and pieces fit together?”

“The truth?” Œ’s laughter was modified into an ominous chuckle. “It’s never been about the truth. It’s been you tilting at windmills from the start, sacrificing what little journalistic integrity you had for the sake of bad puns. The fact that you can’t see the bigger picture is indicative of your failings as a person: petty, narcissistic, lazy, with a latent but distinct fascist bent.”

Who was that rag-clad hobo to call me all that? I was trembling by now, the way I always do during any kind of a confrontation. “If you wanted to insult me you could have just sent a letter to the editor. Now either give me something about your ‘Project’ or crawl back into whatever hole you came out of and go back to sharpening your hammer and sickle.”

Œ laughed again. “The Project is the perfect small-scale experiment. What is a university but an ironclad despotism, with a vast disenfranchised population at the whims of a privileged few, just like any other system? Those people have the power to be awakened and moved to action. That’s what we’re doing, and it’s just the start.”

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June 25, 2012

From “The Z in Zine, the X in Comix” by Joey Gilbertson Chino

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Zines. Short for magazine or fanzine. Small-circulation publications, usually made on a cheap library photocopier. Usually a thousand copies or less of each issue, if there is in fact more than one issue. You’d think that they’d be the sort of thing that would slip under the radar, but as Underwater Basket Weaving proved, academics can study anything. As it happens, the Graphic Arts department at SMU is lousy with people that study zines; it falls to me, as the SMU Archivist for Visual Arts and Ephemera, to collect them.

Time was, most of the zines were outlets for paranoid schizophrenia on the Francis E. Dec level or extreme right- or left-wing conspiracy nuts. That was still true for a lot of them, but of course those weren’t the ones my faculty wanted me to collect. Like everything else that had once been an authentic mode of expression, zines have also been appropriated by hipsters. Now the field is full of people with art, design, philosophy, or literature degrees taking an inordinate amount of time and their parents’ money to try and design an zine that looks like it cost $0.50 to xerox.

So I write to peers in Berkley, New York, Austin, Ann Arbor asking for them to collect what zines they can find and mail them to me. I get piles of zine comics (the creators spell it with an X, comix, but I reserve that term for authentic stuff) trying desperately to be edgy and relevant and socially conscious. They typically wind up somewhere around “pretentious” instead. Then there’s the reams of bad prose poetry, cut up and pasted onto a sheet of notebook paper before xeroxing to make the tired odes to revolutionary consciousness and Free Tibet seem more authentic than the regurgitated leavings of petit bourgeoisie in denial.

I carefully place them into big acid free boxes while people come by to look and write impressive-sounding papers about these grassroots artforms. I haven’t the heart to tell them it’s astroturf.

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June 17, 2012

From “Green Grows the Grass” by Mark Woauiy

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The work of a botanist had long suited Alan Greene. There had been endless jokes and jibes from schoolmates growing up about his “Greene thumb” and Alan was perfectly happy to tend to his garden, which blossomed beautifully with tender care in a way that human relationship could never be relied upon to do. He wrote extensively; even though his ostensible specialization was ragweed and sunflowers and other Asteraceae, his knowledge was far broader and found expression wherever it could, from academic monographs to gardening magazine articles. His home in Hopewell, near campus, was a popular stop on the parade of homes due to its massive and carefully maintained lawn and flowers.

When he retired, Alan bought property in the Upper Peninsula near the old SMU field station that had closed in 1974. With quite the nest egg saved up–he had never married, girlfriends always pulling up stakes claiming he loved his plants more than them–he’d invested in a property out in the middle of nowhere, roughly halfway between Paradise village and Whitefish Point. It was equipped with a geothermal heating system, its own well, and a greenhouse almost as large as all the other rooms combined.

Infrequent visitors found the lawn to be an order of magnitude more impressive than the old Hopewell property, bursting with artful arrangements of flowers and grass in front and a garden bursting with produce around back. In the winter, heated by the geothermal pipes and the occasional cylinder of propane from Paradise, the greenhouse was a beacon of life, often snowbound.

When Alan’s remains were found in his garden nearly a year after his last trip to town, investigators were astonished to discover seventeen previously unknown varieties of flora growing about him–a last will and testament of sorts.

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June 12, 2012

From “A Concise History of Southern Michigan University” by Sharlene McKinney Vaughn

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SMU Seal

1848 – Muscogee County approves a grant of $100 to establish a small county school and adjoining training facilities for teachers. The first head of instruction, the Rev. Henry Watkins, dubs the institution the “Muscogee Catholepistemiad,” named in honor of Augustus Woodward’s original (and unwieldy) Latin-Greek name for the University of Michigan.

1857 – The village of Hopewell incorporates, including the site of the Muscogee Catholepistemiad.

1884 – The Muscogee Catholepistemiad closes during the Panic of 1884, having grown to 200 students. The city fathers of Hopewell meet to decide what to do with its assets.

1884 – The Southern Michigan Normal School is founded as a teacher’s college in Hopewell, Michigan. It inherits the buildings, alumni, and budget of the previous institution on the site, the Muscogee Catholepistemiad. The first class is 271 students from 18 counties of Michigan.

1887 – Coeducational instruction begins. Construction of Watkins Hall (“Old Hall”) begins.

1890 – The first intramural sports teams are formed. Enrollment tops 1,000 for the first time.

1903 – The Southern Michigan Normal School board attempts to negotiate the sale of the university to the state of Michigan. Governor Aaron T. Bliss vetoes the measure, noting the number of other state-owned schools at the time. The legislature is unable to muster the votes to override his veto.

1912 – The Southern Michigan Normal School becomes Southern Michigan College following the passage of the Southern Michigan Educational Act 1912. The Act is passed over Governor Chase Osborn’s veto, and the school’s assets are purchased by the state for a nominal sum of $1.

1927 – The university becomes a Division I school; the Fighting Potawatomi football team and mascot Chief Kawgushkanic lead the school to a top ten finish. Enrollment now tops 5,000 students.

1955 – Southern Michigan College is renamed Southern Michigan University, partly as a response to the institution’s massive postwar growth and partly as a response the the name change of perennial rival Michigan State University earlier that year. The university now enrolls more than 10,000 students.

1966 – The SMU Fighting Potawatomi football team is defeated by the eventual national champions 33-32, ending the season as the second-ranked team in the conference and fourth in the nation. As of 2012, the team has never equaled this performance.

1967 – The SMU “Summers of Rage” begin. A small campus demonstration against the Vietnem War turns violent, leading to the cancellation of the homecoming festivities.

1968 – In keeping with the unrest in the rest of the world, clashes erupt between students and police throughout the summer and fall. Homecoming, all football games, and commencement are cancelled.

1969 – The Fighting Potawatomi play their home games at Rynearson Stadium on the Eastern Michigan University campus due to continuing unrest. Homecoming is canceled once more, though commencement proceeds as normal.

1970 – The last SMU “Summer of Rage.” The football season, homecoming, and commencement are canceled. The SMU Board of Trustees fires the president and calls in National Guard troops to restore order. Enrollment slips below 10,000, largely due to the continuing unrest.

1972 – Commencement is canceled due to a bomb threat. This marks the last unrest at SMU for nearly 30 years. Enrollment is once again north of 10,000.

1978 – A major campus expansion program begins as enrollment nears 15,000.

1987 – Despite support from the Potawatomi Nation and community leaders, protests from out-of-state activists lead the Fighting Potawatomi to be renamed the Fighting Grizzlies, with Chief Kawgushkanic replaced as mascot by Smitty the Grizzly. The decision is mocked by some as Grizzlies have not been native to Michigan since the Pleistocene epoch; some fans consider the name change led to “The Curse of the Chief” which is blamed for the poor athletic performance for the following decades.

1999 – Total enrollment tops 20,000 students. Southern Michigan University is now the third-largest university by enrollment after Michigan State and the University of Michigan.

2007 – Massive protests once more rock SMU, leading to hundreds of arrests and two deaths. A local radical group called “The Nothing” is blamed by some for instigating the violence, but others hold the action as a spontaneous outgrowth of national disaffection with a stagnant job market and the Iraq War.

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May 23, 2012

From “Nathan of S’Mad” by Reqima Syrus

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S’Mad had been a fixture of the independent and underground music scene in town for years. The proprietor for many years, Nathan Rostop, simply maintained that after setting the little marquee for the joint’s first act (The Bynched Sea, a jazz trio led by SMU professor Sam Bynch), the S, M, A, D and apostrophe had been the only characters left. The fact that the odd name seemed to draw people in was, according to Rostop, a bonus.

Still, from its humble 1978 beginnings as a drain on Nathan Rostop’s UAW pension and disability fund, S’Mad eventually expanded to include a full cash bar (in 1983) a complete kitchen (in 1986) and eventually its own microbrewery (in 1998). Regional and local acts of every genre and stripe kept the house at least moderately in the green, from The Bynched Sea jazz trio to The Rescinded League folk metal to the Antique Threshers ska group.

When Nathan Rostop died in 2002, reportedly during a performance of The Highest Constable electro-pop group, the books were opened on S’Mad and it was found to be drowning in red ink, with operating costs and gig fees largely paid directly out of the cover fees in cash.

 

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