We're Back!

Hi everyone!

Bet you didn't even know Ubiquitous actually HAD a blog until you stumbled across the address, right? The blog is fairly new, but this year's staff is planning to make it as important as the published magazine. That means we need SUBMISSIONS, so send them in!

This year we're accepting any writing submissions, whether they be poetry, fiction, interviews, creative non-fiction, reviews, critical essays, or anything in between. That goes for art, too. Got an art piece with writing in it? Even better. Don't have time to scan your art pieces to send to us in jpeg format? Don't have time to take a photo of your art pieces? No problem. Just let us know you're interested, and we can take the photo or scan your art pieces in for you.

Send any submissions or questions to ubiquitous.submissions@gmail.com. You can even leave submissions on a disc in our box in Chapel Hall. Our deadline for the magazine is October 18th, but we accept writing AND art submissions year-round for the blog. Want to write something for the blog, but don't know what? Just let us know. We have a ton of ideas that need writers!

Think the blog could use a make-over? Most of us involved in Ubiquitous have little experience with computers (no, seriously--someone actually asked what a blog was during our first meeting) so if you're willing to help us out, drop us an e mail at the address above.

And now, to kick off the year right, here's a brief history of Ubiquitous from our very own academic advisor. We can't update if we have no submisions, so share some of your work with us!

-The editors


**********


Welcome to the new school year, UBIQUITOUS! As long-time faculty advisor, I’m in a good position to give a little background…

“Ubiquitous,” the name of Pratt Institute’s literary and arts magazine, means “it’s everywhere.” When I first started teaching in the English Department (I won’t mention how long ago – I’ll just say it was well before my current classes of freshmen students were born) the name was more than ironic. Student enterprises tending to wax and wane in a more or less cyclical pattern, the magazine had languished, clinging to a shadowy existence as a name-only entry on the roster of Student Activities.

“An art school without a magazine?! What sense does that make?” I kept thinking. I had worked on a number of journals (Megaphone, Birch Leaves, Artemis, Columbia, Parnassus – I’ll bet even you zine junkies have never heard of some of those) and I was determined to get Pratt back into the running. A colleague remembered a publication years previously called Snakeroot, that showcased work by faculty, students and writers in the community. For a few years I was involved with a publication in the English Department called Thought Lines (with a sub-heading by Hannah Arendt: “We humanize what is going on in the world and in ourselves only by speaking of it, and in the course of speaking of it we learn to be human”). It was an annual anthology of wonderful writing culled mostly from the Freshman English classes. But a bona fide, student-run literary magazine, that also had art, as befits an art school – well, what’s the opposite of “ubiquitous”?

Apathy on campus was rampant; Student Activities was skeptical. But I fastened my eye on an older student in one of my classes named Stanley, who had both publication experience and enthusiasm. With a small grant from the Mellon Fund through the office of the then-Dean of Liberal Arts and Sciences, novelist Richard Perry, and a price break from my friendly local copy shop, a small committee of dedicated students put out a photocopied, Velo-bound 88-page edition that brought Ubiquitous back into the realm of the actual, even if it could not be said to be “everywhere.”

That was in 1992, and so this is the resurrected Ubiquitous’ 15th anniversary! It has been thrilling for me to see the magazine, like a child, grow a little bit each year in stature and sophistication, and to feel pride in my contributions in shepherding it along the way. We’ve had a pocket-sized issue, a hand-bolted rhomboidal issue, an accordion-pleated one, and one that consisted of postcards in a hand-folded box. One issue was 15 inches long by 2 inches high. (The writing and art was necessarily rather attenuated!) We’ve had black-and-white covers, color ones, glossy, matte, and one that was painstakingly brushed with a circle of vegetable oil on each copy so that the second page showed through to complete the design. We’ve had covers featuring photographs, paintings, graphic designs and hand-set antique letterpress type from Pratt’s well-kept secret studio. We even had an issue on a CD.

The editors have been from fine arts, commercial arts, graphic arts, art history, and our relatively new major in Writing for Performance, Publication and Media. It is truly a pan-Institute journal, and it is beginning at last to live up to its name: it now has two issues a year, a chapbook in collaboration with the spring poetry contest sponsored on campus by the Academy of American Poets, and various ancillary readings and events. Even the posters are impressive, as are the behind-the-scenes efforts to get them prominently into the public eye.

Recently, at the first meeting of the new school year, a dozen students crowded into the Writing Center to hear about the editors’ plans for the fall issue. The students were especially wowed by the current budget, incrementally larger each year as it has been painstakingly pitched and won in the annual Student Activities budget process. It’s a big opportunity – and responsibility – to work with a budget now more than ten times that of Stanley’s issue fifteen years ago.

So keep an eye out for it, and more to the point, contribute to it! I can’t tell you what it will look like, or what kinds of genres, both verbal and visual, you will find inside, but I can vouch for the fact that it will be something Pratt students – a pretty special lot – will be proud of, and that it will reflect them in all their astonishing diversity and talent.

Liza McAlister Williams
September 2007

Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)--Emily Thomas

My shopping basket is too heavy to hold onto so I put it down by my feet. Through the big glass window, I watch a couple fight and make up. The girl wears a long black coat. The boy wears faded tan Wallabees and a tie. The boy gives the girl a long kiss on the mouth, steps off the curb, and looks both ways. Someone pokes me in the back. The line has moved. I push my basket forward with my foot. I don’t want gum. I don’t want to read the tabloids. The woman in front of me pays with food stamps.

I make it home and my pregnant mother digs into the shopping bag and grabs the carrots and the mustard. She eats this every day and in a month my sister is born. Her hair grows in curly and blonde. After her first haircut the curls go away. She tries swimming and hates it. She tries ballet. Still no curls. I drive her to second grade and we talk about our dad’s new puppy whose name is Bernie. She gets her first pair of pointe shoes and I teach her how to sew on the ribbons. She dances in the Nutcracker. When she puts up her hair, a couple of curls fall out on the sides. I drive her to sixth grade and we talk about our dad’s new apartment in a different state. We like it. It’s bigger on the inside than it looks on the outside.

For a few months all I wanted to listen to while my mother and I drove in the car was country music. If a song I didn’t like was on Continuous Country, my mother would sigh with relief, but I would switch over to The Nashville Way All Night and Day.

“Why?” my mother would ask. “Please, why?” And I would say, “Because it makes me feel good.”

On the first of February, we drove to her favorite restaurant. There had just been a blizzard, and the wind sent tree branches pirouetting into the road. Since it was her birthday, I let my mother pick the music. The station she picked was playing the song “Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)” by Bruce Springsteen. “What is this, mom?” I said. “Ugh.”
My mother cracked the window and threw out a piece of gum she had wrapped up earlier in a napkin.

“I wish I was listening to Tim McGraw,” I said.

“Let me tell you a story about this song,” my mother said. She brought a hand to her hair and poufed it into shape. The whole coif shifted to the side when she touched it.
“When I was a teenager, I would listen to the radio through my pillow when I was supposed to be asleep. And once I heard this song, and—“ she put her chin on the steering wheel. The car was filling with cold air.

“And what?”

“I just thought it was the best song I had ever heard.”

“Can you close the window?” I said. “That’s not even a story.”


emilymica@gmail.com

Thetis--Aldrin Valdez

for Mai Maguire

I met you in a city by the sea,
just yesterday
it seems. Your prettiness was harsh
at first, unusual
because most girls then
were blonde and stout--
you were lithe and ocean-eyed,
not in color but in gaze.

I heard you sing once, too,
in a bus to the mountains.
It was winter and your nautical tune
warmed the ride through valley frosts.

And then you became a friend
years later, in the flotsam-jetsam of hurricane times.
I ended up beside you in class sifting too slowly
through millennia of art, pausing to consider
a then-faint metaphor
in the Cycladic shores of Grecian yore.

Since then, you've become too quick.
You move too fast and too much,
I can barely keep a memory still;
it ripples with a mere touch
and then I remember I cannot breathe water.

I would like one day
to grasp you completely, secure you
in the tangle of my arms,
finally tangible and exhausted of all forms
except one:

My friend
my sister.

Aldrin Valdez is a Sophomore Painting Major.
avaldez@pratt.edu

Serial Poems -- Erin Heath

Dearest Mousetrap Inventor,

their coats are still white, buried beneath theories

Look; produce; compare among the scientists
before oceans before bones,
it turned out a glitch produced a gene
for reasons, not mutation.
An experiment, a mixture of circumstance builds
a complex mousetrap.
Such a system falls with evolution’s
modern jawless equivalents
of incremental changes: 9.82 meters per second per second







The tracks of scientists scratch the kin

of a bitten skeleton. The teeth remain closed,
half-blown, scattered glass on glass table.
A direct afarensis stature, the frame sized unlike

a modern two scientists, unclear, a key of
a key of evidence happened before.
uncover
the States’
wobbly foundation







Dear Fahrenheit,

The object, unnamed trumps its discovery, tagged with
only 1.5 pixels. The telescope measures the ground.
Observations of a moon circling, enabling the release

Science operates a new report, shuffling thin white rectangles.
They spin out until they look like stars whose light takes years.
A percent of light, analysis, percent of
planetary shock—

Shooting geysers transform to ice crystals, a sheen
of freshly fallen snow. Nine billion miles
liquid water

shooting geysers minus 400 degrees

an eccentric atmosphere sweating organisms:
astronomer should be regarded as
two distant objects







Outer

Crashing crafts, help scientists.
Water might lurk deep in dark craters. Help future human
early lunar hydrogen
bound for the south pole,
identified identified identified
help astronauts off-land, the first to strike.
A craft will fly, launch Earth before slamming






Dear Mathematics,

Dr.,
the date
ancient keys and locks
Dr.
find any piece
an elegant,
of course
formulate
Dr.
be considerate,
three pieces
what, Dr.?
even if this calculates
it doesn’t show much






Dear Scientist,

A plume of debris rising 30 miles before
hitting the moon. Looking 90 degrees against the darkness,
high high increase of the orbit,
aim the telescope, smash into distant bodies,
A heavy copper comet ejected from a stone






Dear Force,

Earth’s magnetic storms send large flares.
Their intricacies introduce a phenomenon called
atoms,
stripped of ultraviolet force,
these temperatures are high enough to
x-ray the loops
beyond a fuzzy dawn.
The first sign the first high x-ray
the loop the pointed the rounded
then a wave






Crossing

A pocket would be expected to glow
at high velocities, causing ions
to suddenly bash near the
edge of the loop.
The lack of such electric lines
lines
relatively converge.
The strong halt
against a mattress, a motion charged,
a big trap






Burn

In a field, a lightbulb dissipating
over the years, a flux,
such fields, parallel to the sun,
a flat sheet
working over time as a result of
the current giving rise,
the weak x-rays
a series, a sequence,
the mysterious source reaching its peak
within two minutes—such fields




Erin Heath is a Junior writing major
cityscorp@hotmail.com

REWIND -- Katie Cheek

I threw up. I ate three slices of pizza. The pizza arrived and I was starving. In the car, I begged my mother to order Pizza Hut. When I was putting on my pants and shoes, my mom asked me what I was hungry for. The nurse gave me graham crackers and diet coke. My vision was blurry. I couldn't open my eyes but I could hear a little boy screaming. The nurses were gossiping. 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, I'm not going to fall asleep 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, I'm going to college in Brooklyn next year, 96, 97, 98, 99, I can move my left arm if need be, 100. The metal table was freezing. She gave me a heated blanket. I almost tripped on my IV cord. The nurse had to hang the IV bag from the bathroom door so I could use the bathroom. It was weird trying to walk attached to a pole. When I stood up, I immediately grabbed the back of my gown so as not to moon the hospital staff. My Dad came back. My mom touched my hand. My hand hurt. The nurse tried three times to put in my IV before she was successful. Laura came in and read me a book. They gave me a heated blanket. My Mom came in. The nurse sat me next to an old woman who complained very loudly. I shuffled through the hallway in my surgical socks. I locked my purse in a locker and wore the key around my left wrist. Cheek, Katie you can come back now. I watched the news on channel 13 because that's what was on. I sat in the corner of the waiting room. Dad dropped us off at the door. I sat in the back seat. I woke up at 5:30 in the morning. I didn't sleep much that night.


Katie Cheek is a Junior writing major
katiecheek@hotmail.com