Digging into Durham: the James Joyce

12 Nov 2011, Posted by Ibe Alozie in Digging into Durham, News, 0 Comments

Chase Olivieri/The Chronicle

When looking for a slightly classier night-time venue than Shooters, some Dukies opt to frequent the James Joyce.

One of the best restaurants in Durham, the James Joyce is aptly named after arguably one of the best Irish writers in history. Situated a short walk away from the walls of East Campus and within seconds of Shooters, the James Joyce provides a quick get-away from the Southern cuisine of Brightleaf and the tiresome, American cuisine of Duke.

According to the James Joyce website, Owner Fergus Bradley came to the United States from the small town Ennis, in County Clare, Ireland. After a brief stay in Boston, Bradley came to Durham, and set up an Irish pub.

Adele Williams, co-manager of the James Joyce, recounted the history of the James Joyce.

“As you can tell, this is the original James Joyce,” she said. “It was just a bar, and the restaurant came along later. The street signs from Ireland and Joyce family pictures attest to the authentic Irish roots of the James Joyce.”

Much like many restaurants in Brightleaf, the James Joyce has outdoor seating with heaters, which makes eating outside a viable option in any temperature.

But it is inside that the real James Joyce experience begins.

Candlelit tables are set up around the bar, which has about 10 stools under it. Posters of different types of Irish brews and Irish street signs are only interrupted by televisions, mounted on the walls. Almost immediately upon choosing your seat, a waiter or waitress (rarely holding a pen or pad) comes by to take your order.

The menu features American staples like salads, grilled cheese sandwiches and hot wings, but the Irish cuisine of meat and potatoes prevails. Delicious options like Irish smoked salmon, clam chowder, sirloin tips with mashed potatoes, shepherd’s pie and fish and chips highlight the distinctly Irish menu.

The great food and experience has not been lost on one portion of the Duke population however. The spot has become a favorite of graduate students according to Williams.

“About 85 percent of the Duke students we get here are graduate students,” he said. “Lots of graduate students.”

On Fridays and Saturdays the James Joyce features live music at 10 PM. Directed towards college students bored of the club scene, the pub features Tuesday night Trivia at 9:30 p.m., which generally gathers a crowd, Williams said. Friday nights also boast All You Can Eat Fish&Chips from 12 p.m. to 8 p.m.—an ever-appealing concept to the starving college student. Finally, one of the pub’s most popular features is its Sunday night Open Mic Night starting at 9 p.m.

Uganda: two sides to life

07 Nov 2011, Posted by Minshu Deng in Backpages, 0 Comments

Victoria Powers/The Chronicle

Uganda, the “Pearl of Africa.”

When we envision the interior of this mystified country, we often reduce it to images of exotic jungles, complete with long-lost tribes and “Tarzan swinging through the air,” according to the flyer of the new photo exhibition in the Mary Lou Williams Center for Black Culture. The photos in the exhibition seek to get rid of these faulty notions.

The prints are fairly small for an exhibition, and the quality is not entirely up to par—several of the photos seem to have lost a significant amount of detail in the enlargement process.

According to Newsome’s written artist’s statement, the photos remain “real, unedited, ‘unphotoshopped,’ raw, naked, honest, vulnerable, true, ordinary and beautifully black and white.”

Although it seems Newsome may have gotten a little too happy with the thesaurus, his pictures do have a certain quality I found refreshing.

This quality lies in the fact that these photos clearly diverge from the romanticized visions of Africa characteristic of so many other photographers and those images made popular by publications like National Geographic. The images also evoke a “deeper diasporic connection” for Newsome as an African-American as he tries to capture a land where his ancestors once lived.

Duke senior Ubong Akpaninyie helped bring the exhibition to the Mary Lou. He said in an email that he also appreciated the photos for their holistic representation of Uganda.

“[The photos do] not depict the remains of the previously war ravaged country or malnourished children,” he said. “[They] showed the diversity that is Uganda and beautiful and realistic scenes…Additionally, this art helps show the diversity within Blackness and provide a space for black students to engage in their history and people. Although many students have no relation to Uganda, it shows the diversity of the Diasporic Black community and initiates dialogue to re-conceptualize Blackness.”

The exhibition will run until February 15.

DukeEthicist: OccupyAnswers

04 Nov 2011, Posted by Duke Ethicist in Backpages, DukeEthicist, 0 Comments

Movement for the sake of Movement = No Answers.

“The challenge that Occupy Duke poses to the Duke Community is fundamentally an ethical question. We challenge all members of the Duke Community first to explore where the rampant economic and social inequity in our society comes from and then we challenge them to critically analyze the role that they as individuals and Duke as an institution plays in creating those inequities. The movement is, at its core, an ethical inquiry into the ways that our lives shape economic and social inequality. These are not easy questions to ask: they bring into question fundamental assumptions that we make about the world.”
–Jacob Tobia, member of Occupy Duke

The preceding quotation was in response to the question “How is Occupy Duke an ethical movement?” After reading this reply, I felt the best way to paraphrase it was: “It is about inequality, so therefore, it just is.” Not feeling completely satisfied with the answer, I looked into various other resources to discover more about the movement and what it was all about. Yet, every single resource was about as vague as this reply. They said it was about fighting out against the 1 percent that control all of the economic and political power in this nation and making its distribution more equal. But how is this movement trying to do that? Finally, I came across the best answer in an interview printout on the table in front of their campsite. It stated in so many words: this movement has no leaders and is undefined. They are not particularly affiliated with any party, and have no clear goals.

This was shocking to see. Have none of these people learned how to properly critique something? I will take a moment to remind all who have forgotten that the best way to encourage improvement is to point out where someone needs to improve! It is as though a teacher hands back a paper and with a fat red F sprawled across it without telling the student where they went wrong. In this case, the Occupy Duke movement is boldly saying that our economic and political state is bad because it is rampant with inequality, without even beginning to outline how to stop it. Even if that big Wall Street businessman decides to compromise, they will have no solution to offer him. I find this quasi-hypocrisy very frustrating.

As far as the ethics of this movement goes, I feel that denying people information is, in itself, a bit unethical. The movement is asking people to stand behind an issue that many of them have yet to understand, simply because they fall into the category of ‘the 99 percent.’ It is a movement for the sake of movement, which is leading nowhere. (Perhaps I should make a more inclusive movement saying that dying is bad. I am sure I would have 100% support.)

Once Occupy Duke is able to pull itself together enough to actually effect some REAL change, I think that they will be ethically driven. If they can get the big companies on Wall Street to reinvest their excess money into more valuable, social change, then I will support the movement completely. For instance, Gene Isenberg, a CEO of NBR (an oil drilling company) was paid $100 million upon his retirement. Did he really need that extra bonus? Imagine how struggling families would have been helped had it been cut to $50 million. Imagine how many students would no longer be drowning in student loans. Imagine all of the vaccines that could have been administered! Only when Occupy Duke and all the other Occupy Together movements actually change issues like this can they be deemed worthy to wear the crown of ethics.

The Duke Ethicist is a project of the Honor Council which responds to ethical questions posed by the Duke community. Our purpose is to provide a medium through which students may anonymously seek advice or spark dialogue. Got a question? Send it to dukeethicist@gmail.com, and look out for a response on our blog.

This week in Chronicle history: housing models and seating charts

01 Nov 2011, Posted by Hong Zhu in Backpages, Chronicle History, 1 Comments

Melissa Yeo/The Chronicle

Evidently, Duke does not easily tire of housing issues.

On Halloween day 25 years ago, the Chronicle ran a front page article on a proposed new residential college system. In true Halloween spirit, the article bears an eerie resemblance to contemporary ones about the housing model.

First, some background from the depths of the 1986 archives: a residential model was proposed in the mid-1980s to foster a greater intellectual atmosphere. Dubbed Bassett-Brown College, the project was received with skepticism, paltry financial support and low student interest. As reported in an article from Oct. 24 of that same year, only 3.5 percent of student respondents in a school-wide survey said they were very interested in living in a residential college.

To add even more meta-ness, the article from Halloween 1986 talks about how a similar experimental residential model had been implemented in 1970. This program (named Students’ House for Academic and Residential Experimentation, or SHARE) provided Duke with its first co-ed residential hall. In other words, you are reading an article (about a little-known residential model from 25 years ago) based off of an article from 1986 (about a little-known residential model from the ‘70s).

Melissa Yeo/The Chronicle

On a different note, another article from Oct. 27, 1966, displayed a delightful seating chart for football games. As the caption explains, “the cheerleaders have drawn up this revised seating chart for the football game with Georgia Tech Saturday afternoon. The student section of the stadium will be divided up by living groups, with a sign marking each area.” And thank goodness for the signs; God forbid anyone sit outside of their fraternity section, or disrupt the cheerleaders’ carefully crafted social hierarchy!

I love rice and beans, but who doesn’t?

31 Oct 2011, Posted by Minshu Deng in Backpages, 0 Comments

Special to The Chronicle

As part of Hispanic Heritage Month, Mi Gente, Duke’s Latino Student Association, in conjunction with the Center for Multicultural Affairs (CMA), has rolled out a new campaign to challenge Latino Stereotypes on campus. The posters are hard to miss because they seem to be everywhere and especially because many of the faces on the posters are familiar ones. I first saw some while drinking from a water fountain in the Bryan Center after noticing one of my friends’ faces on one of the posters.

Most of the stereotypes are ones that a lot of people probably already identify as stereotypes: All Latinos work as construction workers, all Latinos are Mexican or all Mexican-born Latinos in the U.S. are illegal immigrants. Then you have some oddball ones, like one with a Latino student looking at what is clearly a taco with the caption, “I don’t know the difference between a burrito and a taco!” I’m not entirely convinced, thinking he’s just a bad global citizen at this point, but there is another poster that seems more appropriate to me, where a Latina girl exclaims, “I LOVE rice and beans…but who doesn’t?”

Acknowledging her diversity and embracing it is a refreshing break in a long line of stereotypes simply being debunked. Stereotypes exist because they have some minimal basis in reality. So in acknowledging the reality that yes, Latinos really like their rice and beans; or yes, Asians are super smart and sleep in the library all the time, we’re saying yes, we are different. But it’s about the principle of diversity over hierarchy. At no point should our differences be held over us; at no point should we use our differences to hurt one another.

“The campaign takes a lighthearted approach to the topic,” said sophomore Ricky Guerra. “It doesn’t lecture people, but in the same respect, it does make people have second thoughts about their misconceptions of Latinos on campus. I have personally encountered Latino stereotypes, but I’ve never taken offense to it. I am not doing this for myself, but I know these stereotypes affect many Duke students, which is why I wanted to participate.”

On a campus where there seems to be little discussion on topics like racial stereotyping, this new campaign from Mi Gente and the CMA has been long overdue. Another topic that is slowly generating a dialogue on campus is Occupy Duke, which, albeit far removed from the topic of Latino stereotypes, produced a response from junior Ian Harwood that neatly sums up the importance of campaigns such as the Latino Stereotypes one and Occupy Duke.

“I’m of the sentiment that this conversation just doesn’t happen unless you get in people’s faces.”

And Mi Gente and the CMA are doing just that.