The Bowdoin mystique

Talk of the Quad: Turning sharp corners

Welcome to the 148th annual Ivies, perhaps the most sacred tradition that Bowdoin knows. And yet, it almost wasn’t. The first Ivy Day was held in the fall, on October 26, 1865, when the junior class assembled before the chapel to plant an ivy and recite the Class Ode.
For eight years after that, there was no Ivy Day to speak of, according to a 1976 Orient article. What would have happened if our grand tradition had never been revived? Would Bowdoin have become what it is today? Would we have devised some replacement for our annual festival of inebriated catharsis?
Probably. Whenever Ivies comes along, people like to say that Bowdoin becomes, if only for one week, what other colleges are like year-round. Maybe this is true, maybe it’s not—so long as we are students of this College, we can’t know for sure. All we know is that Bowdoin isn’t easy (grade inflation aside), and hope that our weekend of coordinated debauchery will make it much easier to re-enter H-L come reading period. Most NESCAC schools indulge in some similar celebration—Nelly and Yeasayer graced the Tufts campus last weekend, and Macklemore has made appearance at Williams, Amherst, and Colby in the past few weeks. When Guster and Hoodie Allen take the stage on Whittier Field tomorrow, students will indulge in bacchanalian revelry like they always do--but this year, it can’t help but seem particularly well-deserved.

Talk of the Quad: Bearded in Cairo

I arrived in Cairo on Wednesday, June 19, eleven days before the onset of nationwide protests that were to depose President Mohammad Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood. I moved into an apartment on 15 Bostan Street, a couple minutes walk from Tahrir Square. In true foreigner fashion, I found myself paying double-price for the taxi, dragging my suitcases into the lobby. Most apartment buildings in Cairo have a doorman—a bawab—and I spent our first conversation trying to explain that I was claustrophobic and was going to walk up eight flights of stairs to my apartment. He smiled and grabbed my suitcases as he stepped into the elevator. I started climbing.
The summer before, I had studied at Middlebury’s Arabic program with a friend who then recommended a language institute in Cairo. I took his advice, and this summer, I signed up for six weeks of an intensive language course and gave myself a week at the end to travel around the country.
In Egypt, like in every other Arabic-speaking country, people speak a local dialect of Arabic known as aamiyya. Aamiyya and fusha are like two languages that, while obviously related, are still noticeably different. I, like every other foreign language student, learned the latter—it is taught in schools, spoken in official capacities and used for all written Arabic. However, I soon learned that no one spoke it outside of a presidential address—ever. As I explored the streets near my apartment, I tried to pick up conversations with whoever was willing. Midway through one, the man I was speaking to paused, saying, “I can’t believe I’m speaking fusha right now”—obviously saying most of it in aamiyya. I was a Shakespearean character walking around twenty-first century London; all I was missing was the medieval outfit.

Talk of the Quad

This piece represents the opinion of the author:

Leo Shaw

Orient Staff

April 25, 2013

I visited Bowdoin for the first time in February 2011 and stayed in one of the hotels at the desperate end of Pleasant Street, right off of Route 295. To the 17-year-old me who had grown up in a beach suburb of Los Angeles, the opposite corner of the nation was more naturally grim than I had expected. Its buildings seemed to abide the weather with an aged melancholy, as if past generations had fought nature and settled for a stalemate that still held. I remember standing in the deserted and windy stretch of restaurants near the College feeling like Brunswick was a literal ghost town.

When I arrived, I had no sense of what New England life was like in any season. I’m not sure I was even aware of Dunkin’ Donuts, let alone Tim Horton’s. My only frame of reference came from school. I was taking AP U.S. History and American Lit, and junior year academic overdrive shoved a heap of historical associations to the front of my mind. Didn’t James Bowdoin put down Shay’s Rebellion? I’d commit suicide too if I was Ethan Frome and I was this cold all the time. Just focus on the tour, geez.

The character that kept popping up was Nathaniel Hawthorne, Class of 1825, whose stories I had recently been reading. It was all so novel—I connected the towers, shadows and lamp-lit walks of the College with the eerie townscapes of his fiction. The dark outlines of the Pines gave off the same foreboding as the forest that swallowed up Goodman Brown, and the severity of colonial houses seemed to hide unknown evils behind closed doors.

Back home in southern California, one’s senses work more straightforwardly. After all, my town was a long stretch of sand dunes a century ago; it has only one season, and its only legends were written for the screen. No one has ever been burned at the stake, experienced a Great Awakening, or influenced the course of history; everyone just drives their cars and surfs.

Bowdoin, on the other hand, has not only a history but a whole mythology. Pine stands and plaques, gravestones and cornerstones; there is a historicity to every part of the College that brings the weird and hallowed traditions of the past into our present. The creepy-crawly stuff of bygone centuries is never that far out of sight. My current residence—the old Chi Psi lodge—has skulls carved into its front lintel and an empty coffin locked away in its basement.

Hawthorne’s images stayed with me because they resurrect the world that gave birth to these supernatural extensions of this school’s identity. As an outsider, I was hypersensitive to them when I arrived and have somehow remained so two winters later. The freezing weather and ever-present historical tradition give the shapes of everyday life a sort of mysticism in my vision, so that settling into a town incorporated in the 18th century is more than a novelty. It feels a bit like living a narrative.

All this will sound silly to the hundreds of J.O.B.s on campus. Maybe I’m overthinking things, and maybe I was a little oversensitive to the imagination of our mustachioed favorite alumnus. But Bowdoin truly is a rich repository of the ghost stories, gothic designs and Puritan history that Hawthorne channeled so vividly. On freezing nights when I’m walking alone and the Quad feels alive with inhuman things, I get a tiny thrill as his world spills over a little into mine.

I know I’m not completely alone in this. One only need refer to John Cross’ wonderful “Whispering Pines” column to see that Bowdoin’s flirtation with the unearthly goes back a long way. In the 1880s, for example, students annually buried mathematics textbooks after a long funeral procession in honor of “Anna Lytics,” and multiple gravestones on the Quad bore her name. The cadaver hooks that still hang in Adams Hall are yet another morbid legacy.

For a better example, an 1888 article in the Lewiston Wednesday Journal recounts the rituals of Old Phi Chi, a now-defunct secret society whose hazing routine makes the men’s tennis team look like the Children’s Center. It is subtitled “A Gruesome Tale of the Era of Barbarism at Bowdoin,” and tells the story of an inductee dragged through mud, placed in a coffin, dropped from a height of 20 feet into a sail-cloth, and then tossed up and down above a bonfire for good measure.

The days when sons of Bowdoin reveled in the supernatural attachments of the College’s setting and origins died out with the fraternities and secret societies that revered them. Morbid thrills and pranks belonged to the 19th century, the way top-40 a capella covers and sweaty dance parties belong to the 21st. But as summer approaches, I am already looking ahead to those blustery evenings when the ghosts of old Bowdoin feel at home in the new one.

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