Sharing unhappiness

Talk of the Quad: Tomorrow's farewell parties

I was not—I do not think—among Peter Coviello’s favorite students. He was nonetheless among my favorite teachers.
Pete, or “Coves,” as his self-appointed acolytes called him to make him ours, had many wonderful pupils in whom he delighted. I’m thinking of the unexpected poets of the lacrosse team and the unforeseen theorists at the end of the seminar table who inspired him to clap his hands in joyful assent.
As Professor Coviello departs, I anticipate an outpouring of fond remembrances to rival those of President Mills. So it’s with a familiar proprietary feeling that I once again raise my hand to say something to Professor Coviello and jealously imagine the sea of other—maybe more beloved—students upon whom he might call.
Yet as we all lose Pete, I think that jealousy grants me—grants us—some purchase of this loss. I first took a class with Professor Coviello my sophomore year. It was a seminar on Freud that was among the courses he offered when he returned to Bowdoin in 2010. (He began teaching at the college in 1998).
I admit to some skepticism: What, I chided myself, could this effortless intellectual care for my thoughts?
Yet, when Professor Coviello wasn’t teaching electrically, or gesticulating eloquently, or expertly deploying jargon and obscenity, he was listening intently. Perhaps this is why I never felt as special to him as I, or maybe all of his students, secretly hoped to: Pete is an egalitarian. We were all peers in the classroom, if only for a tantalizing moment.
This democracy is not without pedagogy. Here, as always with Professor Coviello, I’m aware of the injustice I do in paraphrasing him.
The languages we, in academic communities, create and deconstruct together has a great power to sustain and unite us.
Put another way: the vocabulary with which we parse our thoughts and carefully complicate the seemingly simple can be turned to the work of our lives. This talk does not, as Pete might say, do nothing.
I would not be writing now (in any of the ways I am) if it weren’t for Pete.
Once, in a second course with him, I managed to suggest a word that he briefly took to using. To have permeated his vocabulary one one-thousandth as much as he had entered into mine was a thrill I won’t soon forget.
Yet I drifted quickly from Pete’s powerful orbit even while at Bowdoin. My senior year, he offered a course called The Queer Child and unfortunately, I didn’t take it and don’t know much about the course information.
It did cause a stir on campus with its title, and managed to attract to it a number of my English major friends. Queer children, they called themselves. Their eagerness reminded me when I too, was in the throes of his charms.
Even then I felt acutely out of his circle. For this of course I don’t blame him, but to be distant from people who shine as brilliantly as he does is a kind of winter.
But perhaps that’s too sentimental or not poetic enough.
Besides, I would like to think that Professor Coviello teaches a way of thinking and talking that will survive his tenure at Bowdoin, as it survives in me and in all his friends and students.
So farewell, Pete! You will be, and have been, missed.
Caleb Pershan is a member of the Class of 2012.

Talk of the Quad: A dream pop legend dies at Bowdoin College

When Galaxie 500 arrived at Bowdoin to play a show on April 5, 1991, few knew that the cult dream-pop band was falling apart.
“The notes rang out in cold clarity over the action, condensing themselves into a polar vista, beautiful for all their austerity and absence,” wrote Dan Pearson ’94 in a 2003 issue of the music magazine Stop Smiling. “Hearing it live, you were struck by this sense of space and the power of a single chord or word to ring and dopple out of sight.”
Months before, Pearson and his friend Christopher Heuer ’94 had booked the band to play in Moulton Union’s Main Lounge through the College’s Student Union Committee. In the tradition of college radio DJs eager to engage with underground artists but operating with limited budgets, they booked the band “on a shoestring,” according to Pearson. Last week I spoke with Pearson, who now lives in Connecticut and is working on a novel.
“It meant a lot for us to basically bring these things to Maine,” Pearson said. “Most of these bands that came up had never been north of Boston.”
Galaxie 500 had played the night before in Boston University’s hockey arena, warming up the crowd for the band’s better-known peers, the Cocteau Twins. After a transcontinental tour, Bowdoin was Galaxie 500’s last scheduled date before the band moved on to Japan.
But singer and guitarist Dean Wareham had other plans. Tensions had been building for weeks between him and the other two members of the band, drummer Damon Krukowski and bassist Naomi Yang, as they decided whether to sign to a major label following the success of their third album, “This Is Our Music.”
It was a time of transition for a whole generation of bands like Galaxie 500. Nirvana’s “Nevermind,” which signified the arrival of alternative rock on a mainstream stage, was released five months after the show at Bowdoin.
Sonic Youth, who had been a well-established underground group in the 1980s, released their first album with the major label Geffen in 1990. Their tour the following year was immortalized in a documentary called “1991: The Year Punk Broke.”
Galaxie 500 would never make it to Japan. When the band arrived in Brunswick, a fed-up Wareham had been planning on quitting for weeks, setting the stage for Bowdoin to become an accidental landmark in alt-rock history.
“We were scheduled to go on at nine that night, but the opening band played for an hour and a half while we waited in the green room that the students had set up for us,” Wareham would later write in his 2008 memoir, “Black Postcards.”
“Being a college band, they didn’t know that the opener is supposed to play a short set and then get off the stage. We sat in the green room getting more and more irritated. And that was our final show—an annoying evening at Bowdoin College,” he continued.
Even with the internal tension, the band, with its deceptively simple chord progressions and quietly building percussion, impressed the student crowd of a few dozen that filled Moulton Union.
“It was a truly awesome show,” Pearson said. “The acoustics were awful, but it was the coolest place to have a show.
Still, for Pearson and his peers, it was hard to square the musical excitement with the band’s apparent lack of interest in the school’s scene.
“[Dean] got so finished, he packed up and went out the door and drove away. I don’t even think he said thank you,” Pearson said. “We bought all this beer, and we wanted to have some beer and talk with them, but they just wanted to get back to Boston.”
The next morning, Krukowski called Wareham, still unaware that he intended to leave the band.
“Damon called Dean to say he was going to buy our plane tickets to Japan for the tour we had booked there, and Dean said he quit. Damon asked why and Dean said he had nothing more to say to us,” Yang recalled in a 2010 interview with Pitchfork.com.
Pearson didn’t hear about the band’s breakup until weeks later, when a tearful writer from CMJ (a music events company) called WBOR’s station manager with the news.
“It was a strange thing, because we were so excited and they were in a very different place with their relationships,” he said. “We really felt bad for a few years after, before the published accounts came out, and we thought it somehow had something to do with us.”
Galaxie 500’s records went on to become an important piece of the indie rock canon, but they remain as a tantalizing reminder of what could have been, as many of their contemporaries crossed over to commercial success while still retaining artistic control.
The former members seem to agree that a deal with Columbia Records was imminent, had the band stayed together. Instead, the band was finished, along with the underground era it had matured in.
According to Pearson, students booking shows at Bowdoin felt the effects. All of a sudden, he said, “You weren’t talking to some dude in his apartment in Chicago. You were talking to major labels.”
“There were some very good shows, but by the time we were seniors we had really stopped trying to bring these little shows to campus,” he added. “They were putting more money into bigger acts.”
At Bowdoin, the concert itself seems largely forgotten. I did a double take when I came across a poster advertising the show on a music blog this summer. Of the Galaxie 500 fans I’ve spoken to at Bowdoin, none had heard that the band’s last show happened here.
Still, the ethos that brought the band to Bowdoin in the first place lives on. In spring 2013, The Antlers—a band whose atmospheric, melancholy guitar pop makes them a sort of spiritual heir to Galaxie 500—played WBOR’s spring concert in Smith Union before a similarly enraptured crowd.
Last spring brought an equally successful show from underground rapper Murs. While the members of Galaxie 500 seem unlikely to reunite—Wareham has a solo career, while the other two members perform as Damon & Naomi—independent music has once again found a home at Bowdoin.

Talk of the Quad

This piece represents the opinion of the author:

Oriana Farnham

Contributor

May 2, 2014

I had a conversation with one of my proctees recently that made me angry. Usually after a hard conversation with a resident or a friend, I end up in the same space as that person. If they’re sad, I also get down; if they’re worried, I worry about those same things. In this conversation, though, my proctee was pretty down, and afterward I was angry.

I was angry that in his second semester at Bowdoin he felt pressure to “be OK.” In fact, he felt pressure to be better than OK—he felt like it was his fault for not being happy here. I wondered, how is it possible that someone doesn’t know that people are unhappy at Bowdoin?

Even just among my friends I have seen that Bowdoin students have rough days, rough weeks, rough semesters. So what are we doing every day that gives the impression that we’re always having the time of our lives?

I remember former director of Residential Life (ResLife) Mary Pat McMahon explaining at a ResLife meeting during my sophomore fall that as the first years were settling in and adjusting, it was important to create space for them not to be happy with Bowdoin right away. She said that we should be careful not to normalize any one experience at Bowdoin, especially one of “Everyone loves it here!” Cue the parody of your RA with the constant robotic smile.

Like the dedicated ResLife staff member I was, I internalized this message and tried to carry it forth in my interactions with my residents. (This is why I was so upset that my proctee hadn’t heard that simple statement yet: “You don’t have to be happy at Bowdoin all the time.”)

ResLife doesn’t have a formal mission statement, but I have come to see that its mission is to validate all students’ experiences at Bowdoin and offer support as needed; it is in large part a commitment to empathy.

For my part, I have tried to provide a listening ear to my residents rather than give advice or attempt to solve their problems. I tend to balk at blanket statements like “Everyone should go abroad!” I want to tell people, “No, listen. That doesn’t fit me. My experience is different because I am different.”

So, no, I didn’t tell my proctees during Orientation that classes are hard, sometimes you bite off more than you can chew. I never warned them that eventually even Ladd would lose its luster and every themed party would blur into one sweaty first-year memory. I never said that making the journey to L. L. Bean at midnight isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, the Bowdoin Log is entirely overrated, and your floormates probably won’t be your best friends for the rest of Bowdoin.

They didn’t need me to pave a way through Bowdoin for them or to tell them what things to avoid. They didn’t—and still don’t—need me to label their experiences. Instead they’ve needed me every once in a while to listen to their individual frustrations, their successes and their stories.

The work that ResLife does to change campus culture is slow but essential. In the broadest sense, we try to create space for every individual Bowdoin student to be heard and we try to give voice to the multiplicity of Bowdoins that exist for students, good and bad.

At least, that is what I have gotten from my interactions with ResLife staff members, and what I have tried to pay forward, too. It’s slow because it often happens in late night conversations between just two people when one person is stressed, tired and vulnerable. These conversations are often about feelings we’d rather not discuss by daylight. But in the accumulation of all these conversations, these moments, I see change.

On my most optimistic days at Bowdoin, I see us moving towards a culture of greater empathy and acceptance, and of openness to learning from each other—a culture in which we can be more open about being not OK.

It’s tiring, though. Not just for members of ResLife staff, but for anyone who holds someone else’s frustrations, fears or pain. It can be draining and disheartening. I’ve had more than my share of bad days because of someone else’s unhappiness. I see now that my sophomore slump, which, really, could be better characterized as a sophomore series of slumps, was in large part a result of some of those really bad days.

But from where I stand now, at the end of my junior year looking toward a senior year without ResLife, I am grateful, not bitter. It is through these conversations, as hard as they have been, that I have made some of my deepest connections at Bowdoin.

I am honored and humbled by all of the people who have trusted me with their unhappinesses and their bad days. I have basked in the warmth of the intimacy and genuineness of those conversations. I have held them close to me to remind myself on my own bad days that sadness, apathy, anger, loneliness—they’re natural feelings and I am not alone in them.

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