Turning sharp corners

Talk of the Quad: The Bowdoin mystique

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.

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:

Linda Kinstler

Staff Writer

April 25, 2013

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.

The liberal arts has taken something of a beating this academic year. Months before the NAS report was released, a profusion of articles took aim at the plight of our purportedly aimless generation, deriding us for our reverence of a system of higher education from which we are promised few returns. “The state of people in their twenties” became a subject for popular debate, prompting Nathan Heller—a well-seasoned twenty-something himself—to defend our demographic in the pages of The New Yorker. “They are moved by dreams of adult happiness, but the form of those dreams is as serendipitous as ripples in a dune of sand,” Heller wrote, back in January. “Where you start out—rich or poor, rustic or urbane—won’t determine where you end up, perhaps, but it will determine how you get there. The twenties are when we turn what Frank O’Hara called ‘sharp corners.’”

Bowdoin’s curriculum prepares us to do all manner of things, or to do nothing—it is, for better or for worse, what we make of it. The same goes for Ivies.
But given the year we have had, maybe it would be fitting to take this year’s Ivies as a celebration of the liberal arts, and of the feckless, aimless, twenty-somethings who believe in their purpose.

After all, Ivies began as a celebration of youth—back in 1865, the juniors had to invite the outgoing seniors to take part in their fun. Then, the seniors celebrated by walking to their last chapel service, after smoking a peace pipe together. Tomorrow, seniors will make their last pilgrimage to celebrate on the Brunswick Quad, after no doubt sharing some peace pipes of their own. The feelings of nostalgia that trek is sure to enjoin are a foundational part of the Ivies tradition. So goes the Ivy Ode: “Oft in the future—/ Life’s chilling winter—/ Here shall we glean / Youth’s sunny leaves; / Mem’ries will throng us / Like strains of music / Wafting their burden / From o’er the years.”

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