Talk of The Quad

TALK OF THE QUAD
The Bowdoin Orient January 2016
FROM THE EDITORS

On September 9, 2011, the Bowdoin Orient published the
first Talk of the Quad.
Nick Daniels and Zo Lescaze were the editors in chief at
the time. Daniels explained their original vision:
We imagined it as a Bowdoin-centric version of The New
Yorkers The Talk of the Town. We felt that the Orients format
had at times constrained the imaginations of its writers and
editors. Talk of the Quad was created to feature the Bowdoin
communitys best short-form writing; allow aspiring essayists, journalists and illustrators to experiment; and provide the
Orients staff writers with a diversion from covering campus
news.There are many stories to be told about Bowdoin and its
people; those stories, of course, often evolve in unexpected
ways.
Last semester, we published the Orients 100th Talk of the
Quad. Over the past few years, these historical and personal
narratives have been some of our most talked-about stories. In
honor of the milestone, weve decided to put together a special
issue of the Orient featuring 20 from the past four years.
The Orients editorial board, with input from current and
former editors, sought to choose pieces that represent both the
evolution and flexibility of Talk of the Quad. Some of these
pieces remain relevant, like Ted Clarks Seniors Left Astray,
while others take on different significance with timelike
Eliza Novick-Smiths 2013 profile of Wil Smith 00, who passed
away last February. Some were published as recently as last
semester and represent the range in tones that Talks of the
Quad can take; from Joe Sherlocks humorous yet poignant tale
of fledgling presidential candidate Jim Gilmore to Hy Khongs
deeply personal exploration of his relationship with his family.
Talk of the Quad has moved in new directions since its
inception. At the beginning, most pieces took the form of
reported articles by Orient staffers; more recently, Talk of the
Quad has become a forum for personal narratives by both Orient members and other students and alums. Some are humorous, lighthearted or quirky takes on an element of a students
experience at Bowdoin; others deal with current events and
serious, sometimes difficult personal experiences. Talk of the
Quad has remained a space to feature the writing of a myriad
of voices. This year, writers have begun to record their pieces
aloud, and we hope that Talk of the Quad will continue to
evolve and represent more perspectives in new formats.
Whether youre reading these stories for the first time or
rediscovering old favorites, we hope that they will shed light
on different facets of the Bowdoin experience, familiar to you
or not.
OUR BIG APPLE

Sam Frizell, page 1
STUFFED ANIMALS
Zo Lescaze, page 2
BLOW, BUGLE, BLOW!

Linda Kinstler, page 4
SENIORS LEFT ASTRAY

Ted Clark, page 5
THE BOWDOIN MYSTIQUE

Leo Shaw, page 7
BEARDED IN CAIRO
Zohran Mamdani, page 8
LIVING HUMBLY FOR A CAUSE

Garrett Casey, page 10
WHERE THERES A WIL: THE STORY OF WIL SMITH 00

Eliza Novick-Smith, page 12
A CASE AGAINST DIGITIZING SPACE

Eliot Taft, page 14
LIFE PER SECOND

Toph Tucker, page 15
THOUGH A HOUSE IS NOT A HOME, A LIBRARY MAY BE

Marisa McGarry, page 16
SHARING UNHAPPINESS
Oriana Farnham, page 17
A DREAM POP LEGEND DIES AT BOWDOIN COLLEGE

John Branch, page 18
BENEATH THE BIRCHES AND THE PINE

Matthew Gutschenritter, page 20
THE LORE PACKAGE

Erica Berry, page 21
MY EXTRACURRICULAR IS NOTHING
Raisa Tolchinsky, page 23
TRADITION AND RITUAL

This special edition of the Bowdoin Orient was produced
by John Branch, Sam Chase, Matthew Gutschenritter, Hy
Khong, Alex Mayer, Emma Peters and Nicole Wetsman.
Helen Ross, page 24
TBT ABROAD
Phoebe Kranefuss, page 25
Cover Illustration
Hy Khong
BUILDING AND BREAKING WALLS
Back Cover Illustration

Zo Lascaze
ALL ALONE AT THE GRAND OLD PARTY
Hy Khong, page 26
Joe Sherlock, page 27
OUR BIG APPLE

Published on September 9, 2011.
Sam is a member of the class of 2012.
BY SAM FRIZELL
ZO LESCAZE
On July 4th, 2011, at around 9 oclock, a crowd gathered on

the balcony of Professor Steve Cerf s penthouse apartment on the
Upper West Side of Manhattan. The sun had already set over the
Hudson River, and the buzzing flock of old and new friends, neighbors and relatives, teachers and professors, spry young Bowdoin
students and wiser ex-Polar Bears were eagerly anticipating the imminent fireworks display, scheduled to blow, well, any minute now.
Steve Cerf, professor of German for 30 years, current department chair, last years Common Hour speaker, opera enthusiast,
social butterfly, and culture guru, is a veritable institution at Bowdoin. He has hosted the Independence Day party every year from
his apartment in New York and always invites a colorful range of
characters from inside the Bowdoin bubble and out. At the party,
he busied himself between the kitchen and twittering with the
guests on the balcony while his spouse, Ben Folkman, co-creator of
Switched-on Bach, the immensely popular, first-ever synthesized
version of the Baroque composers better known pieces, was on
hamburger-grilling duty, chatting with the crowd of Bowdoinites
and other distinguished personalities. Cerf, a legendary charmer
and matchless mingler breezily played the crowd, acting the perfect counterpoint to his tall, pony-tailed, musically-inclined partner Ben, who, though slightly less visible, played an equally important role in keeping the mood fresh.
Cerf and Folkman have been married since their ceremony in

Santa Cruz, California in 2008we are legal-schmiegal now, said
Cerfbut theyve been partners for over 30 years. Folkman comes
up every fall to lecture in Professor Cerf s popular course Literary
Imagination and the Holocaust on relevant composers, including
Shostakovich, Hindemith, and Wagner, but for most of the year, he
lives in the couples New York apartment, which is filled with more
thick rugs, cushiony furniture, slapdash bookshelves and stacked
records than they have room for.
On the July 4th bash, Cerf said, If youre talking about an
older couple like us, its really la recherche du temps perdu, a
walk down memory lane. Or like a superannuated Bar Mitzvah.
He paused. And of course, its Bowdoin on the Upper West Side.
By sunset, the guests were still lounging inside the apartment,
beginning to claim the hotly contested spots at the balconys edge
overlooking the river, where the fireworks would be set off of
barges a few miles downtown. The company Cerf and Folkman
invited was an impressive group, counting among their numbers
2001 Pulitzer Prize for Music winner John Corigliano, New Yorker
book critic Joan Acocella, and coloratura soprano opera singer Harolyn Blackwell. There was the old neighbor and intimate friend of
legendary author Paul Bowles from his years in Tangier, Morocco,
and even an ex-Radio City Hall Rockette, now in her seventies,
with elaborately done-up makeup who sat composedly by the door
in an extravagantly flowing dress, covering, undoubtedly, magnificent legs. Bowdoins finest were also reppin strong: classics professor Barbara Boyd and her husband, and former Bowdoin professors Helen Cafferty and Richard Korb all attended, along with a
smattering of current students and alumni for whom Cerf has been
a teacher, an advisor, and a friend. They included, among others,
New Yorkers Bob Paplow 81, Sally Hudson 10, Gabe Faithfull 13,
Emma Stanislawski 13, Leah Weiss 11, as well as Evelyn Miller
73, who also happens to be the mother of Adam Mortimer 12.
(Let it be noted that Adams mom said nothing at the party to embarrass him.)
The crowd hummed in the darkening evening, and the last red
light streaking the wisps of cloud deepened into black over New
Jerseys mock skyscrapers across the river. Bottles of craft beers
clinked against wine glasses and a warm breeze wafted the smell of
charcoal off the balcony into the endless free air beneath the perch
high above the New York cityscape. And thenjust before the city
went absolutely darkthere they were! The fireworks exploded
overhead like psychedelic umbrellas, funky geodesic domes, popping 3D spirographs, brilliantly colored. You could hear snippets
of conversation: Fantastic. Marvelous. Better than last year.
Worse than last year. I want dessert. Cant you pay attention to
anything for more than five minutes?
Afterwards, the guests lined up for peach cobbler, cheesecake,
and a dozen other assorted sweets. Everyone gathered inside as
Ben sat at the piano and sang a humorous Gilbert and Sullivan
tune, and the guests all joined in for a raucous America the Beautiful. The schmoozing continued as the evening lengthened, the
hour approached eleven, and finally, satiated with good food, wine,
company, and the best, or worst, fireworks show since last year,
the guests drifted home one by one, each leaving Manhattans little
Bowdoin a little smaller.
STUFFED ANIMALS
Published on February 24, 2012.
Zo is a member of the class of 2012.
BY ZO LESCAZE
Squirrels and crows may
be the most conspicuous creatures on campus, but the College boasts a bevy of beasts
far more majesticalbeit
less lively. A regal walrus and
black-crowned night heron
are among the many taxidermy specimens in Bowdoins
collection, and while scores
of students weave around the
iconic polar bear in Buck every day, other animals lie just
off the beaten path.
Many of these creatures
can be found in the PearyMacMillan Arctic Museum. A
snowy white caribou, several
seals, an arctic fox and a nuclear family of polar bears stare
down at visitors from a ledge
above the entrance. Its easy to
imagine the animals moving
in the morning hours before
the museum opens its doors,
relaxing out of the poses they
are forever frozen in. Most
members of this menagerie
were collected by MacMillan
himself and mounted in the
late 1940s and early 1950s.
But the museum is currently planning a new exhibition, slated to open in April, that will
showcase some of its animal specimens and the importance of various Arctic species to native peoples.
The exhibit is mid-installation, and the closed off gallery space
is in a state of cluttered, but controlled chaos overseen by an enormous polar bear. This more recent specimen, acquired sometime in
the 1970s, makes MacMillans look benign, with ripple-like wrinkles
raised around its snarling black lips. Out of the scaffolding, sketches,
and sheets of bubble wrap emerge other creatures, including a massive musk ox. Her coat and curling tusks look as though they could
have inspired the beasts of burden on Tatooine.
The musk ox will eventually live up there, said Curator Genevieve Lemoine pointing to a high platform. A fitting perch, as musk
ox like to be up high looking down on everyone
Placing the ox above eye level will also help to conceal the saddleshaped patch on her back where her long, shaggy coat has been worn
down to a crew cut.
SOPHIE MATUSZEWICZ
The ox, like the many other animals Donald MacMillan collected
on his Arctic expeditions, used to reside in Searles Hall, unprotected.
Some aged alumni still fondly remember sitting astride the animals.
Despite the damage, the musk ox stares ahead brightly, seemingly
unfazed by any past indignities.
She is not the only specimen with stories of questionable student
behavior. The polar bear in Buck will never forget a certain Busta
Rhymes concert, sometime before the year 2000, when someone
crashed into his glass case.
Somebody got thrown through the glass, and it was old glass so
it just came down like guillotines, Dave Maschino, the Arctic Museums exhibit coordinator, said animatedly.
Remarkably, no one was hurtincluding the bear.
Though Lemoine says she would not commission a specimen
now, the ones in the museum are useful teaching tools that offer visitors more immediacy than photographs can. The Arctic Museum is
not alone. Despite the fact that there is currently more technology at
museums disposal than ever before, most natural history museums
SOPHIE MATUSZEWICZ
have maintained their taxidermy collections, spending millions restoring their classic specimens.
On a popular level, taxidermy is also very much in vogue. Specimens stud fashion shoots and define the dcor of trendy bars. It
seems as though every Williamsburg apartment boasts a small collection, but you know its gone mainstream when Martha Stewart
runs a feature showcasing her own assortment of mallard ducks and
bear cubs. American Stuffers, an Animal Planet reality show that
first aired last month, follows a family taxidermy business specializing in the preservation of pets.
All of this to me illustrates our detachment from real nature,
said ornithologist and Professor of Biology Nat Wheelwright. Its
sort of phase two when we should know better, using animals to
entertain ourselves and others and use them as ornaments. I got
it in the 19th century and early 20th century, but to see a resurgencethats odd.
For much of the 19th century, taxidermy was the work of upholsterers who sewed and stuffed skins as they would a sofa. Modeling techniques developed toward the end of the century enabled
taxidermists to give their specimens life-like attitudes. Good taxidermy can evoke complex, contradictory reactions from viewers,
and its appeal may very well lie in its simultaneously attractive and
disturbing quality.
Taxidermys pull is its ability to make humans feel closer to nature, allowing urbanites to admire animals they may otherwise never
see. This allure, however, is accompanied by an unsettling effect that

does not necessarily compromise viewers appreciation, though it
does complicate it. Discomfort with taxidermy is partly due to our attitudes toward animal rights. Today, popular morality decries animal
cruelty and the fact that taxidermy specimens (especially highly endangered species like the polar bear) were hunted and killed is troubling on a basic level. On top of that, however, the manipulation of
the dead such that they look alive constitutes a macabre resurrection.
Wheelwright and I are standing in front of the small taxidermy
aviary on the first floor of Druckenmiller Hall. In a case bearing no
information on the origins or ages of the specimens on view (though
Wheelwright estimates they are at least 90 years old), 18 birds are
silently roosting.
Many are woefully dusty, but the passenger pigeon may feel forgotten for other reasons. The North American species once numbered in the billions but is now extinct. John James Audubon described a flock in terms that evoke Old Testament locusts: The air
was literally filled with pigeons; the light of the noon-day was obscured as by an eclipse...and the continued buzz of wings had a tendency to lull my senses to repose.
Massive hunting and deforestation wiped out the species, which
was often used to feed slaves and even hogs. The card below the bird
states that 7.5 million were shot at a single nesting site in 1869.
With its splayed tail feathers and wide eye (its right is missing),
the pigeon looks rather scandalized by the thought of its own extinction. The postures of the pigeon and his fellow birds reflect an attempt on the part of the taxidermist to imbue them with personality.
Wheelwright said the mounted specimens are not that educational, compared to the departments other holdings: They get dusty
and they kind of give the whole field a dusty reputation.
When he realized I thought the dusty mounts were the buildings
main ornithological attraction, Wheelwright laughed and said, You
havent seen anything.
We made for the second floor, and I, half-expecting to encounter
a Hitchcock-sized flock, followed him into one of the labs. Instead,
on the table lay the beautiful, perfectly preserved wings of blue jays
and raptors.
I was invited to move one of the hawk wings through space, to
feel the way it catches the air, and to examine special frayed feathers
that muffle the sound of the predators approach. The wings were just
the beginning. The next room contained dozens of shallow drawers,
each full of colorful birds in clear cylinders, like so many jewels in a
case. Some are from as long ago as the 1890s, and many of the birds
were prepared by students, who continue to use them to memorize
markings and morphology.
I think its very educational in terms of just getting a little bit
of blood under your fingernails, said Wheelwright of the preparation process. When you actually open the bird up and look inside, I
think you remember it in a different way.
BLOW, BUGLE, BLOW!

Linda is a member of the class of 2013.
BY LINDA KINSTLER
A note from the editors of the 1890 Bowdoin Bugle presents
the new edition as if it were a fellow-graduate of the College:
The Bugle, having taken a complete course in the cerebral convolutions of the heads of the several editors, now comes upon
the stage to receive his degree from the hand of a criticizing
public. We hope it will be at least, cum laude. What is it he says?
Vos salutamus.
The 2012 Bowdoin Bugle is the 154th edition of the yearbook, and it will be the last. When the final copy of the Bugle
comes off the printer in November, Bowdoins yearbook will
have completed its course of study at the College and will join
the ranks of retired Bowdoin publications in Special Collections. What is it he says? Morituri vos salutamus.
The Bugle is the only student publication that predates the
Orient. The first edition was printed as a tabloid pamphlet in
July 1858, just as the academic year was coming to a close.
Then, the yearbook cost four cents, and the front page
proudly proclaims it was published by the students, as it continued to be for its entire 154-year history. BLOW, BUGLE,
BLOW!a line from Lord Alfred Tennysons poem The Splendour Falls on Castle Wallsis printed in miniscule font below
the header, emphatically reimagined as a call to editorial arms.
The first Bugle may have been one of the most successful
editions ever published. The editors note that by press time, they
had already sold over a thousand copies in less than forty-eight
hoursa success probably unparalleled in the history of the
press in the Pine Tree State.
Only 225 copies of the 2012 Bugle have been sold thus far,
at a price of 75 dollars each. For each of the past two years, one
student has single-handedly produced the Bugle.
The decision to end publication of the yearbook was made
last spring after Student Activities determined there was not
enough student interest to justify printing another edition.
We have been rooting for the Bugle the last two years, hoping that some students would come forward and say, this is
something we really want to produce, said Allen Delong, director of student activities. That hasnt happened.
The death of the Bugle is no surprise. Thousands of high
schools and colleges around the country have already done
away with yearbooks. The University of Virginia retired its
120-year-old yearbook, Corks and Curls, in 2010, and The
Washington Post reported that despite its storied history, no
one seemed to notice. Jostens,
the yearbook publishing company which prints the Bugle,
told the Post that only about
a thousand colleges still print
yearbooks nationwide, down
from 2,400 in 1995.
Subscription sales were anemic, said Richard Lindemann, Bow-
doins director of special collections. There was a general lack

of interestif theres no audience then theres no product.
Students have found other ways of connecting with each
other after graduation; constant Facebook and Twitter notifications have all but completely eliminated the problem.
Students are carrying their own archive differently than
when I was in college, said Delong.
In its first few incarnations, the Bugle served primarily as an
inventory of campus organizations: the Colleges fraternities
or secret societies, as they were knownwere each represented by an etched crest and list of members, as were Bowdoins
literary societies, and, of course, the Bowdoin Militia.
Sprinkled amongst these inventories are editorial notes and
news snippets, including one poetic entry in the first issue demanding that during commencement, those students who
write poetry will be required to sit at their respective windows,
with their fair locks streaming carelessly yet beautifully over
their upturned, intellectual brows, while with their dark Byronic
eyes they gaze in rapture upon the feathered songsters.
More colorful editions chronicle reckless escapades at
Bowdoin in generations past. The 1898 entry from the junior
class salutes one mischief-maker in particular: Baxter, our
bold, bad criminal, whose misdemeanors have been bitterly
repented behind prison barsa reference to Percival Proctor
Baxter 98, college organist.
The Bugle ceased publication briefly during World War II,
releasing two special editions to chronicle wartime at Bowdoin. The 1944 dedication reads: Here, then, is a chronicle
of Bowdoin in what may be its last year as a liberal arts college...Seldom, if ever, has there been more uncertainty about
the future.
From now on, chronicling the life of the College year to year
will be harder than ever beforethe Orient does its part to record the weekly goings on, but our paper is no replacement for
the Bugles broad strokes.
As Lindemann put it, the end of the Bugle is a loss of social inventory. No longer is it guaranteed that a record of every
student, sports team, and club will one day find a place in the
Colleges archives.
The loss will be more profound over time as people age,
Lindemann said.
But the Bugle has been conscious of its existential peril ever
since the first issue. The present blast of the Bugle may be rather faint, but long ere its echoes shall cease, it will be followed by
a longer and louder blast, wrote the editors in 1858.
Like the Orient, each edition of the Bugle was an experiment, and it is a small miracle that both publications have managed to remain in print thus far.
Bugle adviser Robert Volz may have put it best in his preface
to the 1968 edition: The Bowdoin Bugle this year has attempted
to do two things. The first was to survive.
It is entirely possible that the end of the Bugle
is not final, but the yearbook will probably never
again reassume its current form. Yearbooks, like all
forms of print media, are moving online. For now,
we bid farewell to the Bugle just the way
it started, with a line from Tennyson:
Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild
echoes flying, / And answer, echoes,
answer, dying, dying, dying.
SOPHIE MATUSZEWICZ
SENIORS LEFT ASTRAY

Published on November 16, 2012.
Ted is a member of the class of 2013.
BY TED CLARK
For most students at the College, course registration is an exciting time to consider the future. For first years, with the fateful first
semester almost under their belts, spring course registration is a
subtle affirmation that, yes, you can make it here. In fact, Bowdoin
even wants you back for another semester! Sophomoresthose
confident, savvy Polar Bearsmay not know their major quite yet,
but they know what they like and definitely know what annoying
professors to avoid. And juniors, well, they could care less. Enjoy
camping in Australia next spring!
For seniors, however, spring course registration is a grim reminder of reality. Bowdoin cannot go on forevernor, frankly,
would I really want it to at the hefty price of $56,128 per year.
Continued on the next page (6).
HY KHONG
Continued from the previous page (5).

I understand that senior year is necessarily a transitional year
because planning for the future takes time. Right now, I sadly have
one foot in Bowdoin and one foot in my as-yet-undefined future.
But why do I get the feeling that my time as a Polar Bear began to
end as early as sophomore year?
The main issue lies with the College House system, which is
generally what Bowdoin considers its mainread, appropriate
venue for social life on campus. But who goes to these parties?
Let me oversimplify the system to make a point: Residential Life
chooses sophomores to live in College Houses, these sophomores
host parties for first years, and giddy first years are served alcohol
by the unfortunate lone junior or senior who has been wrangled
into serving as the Alcohol Host. So, what about these parties
would you call campus-wide?
Obviously, campus-wide parties are advertised as such and any
card-carrying Polar Bear is welcome to join the fray. Yet the College House culture of only catering to first years and sophomores
exists for a reason. Upperclassmenwhat I define as juniors and
seniorslike to hang out with their friends, who are generally fellow older students.
Now, I cant speak for everyone in the Class of 2013, but I feel
confident that Im not alone when I say I dont really want to party
much with first yearsno offense, Class of 2016.
While the College may not want to exclude anyone from campus-wide parties, I think that a little differentiation between the
classes is both natural and appropriate. If first years and sophomores have their own houses and their own partieswhich is a
system that I think works relatively well for the more youthful
target audiencewhy couldnt we expand the idea for juniors and
seniors? Why isnt there an upperclassmen-only College House?
Upperclassmen-only College Houses (why stop at one?) would
be a concrete step toward creating an on-campus social life for juniors and seniors. These houses could work in the same way the
College Houses do, but instead host events for seniors and juniors.
But, you ask, juniors and seniors arent prohibited from living in
College Houses, so why cant they just form a group, apply to a
house, and live there? They can, and it has been done already with
some degree of success (see Helmreich House, 2011).
However, there remains a stigma that goes along with living
in a College House after sophomore year. Quite frankly, its just
weird for an upperclassman to live in a place that Bowdoin
campus culture has clearly defined as reserved for first years and
sophomores. Yet by designating a College House as reserved for
upperclassmen (and allowing that house to limit its events to older
students), the College would finally acknowledge a place for upperclassmen on campus.
The culture of the College House system as it currently exists
caters to first years, and leaves upperclassmen to fend for them-
selves. This is not fair, and should be changed. Campus-wides

clearly dont work; instead, the College should give upperclassmen
their own space on campus and the right to host only other upperclassmen at their parties. Exclusion need not be a dirty word, but
instead a means to fostering stronger community among juniors
and seniors.
One argument against this proposal may be that seniors already
have their own spaces on campus. Remember that enormous tower
in the center of campus? Coles Tower is arguably the epicenter of
upperclassmen life on campus, but not in a way that fosters strong
community. You dont apply to live in the tower because youre excited to become friends with all 200 of your neighbors; seniors live
in the tower because wearing slippers to every meal is magnificent.
And having a single is nice, too.
The tower was originally known as the Senior Center, designed
to emphasize college and class rather than fraternity, as President
Sills said in 1964. In place of Greek life, the administration encouraged seniors to live, eat, attend special programs and suffer through
lectures together. The Senior Center promoted both academic and
social cohesion among upperclassmen, which is something I feel
has been missing.
I realize some great upperclassmen-only activities, like Senior
Night, exist, but I respectfully contend that subsidized blueberry
beers are insufficient, albeit delicious. Upperclassmen need their
own social space on campus. Though juniors may be busy booking
some party hostel in Amsterdam and seniors already have one foot
outside the bubble thanks to the relentless emails of Career Planning, we are still Polar Bears. I support Senior Nights and Tuesdays
at Joshuas and hell, I even support Crack House; however, relegating upperclassmen to these off-campus venues is unfair.
Ill admit, an upperclassmen-only College House is a radical
idea, and Residential Life would undoubtedly object to such dangerous exclusivity. (On a related note, sarcasm is hard to write into
an essay.) In all seriousness, though, I believe upperclassmen deserve a space on campus to call their own. If not a College House,
perhaps start smaller with a senior lounge in Smith Union, outside
of the pub.
As campus culture currently dictates, sophomores have their
houses and Bowdoins blessing to host campus-wide parties that
really only attractand rightfully sothe younger half of the
College. Upperclassmen? Well, at least Safe Ride goes all the way
to Joshuas.
The takeaway message for upperclassmen is that there is not
an adequate on-campus venue for us on the weekends. Sure, you
can have a nice cocktail with friends or attempt a good party in
the tower, or even embark on the long walk to Crack House. But
the current social culture at Bowdoin is that seniors (and those
lucky 21-plus juniors) have little outlet other than to take the
party off-campus. For Joshuas, thats great. For Bowdoin, Im really not so sure.
THE BOWDOIN MYSTIQUE

Published on April 25, 2013.
Leo is a member of the class of 2015.
BY LEO SHAW
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. Im not sure I was even aware of Dunkin Donuts, let alone Tim Hortons. 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. Didnt James Bowdoin put down
Shays Rebellion? Id 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 novelI 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, ones 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 residencethe old Chi Psi lodgehas
skulls carved into its front lintel and an empty coffin locked away
in its basement.
Hawthornes images
stayed with me because
they resurrect the world
that gave birth to these
supernatural extensions
of this schools 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
HY KHONG
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 Im 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 Im 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 Im not completely alone in this. One only need refer to John Cross wonderful Whispering Pines column to see
that Bowdoins 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 mens tennis team
look like the Childrens 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 Colleges 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.
BEARDED IN CAIRO
Zohran is a member of the class of 2014.
BY ZOHRAN MAMDANI
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
doormana bawaband 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 Middleburys 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 latterit
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 addressever. 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 cant believe
Im speaking fusha right nowobviously 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.
Yet even without a tunic and cloak, I learned quickly that I had to
dress differently. Caireans do not wear shorts, they do not use backpacks,
and they definitely do not mix the two together. My first days there I
somehow had not worn either, and was greeted with apathy walking
on the street. When I finally put on my shorts and placed my textbook
in my backpack, the same man who hadnt said a word to me the day
before was now eyeing me, speaking in accented English: yes sir, I can
help you with something? I went back to pants and a notebook.
At the same time though, I had arrived in a society where privilege
was a different color. Gone was the image of the white Christian male
that I had grown accustomed to, and in its place was a darker, more
familiar pictureone that, for the first time, I fit: brown skin, black hair,
and a Muslim name. With the right clothing, some took me for an Egyptian and most thought I was Syrianeither identity allowed me unrestricted access to exploring Cairo.
And yet, in the last year Ive added another distinctive feature: a
beard. It began mostly as a symbolic middle finger to the sometimes
spoken, but oft-accepted, stereotype that pervades America: brown
with a beard? Terrorist! When I got to Cairo, though, it became clear
that this fear of the beard was not constrained by borders. Many of my
Egyptian friendsfirst jokingly and then more seriouslytold me that
I looked ikhwani, like a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. Apparently there are four levels of facial hair: clean-shaven, a stylishly light
beard, ikhwani, and then activist. How activists get to level four without
going through level three, I dont know.
A world of intoxication
On Thursday June 27, four days into my studies, I stopped at Tahrir Square on my walk home from the Metro. The June 30 mass march
was still a couple days away, but Morsi was scheduled to speak later that
nightin part addressing the coming demonstrationsand so protesters had gathered to watch a projection of it in the square.
I sat down next to a bunch of older women, our eyes focusing on the
scene that was unfolding. It was a world of intoxication, of mass appeal.
Even in limited numbers, people packed themselves together, chanting
and clapping, led by one man sitting on anothers shoulders. Ending a
chant, he lit a flare and began swinging it around, as the sun faded in the
background. It was like a potent mix of revolution, soccer stadia, and a
shitty Newsweek cover. I felt at home.
After just a little while in Tahrir, I understood the addiction of revolution, of protest. Those who traditionally had little say on societys direction were immediately granted the chance to speak, with the promise
of an echo of thousands. Ideas of class and status were upturned, as men
without means stood high on the shoulders of others, their voices loud.
This new social solidarity was founded in a widespread opposition to all
that the government had grown to representinefficiency, unjustness
and sectarianism.
Yet, while many traditional social divisions fell, the barrier of gender remained. Although I saw many women at the protest, and at protests in the days ahead, they had to contend with the very real threat of
sexual harassment and assault, especially at night. @OpAntiSH and @
TahrirBG_DWB are two groups that strive to disrupt attempted assaults
and are present at most major protests in the square, with the former
reporting an average of dozens of assaults at the end of a night of protest.
Enraged by the stories and statistics, I thought of volunteering only to
come to the realization that the last thing Egyptians needed was a wellmeaning foreigners assistance.
I headed back to the apartment after an hour. Earlier that day, my
professor had urged me to watch Morsis speech. As I struggled to understand a presidential address, I turned to my Egyptian roommate for
some translation. He laughed, saying he couldnt understand it either,
although we both knew that his issue was the political message while
mine was the vocabulary. As his chuckle came to an end, he mentioned
my beard again. Having watched the protest in which the ikhwan were
denounced, I decided that it was probably time for a trim.
Changing Egypt, changing beard
That night, I went to the barbershop the next street over, telling
the barber in my broken aamiyya that I wanted my beard to look like
his, and while he was at it, to do the same with my hair. I felt like one
of the countless brown-skinned citizens and residents of the United
States who, in the weeks after September 11, traded in their beards for
razors, their pagdis for dreadsexcept that by War on Terror standards, Egyptians on all sides of the conflict would have been suspect in
America. Half an hour later, I emerged a fashionable Egyptian, with a
light beard and a faux-hawk.
I could deal with the occasional nice terrorist beard remark from
a drunk prep-school graduate at a College House party, but the threat
of exploding anger from hundreds of thousands of protesters was a different matter. I realized I was flaunting my stubbornness, not my activism, anymore. Yet even after my trim, the reasons for having a beard still
remained. My beard was a rebuttal

to the narrow associations that it
carried both in America and Egypt.
Singularity, and the simplicity of its
conclusions, is always dangerous.
The Egyptian conflict is not one of
two sides, instead it encompasses many:
from tamarod (the group that organized
the protests and reflects much of the
Egyptian lefts concerns) to the resurgent
feloul (the remnants of former president
Hosni Mubaraks regime), the ever-present
army, and the ikwhan (Muslim Brotherhood), amongst others. The confusion lies in
that other than the ikhwan, these groups increasingly speak with one voice, and so give
off the impression of a true political alliance.
Yet their united front is built first and foremost on a rejection of the
ikhwan, and so they are united only in oppositiona dangerous basis
for any partnership.
But this is not just a made-in-Egypt conflict. Among other backers, American taxpayers are continuing to fund the Egyptian army to
the tune of $1.3 billion a year, and it was this army that I was now watching depose a president, becoming the de-facto head of a nationnot a
democratic process as most Americans would see it.
While the battles to label, define and control Egypt continued to
rage, my roommates and I hovered between the pressure of apocalyptic
scenarios and normal daily life. We stocked up on canned food and instant noodles and stayed inside during particularly intense protest days.
Yet at the same time, I still went to class, and my roommates to work, after June 30. While most of my American friends prepared to leave as the
American Embassy in Egypt advised departure for American nationals,
I still didnt see the tense atmosphere that news reports described. As
the picture of Egyptian privilege, I found the streets the same, people
just as willing to talk, and the Metro just as crowded as it was before. I
could find the difference only if I walked towards Tahrir, where I would
encounter a checkpoint for patting down protestors, with hundreds of
thousands of people in the distance.
Post-Morsi
The masses got their wish on July 3, when General Abdel Fatah alSisi, the head of the Egyptian army, announced that Morsi was no longer
the president, the constitution was suspended, and fresh elections were
to take place in the near future.
While I was engulfed in the euphoria of the anti-Morsi protestors
in my neighborhood, my parents worry intensified with each day. I
left Cairo in the early hours of Friday, July 5, finally giving in to their
requests to come home to Kampala, Uganda. I stayed with my family
for two weeks, spending my time reapplying for my Egyptian visa and
attempting to convince my parents to let me return to Cairo. My parents
relented, and on Sunday, July 21, I was back. I met my roommates with
smiles and hugs, spoke my aamiyya excitedly, and unpacked my bags for
my last three weeks in Cairo.
The whole time I had been at home in Kampala I was sure that my
parents had been hasty in evacuating me. While there was violence in
Cairo, it was localized, and I could steer clear of it entirely. But when I
walked into class on Monday, July 22, I lost my certainty. There had been
two things I could count on for every class: that my professor would
provide his perspective as an ikhwan supporter during our debates and
that he would do so while bearded.

Although we continued our discussions, he had replaced his beard with
a moustache, robbing his facial hair of
its politics and leaving it only with aesthetics. He brushed off my questions as
to why, playing down his new look. We
moved on to grammar, leaving reality
behind.
My professor had always asked me to
walk with him to the Metro after class and
I had always declined, wanting to call my girlfriend or walk the streets on my own. That day,
I was so excited to be back in Cairo, in class,
living in Arabic, that I asked him if we could
ANNA HALL
walk together. As we left the language institute, he brought up his beard. He told me that
his mother asked him to shave it because of all the anti-ikwhan rhetoric
on the streets. He looked up at me and said that as her only son, he had
to listen.
We continued walking and I noticed that he kept his words to a
minimum, a contrast from the classroom. It was then that I remembered something he had said earlier. When I had mentioned the rise
in xenophobic rhetoric towards Palestinians and Syrians as part of the
armys ploy to associate the ikhwan with forces outside of Egypt, my professor advised me to stop speaking Arabic. He wanted me to speak only
in English, so that no one could mistake me for a Syrian. While I was
shaken by his words, I didnt understand their ramifications until we
were en-route to the Metro: outside of the classroom our conversations
were short, abrupt, and soft-spoken, all because of his fear. As we got on
the train, I had lost the joy of walking from place to place and speaking with whoever was alongside me; instead I resolved to put my head
down and walk briskly, treating every journey as a means as opposed
to an end.
From Cairo to Brunswick
On Wednesday, July 24, Sisi announced that he wanted Egyptians
to pour out onto the streets in two days to give him a popular mandate
to confront terrorism. Substitute ikhwan for terrorists and the message was clear. My problem was that the substitution went further; with
beard for ikwhan, Syrian for ikwhan, and foreign for ikwhan. Singularity
struck again, and even though I had shaved the night beforeopting
for a (creepy) goateeI still fit two of the descriptions. On Wednesday
night my parents told me to leave, and this time I agreed with them. By
Thursday morning, I was on a plane to New York. By Friday night, I was
in a bed in Brunswick.
I complain of my fractured plans to my friends, but my comfortable existence does not compare with that of ordinary Egyptians. Like
them, my last two months have been spent witnessing stages of turmoil,
yet while I stood by watching, they were swept up. My dependence on
Egypts future ended when my feet touched land at JFK; their dependence is forever. And it is for them that we must hope there will be a
resolution.
With such a complex situation, where do the answers lie? They reside in the border between the traditional pillars of current affairs and
the insights of the Twittersphere, with @sharifkouddous, @PatrickKingsley, @sarahcarr and @Moftasa offering the most insightful information. It is there that I would advise the interested to go, and it is now the
only place I can go, as the streets of Cairo fade into memory.
LIVING HUMBLY FOR A CAUSE

Garrett is a member of the class of 2015.
BY GARRETT CASEY
Even after two years spent working towards a Bowdoin English
major and thousands of hours curled in a ball in Massachusetts Hall
reading Victorian novelists, African-American poets, French deconstructionist theorists andmy personal favoriteIndian writers writing in English, the passage that most resonates with me is still one I read
in high school.
It doesnt come from a novel that carries much intellectual cachet.
Its not old and dense like Joseph Conrad or Leo Tolstoy; its not postmodern and trendy like George Saunders or David Foster Wallace; it
speaks more to naivet than sophistication.
Thats part of what makes it so important, not just for me, I think,
but for our generation.
The novel is J.D. Salingers The Catcher in the Rye, published in
1951. Its the quintessential book for angsty, disaffected teens, and although I was more happy-go-lucky and innocent than brooding and
rebellious in tenth grade, Ilike millions of high school students before
mewas taken with its narrator, one Holden Caulfield.
I didnt relate to Holdens cynicism or his snark, quite the opposite, in fact. I identified with Holdens dream job, which involves
standing in a big field of rye and catching children before they fall
from a nearby cliff.
The dream is pure in its idealism and its selflessness, rewarding in
its simple, single-minded purpose, andof courseludicrously nave.
The passage that jumped out at mea passage I thought I understood then, think I understand now, and will probably understand differently in another five yearswas the advice Holden receives from his
former teacher, Mr. Antolini, whose words address this childish dream.
The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a
cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly
for one, Mr. Antolini tells Holden.
The Orient reported on September 20 that Counseling Services was
changing its policies regarding appointments, partially to accommodate
the record number of students who are seeking help with mental health.
In an interview last year, Bernie Hershberger, director of counseling
services, told me that the most common problem for students of our
generation is anxiety.
Hershbergerwhose softly lit office, deliberate speech, and warm
manner relieved me of any anxiety I was feeling at the timeexplained
that seniors in particular worry about their futures, not only about securing a job, but also about finding a meaningful one.
Some of that comes from the privilege students feel that theyve
gotten in terms of their life, Hershberger explained. Their parents have
done all these things for them, and they should now take that and do
something really amazingly spectacular.
Hershberger characterized this sentiment as Millennial anxiety,
and althoughas Holden would tell usthis worry is not unique to
our generation, I think he is right.
The parents of many current Bowdoin students were the first in
their families to attend college, and they faced different socioeconomic
realities than most of us do.
10
Anxieties over grandeur and fulfillment were not luxuries they

could necessarily afford.
For many of our parents, college was often a means to a clear end:
a remunerative job, economic stability, andhere it is, the ambiguous
refrain of the American Dream, the task that faces each successive generation of Americansthe chance to give us, their children, a better life.
So here we are, having lived the better life, wondering how we can
possibly keep singing the refrain, how we can give our own children an
even better life. It doesnt seem as simple as it once was.
Landing a job and raising a family in a nice neighborhood with
good schools wont cut it for us Millennials. That was the progress our
parents made, and they fought for it so that we could accomplish something more, something higher, something impressivesomething thats
hard to describe and harder to achieve.
Think about the platitudes that youve heard at high school graduations and Bowdoin convocations, the assurances youve received from
beaming grandparents and strangers who spotted your Bowdoin sweatshirt on the train. Youre going to do big things, they tell us. Youre going
to change the world. Youre going to make a difference in peoples lives.
Youre the future leaders of our country. Youre going to make the world
a better place.
With messages like these, our parents and educators have cultivated in us a highbrow naivet, the belief that our intellect and elite
education will allow us to shape, change, and improve society, not
merely slot into it.
This Holden-like naivet prevents us from seeing the potential for
happiness or meaning in the ordinary careers weve learned to scorn,
the careers that 90 percent of us will eventually pursue. No wonder were
feeling anxious.
Occasionally it seems that if I dont become the next Paul Farmerthe global health icon who has spent his life toiling away in rural Haiti on behalf of some of the worlds poorest peoplethen Ill
be a failure. I want to beall Bowdoin students want to be, to some
extenta catcher in the rye, someone selfless and consequential and
pure and extraordinary.
Of course, Holden would tell us that Paul Farmer is a phony, someone who only does good deeds so that people will give him a slap on the
back. Thats another issue.
Mr. Antolinis advice resonates with me because it lets me know that
I dont have to become Paul Farmer or president of the United States or
Superman or Mother Teresa (another phony, according to Christopher
Hitchens) in order to find fulfillment.
Ive started to think that I might be happiest teaching English at a
high school, coaching the junior varsity baseball team, and advising the
school newspaper. Sometimes I worry that this isnt a grand enough
ambition, that Ill be letting down all the people who seemed so sure I
would change the world.
How fitting then that I have another teacher, Mr. Antolini, to reassure me with a simple truth: theres nothing wrong with living humbly
for a cause.
ANNA HALL
Reflections from the author

During my senior year of high school, I was assigned to write a speech sharing some bit of wisdom I had learned from our English curriculum. I chose to write about The Catcher in the Rye,
focusing on Mr. Antolinis advice to Holden Caulfield about living humbly for a cause.
Three years later, I was living in Bordeaux, France, enjoying plenty of red wine, of course, but
also enjoying luxuries that Bowdoin rarely affords: free time and time alone. Coupled with a 3,000mile remove from my normal life, those luxuries gave me space to revisit Mr. Antolinis words.
And perhaps because of a steady stream of emails from the Career Planning Centerreminders
that an internship during the summer following junior year could lead to a job following graduationI ended up considering those words in the context of career choices.
I remember my dads affirming response to the Talk of the Quad, especially his comment that life
was never simple and that his generation had its anxieties too. I also remember the reception it received from fellow Orient editors, who said they missed me and my earnestness back in Brunswick.
But most of all I rememberand wrestle witha comment from the high school English teacher
who gave me the original assignment. Responding to my occasional worry that teaching might not
be a grand enough ambition, he left a simple statement: Worry is the misuse of imagination.
I wish I could say that Im no longer misusing my imagination, that Ive come to fully understand
and accept Mr. Antolinis words. But when it comes to questions of career, fulfillment, ambition and
happiness, I have fewer answers now than I thought I did during junior year.
Maybe I should give The Catcher in the Rye another read.
11
WHERE THERES A WIL:

THE STORY OF WIL SMITH 00
Published on November 15, 2013.
Eliza is a member of the class of 2014.
BY ELIZA NOVICK-SMITH
Wil Smith 00 came very close to missing the first day of
classes the fall of his first year at Bowdoin. At the end of August
in 1996, he happened to be driving past campus and wondered
when the semester was starting. Hed been accepted to the College the previous spring, but no longer lived at the address
Bowdoin had on file from his application and had not received
any preparatory material. So he was surprised when the deans
informed him that classes began the next day.
He scrambled to make up for the time hed lost in missing
Orientation and began the semester with the rest of the student
body that week. At 26 years old, Wil was nearly a decade older
than many of his new peers. When he showed up for his classes
he brought an unannounced plus-one that caught his professors off-guard: his 16 month old daughter, Olivia, who he was
raising as a single father.
Professor Roy Partridge taught Wils First Year Seminar,
Racism. He hid his surprise when Olivia and Wil came to
class.
Id never had this experience before in my life, he said.
Id been teaching 15, 20 years.
Bowdoin in many ways was a whole new world for Wil, although one he would remain embedded in long after graduation. He grew up in Jacksonville, Fla., the youngest of 10 children. His mother died of cancer when he was 15.
Before Bowdoin, Wil spent seven years as an aviation electronics technician, specializing in land-based anti-submarine
aircraft in the Navy. He enlisted three years after he finished
high school and served in the first Gulf War. He was deployed
to all corners of the globe: Sicily, Bosnia, Saudi Arabia, Iceland,
Greenland, Panama, Puerto Rico and Argentina.
Growing up he had loved to read and learn about different
places and people, and travel was one of the aspects he most
enjoyed about the Navy. While deployed overseas, he made extra effort to immerse himself in the places he was stationed,
often venturing to areas the Navy had told him not to go in
search of normal people living everyday life. He was frequently
in places he did not speak the language of, but he communicated with charades or napkin-drawings. He says he learned
from the common people that most people in this world just
want to go about their business, theyre not concerned with
these issues that the government is waging wars about.
When I spoke with him, he was reticent about his war stories and careful not to sensationalize his experiences in the
Navy, evincing the humility and tendency to emphasize his
role as always one piece of a collaboration, rather than take
credit or attention for himself. He consented to tell me one
12
ANNA HALL
story about the time he was sure he would get shot down flying
a special operations mission over Turkey.
I guess the Turkish government didnt know we were there
and they sent planes up and I was looking out the window and
I was looking at these jet planes with these missiles ready to fire
and somebody yelling in the headphones. I thought we were
goners. And then within seconds they were gone, and I caught
my breath again.
When he was not deployed, Wil was based at the Naval Air
Station in Brunswick, which ultimately connected him to the
College. He had played baseball, basketball and football in high
school and in his off-hours, he coached football and basketball at the Brunswick Junior High School. (Mens soccer Head
Coach Scott Wiercinski was one of the students he coached in
basketball.) Some parents were initially skeptical of him, but
his dedication to the kids on the team quickly won them over.
It was here that he met Tim Gilbride, the Bowdoin mens basketball coach, who would eventually convince Wil to apply to
Bowdoin and to play on the basketball team.
The transition from life in the Navy to life as a student at
Bowdoin had a steep learning curve for Wil. He was one of
three African-American students in the class of 2000.
He hadnt told anyone at Bowdoin much about his situation. He was living off-campus and took Olivia with him everywhere because he couldnt afford daycare. Having missed
Orientation, he didnt know about how to sign up for a meal
plan, or that he didnt have to buy all his books but could read
them on reserve in the library. In the Navy he had learned how

to tinker with the hardware of computers but had never used
word processing. He hadnt been in a formal classroom since
high school and did not feel his high school had prepared him
for the rigors of Bowdoin.
I had never been asked to write a critical paper, where I
had to show, create a strong thesis and support it with evidence
from the text.
Wil struggled. He failed a Latin American history class
with Professor Allen Wells because he wasnt able to buy all
the books; Dean Tim Foster was the Dean of First Year Students at the time and Wil was the first student he met with on
the job. Foster recalls that Wil lost nearly 20 pounds and he
vocalized anger at the manifestation of a very unfair and unjust education system in the U.S. playing itself out at Bowdoin
co-starring [himself ].
His classes introduced him to material and modes of thinking he had never encountered in high school. In the divides
between his classmates and himself, he saw the disparities
between most Bowdoin studentswhose high school education had prepared them to be leadersand the people from
his community who he felt had been prepared, at best, to be
managers at McDonalds.
We never talked about the grand theories of social structure, he recalled. Where I came from we talked about racism as a practical entity which we were experiencing, but never
studied it in a sociological or economic framework. To hear
that some of these kids came understanding the frameworks,
was in many ways maddening to me, because this was the first
time as a 27-year-old, who had been in a war and travelled
around the world, had ever heard these concepts. And it made
me feel like I was never meant to understand them.
His difficulties did not go unnoticed. That first fall Professor Partridge went to the deans office to ask what kind of support they could give Wil. Foster told me that the College was
prepared to do nontraditional things to help a nontraditional
student succeed.
Betty Trout-Kelly, the assistant to the president for multicultural affairs and affirmative action, reached out. She said
she didnt know what Wil was dealing with, but that Bowdoin
would not let him go through it alone. After telling his story,
the administration quickly marshaled resources for Wil. They
got him an apartment in Brunswick Apartments and a meal
plan. An alum donated $25,000 to cover child care expenses
for Olivia.
The more time he spent with students at Bowdoin, the more
he began to think differently about being a student here. Basketball season started and the team immediately embraced Wil.
I got to know my friends on the team, those guys were
really good to me, and some of my babysitters for Olivia. They
were good people. And it was hard for me to reconcile my
disdain for a group of people when they were treating me so
kindly.
His teammates, Coach Gilbride and his wife, Lisa, were
among the first people he trusted with Olivia and remain some
of his closest friends.
He remembered a turning point in an Econ 102 lecture
where the professor was talking about the boom of the Reagan
years and the benefits of supply-side economics. He saw the
other students nodding in agreement but felt that growing up
had shown him that the things at the top never quite trickle all
the way down.
In my community, it was none of the rosy stuff that this
guy was describing. It was rampant unemployment, crack cocaine, the beginning of the war against drugs, the war against
black men, he remembered. He started building relationships
with other students too, who were interested in hearing and
learning more about his experiences.
He got involved with a group of students on campus who
challenged the school to change the composition of the school,
the demographics of the school, and it wasnt just the students
of color at the time, it was a lot of the majority students as
well. They wanted people from backgrounds who were not like
theirs to enhance their education.
When Wil graduated in 2000, he ascended the museum
steps carrying Olivia.The two of them received his degree in
sociology and economics and a standing ovation from the
crowd. As a senior, he was the captain of the basketball team
and received the athletics award for outstanding commitment
to community service, an award which was later renamed in
his honor. After graduation he stayed at Bowdoin, in the Office
of the Dean of Student Affairs, working to continue the diversity initiatives he had begun as a student.
After several years, Wil left Bowdoin and got his law degree
at the University of Maine, although soon after his graduation,
Foster and several other administrators took him out for dinner and implored him to return to Bowdoin as the associate
dean of multicultural affairs, a position they had created for
Wil. Wil returned to the College dedicated to changing Bowdoin fromin his wordsan institution for smart, East Coast
kids that didnt get into the Ivies to a place for dedicated students from high schools across the country.
13
A CASE AGAINST DIGITIZING SPACE

Published on December 5, 2013.
Eliot is a member of the class of 2015.
BY ELIOT TAFT
The other day, I drew a map of my hometown. I sketched the
houses and the office buildings into tight, symmetrical rectangles that
contrasted sharply against the scribbles of forest and farmland that
abut the village. I penciled the sports fields, demarcated the roads.
And then I drew the riverthe long, curvilinear body that swings in
and out of the town line.
I drew this map because, the other day, I bought a new Samsung
Galaxy phone. It is my first phone with Internet, apps and all the good
stuff. Because I am currently traveling and because I want to make
my life richer, simpler, more fun (as its advertisement suggests), I
thought Id get one of these phones to have easy GPS access and instant maps of any location I might end up in during my movements
in unfamiliar landscapes.
I thought it would be fun to sketch out my hometownand
then see how one of my fancy new apps would map the place, objectively, of course.
And then something weird happened. As it turns out, I made
the river in my town way too big. I
made a certain beach of that river
swing enormously and erroneously eastward. Compared to the map
on my phone, that beachs shape
looked grotesque and bulbous,
like a wart.
Its no mystery that the value we
attribute to certain places can, in
our minds, enhance the magnitude
of that areas spatial cataloging. Obviously, if someone frequents or has
fond memories of a certain place,
they will most likely, and probably subconsciously, make it bigger,
more grandiose than other spaces.
In an anthro class I took last semester, for instance, every student
had to draw their own version of Bowdoins campus. Students who ate
at Thorne everyday made the Tower central in their respective map,
many of my peers made their dorms bigger than the other dorms,
etc. As human beings, we divide, we categorize and we separate phenomena. Be it through language, symbols, mapmaking. Whatever.
The reality we experience, even as Bowdoin students walking along
the Quad, is infused with our beliefs about and our interaction with
that reality.
But lets get a little less theoretical. As a kid, I used to fish for rock
bass at that beach that I drew so incorrectly large and sideways. I
would dig up worms and snatch crayfish from pools and hook them
onto the rusty trout hooks that my father had used years earlier. As
I got older, I would take girls down there on one of those awkward,
middle school, is-this-a-date kind of things. That beach means everything to my perception of my hometown.
But now, lets get a little less reminiscent.
After using my new, techno-pimped-out-wifi-Google-Map-
14
wielding polycarbonate device for a few days, I started to use it for

directions pretty much everywhere. I started to look at the street
names within the beige blocks of roads on the screen, rather than on
the green street signs right in front of me.
And then I started to feel boredbored and sad.
It shouldnt take a lot of cerebral somersaults to realize that the
act of translating experience into digital imagery doesnt usually
amount to a whole lot of meaning or personal fulfillment. But its
not just that, Ive known that. I started to feel sad because I began to
put less significance into the spaces around me. So much of how we
move, how we project distance and create space in our mind relies
on the memories we have formed of the places through which we
have traveled. Place, all too often, gets intertwined with emotion,
sensation and reaction. When I think of places, I think of the people
I have been with at those locations.
And heres the problem with having the world perfectly mapped
by satellite in a tiny touch screen that sits in your pocket. Spaces become dully objective. You can always see exactly how far, how big
or how steep a place is before you
get there. Theres no more surprise.
Theres no more interaction and
curiosity about that space with the
people around you.
With an app one touch away
that perfectly delineates the edgings and markings of the world,
we will, less and less, match spaces
with mistakes, thrill, elation, heartbreak. As I have recently done,
we will direct ourselves through
ANNA HALL
pixelated territory and remember
those locations as the satellite maps
we first used to find them: perfectly and sterilely and horribly correct
and accurate.
If I had grown up constantly checking a phone to reassure the
cartography of my hometown, Im not sure I would have built up that
beach as such a big and stunning and magical spot.
Im trying, now, to use GPS mapping as little as possible. I prefer
to find a place on my own. I prefer to map the world in my head,
connect spaces and size places based on the phenomena that affect
and distress and interest me. In the map I drew of my hometown, the
inaccurate beach had little V markings of sand that looked like the
scales of a rock bass.
And I remember that beach so well, despite my current location
so far from home. So big and resplendent with stones as round and
smooth as eggs. I remember walking over them, clenching my leg and
shoulder muscles against the lopsided and incorrect feeling against
my feet. I was younger then. Im trying to walk out into some deep
and unknown poolall to impress a girl. She is at the shore, dipping
her toes in the water and throwing rocks at my back.
LIFE PER SECOND

Toph is a member of the class of 2012.
BY TOPH TUCKER
I didnt mean to graduate. I did a pretty good job of forestalling it,
finding every impediment to arrest the current. But time glides on, nature abhors a vacuum, and I am left with little time to even ask if it was
the Best Five Years! Well, except now, at 3:40 a.m., alone in the office.
In the morning Ill take the train from 116th to 59th Street. Ill turn
East and walk from 8th Avenue until I reach this building, at Lexington.
It is tall, a convenient landmark. Theres an emergency kit with a respirator and 250 mL of water under every desk.
Ill pass many people and recognize none. More people work for this
company in this office (one of our 192) than attend Bowdoin. Ill take
the elevator up to six, then walk down to three, sit down in 03E-113 (in
the fun wing, f.y.i.), and work. Gladly! For years.
When I arrived at Bowdoin I thought only of work. By the time I
left, I thought only of people. Today I am young again, and think mostly
of work. It can take anywhere from three months to three years to get
together with a friend. There is a lot I still owe you all.
There is one difference between Bowdoin and the world outside.
The world is sparse, big and slow. Yes, even here in bustling New York
City, there is a deep slowness. Bowdoin is dense, small and fast. Yes, I
mean fast. Its a supercritical chain reaction of people and ideas. You
cannot help but run into friends, and Searles Science Building is thirty
seconds from the Visual Arts Center and three minutes from your dorm
(depending). Now, I cant even get out of this building in three minutes.
So, yes, I miss the clichd intimate liberal-artsiness of it all. You do a
lot of living per second.
Alumni tend to tell students that you dont know how good you
have it, and to make the most of it. But that seems neither insightful
nor actionable. I actually have great faith in Bowdoin students ability
to make the most of it. Moreover, the first thing any alumnus should
acknowledge is that our experiences are a poor predictor of yours.
Graduation is divergent. With its bigness comes real lifes particularity, its incoherence. Our cohort dissolves; a generation falls out of phase
with itself. Other threads, personal and professional, come to dominate.
Life individualizes, independently.
Maybe they were the best fourish years. People rightly disagree.
Regardless, the best of the rest of your life will not be so neatly circumscribed by spatiotemporal boundaries, a contiguous place and time with
a name you can wear on your back. There are no more semesters.
At homecomings, this stings. For a moment it seems everyone is together again but it is soon revealed as a mirage, like crossing shadows.
What you recapture is a pale imitation. I described this to a friend. You
just have to learn to be happy with less, she said.
I found that blunt, beautiful, and true. But less what? Not less
friendship, less learning, or less meaning. Less density.
The campus was and remains a focal point, but the authentic alumni
experience is not the ghost we grasp at on campus. It does not play out at
the place we mistakenly call Bowdoin. Bowdoin exists in the fleeting,
contingent reunions, but it isnt encapsulated by them.
The authentic experience plays out subtly, quietly, for the rest of our
lives. Our Bowdoin is diffuse, radiating out 10,000 miles. It has been
there all along, but we only see it when our pupils dilate in the twilight
of what weve known.
What do we see?
We see what Bowdoin teaches, what remains when the cramming
fades and the lessons are distilled. We see the true Bowdoin Hello, exchanged between acquaintances who only appreciate the extent of their
shared experience once theyre removed from it. We see Bowdoin.
And we begin to notice new lights, in the distance, dotting the
sparse expanse in myriad signature colors. We hope weve packed what
we need for the journey.

I am alone in the office again. It is 2:02 a.m. My desk has moved
two floors up to 05W-202. Two and a half years after graduation,
its never too late to be late getting something in to the Orient!
Though much today is the same, I could not have written Life per
second at any other point in my life; the time when you can clearly
see both college behind and postgrad life ahead is shockingly brief.
I am happy to have captured the moment, for my own sake. In
the imperfections of a reflection you catch glimpses of a thousand
possible futures. A single sentence hints at the thread that would
come to dominate the next year of my life. Others are loose ends,
reminders that it could have been otherwise. I was elated to hear
from many friends and strangers who liked the piece, and am
gratified when it takes on new resonance with a student after they
graduate. And I have been proven correct, in my case, in the hopeful final notethe confidence that nature does abhor the vacuum
graduation imposes; that although stars are sparse, Bowdoin is not
the only dense bright spot in the galaxy. You find new people.
ANNA HALL
15
THOUGH A HOUSE IS NOT A HOME,

A LIBRARY MAY BE
Marisa is a member of the class of 2014.
BY MARISA MCGARRY
There are some rivalries that
just cant be reconciled. Sparta and
Troy. Ohio State and Michigan. The
Red Sox and the Yankees. Ive never
had much of a stake in any of those.
The only rivalry Ive ever felt passionate about is the one between the
Bowdoin libraries, and for me, Hawthorne-Longfellow (H-L) will always
come out on top.
I can only vaguely recall the first
time I stepped inside. It was a cool
day in June and a dark-haired sophomore in jeans and flip flops rattled
off a series of facts I did not care
about. (Over one million volumes! Named for members of the Class of
1825! $60 in free printing each semester! Inter-Library Loans!)
It wasntby a long shotthe most impressive of the libraries Id
seen on a college tour. It isnt considered the most impressive of our
campus buildings.
Patricia McGraw Anderson agrees. In her book, The Architecture
of Bowdoin College, she writes, The new library is neither a monumental building nor a competitive one. Monumental and competitive
are adjectives that accurately describe Hubbard HallBowdoins library
until H-L was completed in 1965.
Named for two of Bowdoins most prominent alumni, H-L was
built over a period of two years and was designed by Steinman, Cain
and White, the later incarnation of the same architecture firm that built
Cleaveland Hall, Moulton Union and Gibson Hall. In 1982, the building
was expanded to include, among other things, the underground passageway that connects H-L to the Hubbard stacks.
It is undoubtedly where Ive spent the most time on campus over my
four years. My dad warned me at the beginning of my college search that
this would be the case, but I waved him off. The casual keg-side conversations I yearned for would not be found in a library.
I wish I could tell you that most of this time was spent completing
assignments for my courses, but alas, I did not do all of the readings
for my classes. (Except, of course, for the ones Im taking this semester.
Hi Professors!) Sure, I liked my courses and have great memories of
them, but the time in H-L I treasure most wasnt spent reading the
Federalist Papers.
Instead, I explored old interests and cultivated new ones. Books
came to Bowdoin from places like Presque Isle, Maine and Williamstown, Mass., and I devoured them over long breakfasts in Moulton.
Those that had sat on shelves collecting dust came alive after I took them
out of the library for the first time. I watched the raised seal on page 55 of
every book the College owns morph as the years went on.
On the fourth and fifth floors of the stacks, I read the monologues
of Spaulding Gray, the dramas of Eugene ONeill and the short stories
16
of Ann Beattie. I uncovered the

history of ballet and the life of one
of its greatest stars, Anna Pavlova,
who would have rather died an
early death than never be able to
dance again.
When I should have been outlining papers, I snuck down to the
basement to read old issues of Life
and Time dating from the World
Wars to the Kennedy assassinations.
They taught me that infographic
is just a new word for something
ANNA HALL
their editors had mastered almost
a century ago. As the years go on,
typefaces change and advertisements taglines dwindle from six paragraphs to six words.
I attempted deconstructions of the best newspaper and magazine
writing with the vain hope that something would stick in my own writing. I fell in love with profiles of people famous and obscure, from John
Wayne to Zell Kravinzky, the latter who donated a kidney and $45 million to those less fortunate than him.
I spent more time than anyone I know in the Special Collections
reading room where youre not allowed to have a pen. After a four-day
search, I discovered that the marble statue in the landing of Hubbard
is Ophelia, sculpted by Pasquale Romanelli and donated by Henry J.
Furber of the Class of 1889.
When I was sure Bowdoin had made a mistake by granting me admission, the only thing that could turn my day around was looking out
onto the Quad from couches by the third floor windows early on a Saturday morning and watching dogs play fetch and kids climb on the lions
outside the Bowdoin College Museum of Art.
Libraries are time capsules that remain open for everyone and thats
especially true of H-L. Even its name harkens us back. And yes, the past
wasnt always an excellent onethe building was built at a time where
its doors would have been closed to me.
Having time in the middle of the day to randomly wander into the
stacks and spend an hour reading is one of the things I will miss most
about Bowdoin. Its the kind of thing that reinvigorates me in a way Id
never anticipated.
In the October 8, 1965 issue of the Orient, an anonymous student
wrote a letter to the editor, lambasting the new library as a good place
to take your date, rather than a good place to study.
The author hoped that change would come soon. He wrote, In sixty
years, the Hawthorne-Longfellow Library will be outgrown and Bowdoin can look forward to another, marvelously improved, designedwith-the-student-in-mind library.
The next ten years could bring a new library to campus, but I could
not imagine one that could have served me better.
SHARING UNHAPPINESS
Published on May 2, 2014.
Oriana is a member of the class of 2015.
BY ORIANA FARNHAM
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 theyre sad, I also get down;
if theyre 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 OKhe felt like it
was his fault for not being happy here. I wondered, how is it possible that
someone doesnt 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 were 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 hadnt heard that simple
statement yet: You dont have to be happy at Bowdoin all the time.)
ResLife doesnt 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 doesnt fit me. My experience is different because I am different.
So, no, I didnt 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 isnt all its cracked up to
be, the Bowdoin Log is entirely overrated, and your floormates probably
wont be your best friends for the rest of Bowdoin.
They didnt need me to pave a way through Bowdoin for them or to
tell them what things to avoid. They didntand still dontneed me to
label their experiences. Instead theyve 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. Its
ANNA HALL
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 wed 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 othera culture in which we can be more open about
being not OK.
Its tiring, though. Not just for members of ResLife staff, but for
anyone who holds someone elses frustrations, fears or pain. It can be
draining and disheartening. Ive had more than my share of bad days
because of someone elses 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, lonelinesstheyre natural feelings and I am not
alone in them.
17
A DREAM POP LEGEND DIES AT BOWDOIN

John is a member of the class of 2016.
BY JOHN BRANCH
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 Unions Main
Lounge through the Colleges 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 Universitys hockey arena, warming up the crowd for the bands better-known peers, the Cocteau Twins. After a transcontinental
tour, Bowdoin was Galaxie 500s 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. Nirvanas 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 under-
ground 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 didnt 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 showan 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 bands apparent lack of interest in
the schools scene.
[Dean] got so finished, he packed up and went out the
door and drove away. I dont 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 noth-
HY KHONG
18
e
s
k
d
g
e
e
n
m
s
t
t
-
ing more to say to us, Yang recalled in a 2010 interview with

Pitchfork.com.
Pearson didnt hear about the bands breakup until weeks
later, when a tearful writer from CMJ (a music events company) called WBORs 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 500s 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 werent 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
Ive spoken to at Bowdoin, none had heard that the bands last
show happened here.
Still, the ethos that brought the band to Bowdoin in the
first place lives on. In spring 2013, The Antlersa band whose
atmospheric, melancholy guitar pop makes them a sort of
spiritual heir to Galaxie 500played WBORs 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 reuniteWareham has a solo career, while
the other two members perform as Damon & Naomiindependent music has once again found a home at Bowdoin.
e
n
e
k
e
n
-
HY KHONG
19
BENEATH THE BIRCHES AND THE PINE

Matthew is a member of the class of 2016.
BY MATTHEW GUTSCHENRITTER
In 1915, David Endicott Putnam won the Camp Becket Honor Emblem, an award given to campers based on the strength of
their character.
Two years later, Putnam, who would come to be known as the
Ace of Aces, left his job as a counselor at Camp Becket to fight in
World War I. In September 1918, his SPAD XIII plane was shot down
over France and Putnam was killed. The U.S. Army posthumously
awarded him the Distinguished Service Cross. He was 20 years old
when he died.
At the dedication of the 9/11 Museum last spring, President
Obama spoke about the Man in the Red Bandana, Welles Crowther.
While everyone else ran down the stairs, Crowther, a former volunteer firefighter working in the World Trade Center, ran deeper into
the building to help get others out. Welles had been a Becket camper
and was a quintessential example of one of the camp mottos, Help the
Other Fellow.
This summer, Ill be on staff at Becket, just like Putnam was nearly
a century ago. But a funny thing happens when I tell people what my
plans are for the summer.
Really? Oh, thats nice, my friends parents say. Nice lingers, as
if theyre not sure if it was really what they meant. My friends ask if
its going to be my last summer or say Im too old to be a camper. The
Career Planning Center insists that I get an internship.
I get defensive when I tell people that I plan to return for my thirteenth consecutive summer at camp and my fifth on staff. The overachiever inside of me has an urge to justify why Im not applying for a
competitive internship program or a research grant.
I want to tell them about David Putnam and Welles Crowther.
But the truth is Im not going back to camp this summer simply because I think that Becket will make me more like David Putnam or
Welles Crowther. Nor do I have any illusions about my ability to turn
my campers into national heroes in four weeks, although
mature, thoughtful fourteenyear-old boys would be a
good start.
Every Sunday afternoon,
my phone lights up with the
weekly edition of Jobs and
Events I May Be Interested
In. In fact, many of the jobs
do interest me. I think Id like
being a White House Intern
or a Future Global Leader or
a Google Journalism Fellow.
Id also like to sit in a rocking chair on the porch of the
library overlooking the lake
and have to put a sweatshirt
on because the sun is quickly
descending behind the birch
trees. Id like to watch as my campers try to navigate a twenty-five foot,

hundred-year-old canoe back to the dock. Id like to remind them to
hang up their wet life jackets.
If I get to be surrounded by the Bowdoin Pines for nine months
of the year, I want to be surrounded by the birch trees of the Berkshires for the other three. I want my clothes to smell like a campfire
and my arms to be covered in mosquito bites. I want to relive the best
days of my childhood and share them with my campers, despite that
fact that many people do not consider it the best preparation for my
impending adulthood.
My friends and I are stuck in a tug of war between what we want
to do for the summer and what were told we should do. Were lucky if
nothing is pulling on the should end of the rope. Were even luckier if
the want and should ends are the same.
I hope the Offer of the College is wrong. I hope my time at Bowdoin
is not the best four years of my life, but I do hope that the summers in
between my years at Bowdoin are the best of my life because they are the
last summers of my youth. After college, summer is just a season.
My friends have good, fun, relaxing, boring, warm summers. They
sell vacuums and ice cream and stocks. They study Arabic and physics
and poverty. They sit on the beach and in cubicles and on subways.
Walking around campus at the end of August, you need more
than two hands to count the number of people who ask, How was
your summer?
I dont think Ive ever heard anyone say they had a terrible summer,
but I dont see peoples eyes light up when they talk about their summers
either. It seems that few people have a story theyre excited to tell.
Two years ago, my summer story was about a camper whose family life was so turbulent that nobody could make the trip to see him
on visiting day. He pulled me aside before boarding the bus home
on the last morning. He looked up at me and said, in an expression
of emotion jarringly earnest
for a pubescent boy, youre
like the good big brother Ive
never had.
Last year it was a story
about helping a group of
camperscampers who are
much cooler than I was or
will bebuild a cabin that
will house hundreds of campers over the next few decades.
When I return to Bowdoin in August, I hope I have
another story. I hope my
eyes light up when someone
asks me about my summer. I
hope the excitement I feel to
be back at Bowdoin will be
matched by the sadness I feel
that summer is over.
ANNA HALL
20
THE LORE PACKAGE

Erica is a member of the class of 2014.
BY ERICA BERRY
ANNA HALL
The night after Thanksgiving, I visited a damp beach in Lisbon, Portugal with a huddle of Bowdoin study-abroad students.
If youre stuck in continental Europe, this sand is just
about the closest you can get to American soil. If youre stuck
in America, theres a candy cane of a lighthouse in Lubec,
MaineWest Quoddy Head, first built in 1808 for $5,000,
about four hours north of Brunswickthat is just about the
closest you can get to Europe.
Another way of thinking about this is: from Portugal, you
can often catch Europes last sunset. From Maine, you can often catch Americas first sunrise.
I did not visit the Lubec lighthouse during my time at Bowdoin. Like babysitting for a professor, walking through L.L.
Bean in the middle of the night, or joining an intramural team,
it is something I thought I would do. Bowdoin after all was
once the first college in America to see the sunrise, a fact I was
reminded of every time I walked across the tired wax of Smith
Unions giant linoleum sun.
But if I once longed for superlatives and hyperboles (being
the farthest East! Seeing those first red rays!) I now longed for
closenessa collapse of time or space, a quick reunion with
Super Snack. This beach was, literally, the nearest I could get.
You have probably seen Lynchville, Maines international
signpost, a 1940s-era sign displaying directions toamong

other local townsParis (15 miles, turn right) and Peru (46
miles, left). Im living in Italy for the year, in rural Sicily, and I
sometimes find myself wanting to come upon a sign a like this:
a real one though, with a neat list of mileages to my parents in
Oregon, my sister in Rhode Island, my friends in Maine, Utah,
China, Mexico.
In the weeks after graduation, the first novel I read was Mating, by Norman Rush. It was worth the raised eyebrows I got on
the airplane. The narrator is a wry female anthropology student
working on her thesis in rural Botswana in the early 1980s. To say
that I related to her isolation is an understatement.
When I arrived in Sicilyworking remotely for a woman I
hadnt met, living in an empty villa without a car, surrounded
by hundreds of acres of vineyards and waves of 100-degree
heatI could go days at a time saying only a few sentences.
I didnt speak Italian, and no one around me spoke English. Terrified of sounding like an idiot, I chose to feel like one
instead, and I kept to myself. Before bed, I swatted mosquitos
and read Rush in my basement room, which has one small,
barred window and a wardrobe quilted in pink, floral satin.
21

There is a great line in Mating where the narrator talks
about her lore package. As I understand it, this is the narrative shield we carry to make sense ofand make safe ofthe
world. She chooses to believe that lions are torpid during the
day, thus buying herself a break from fear.
Since graduation, Ive been assembling and dissembling
my own lore package, trying to decide what myths I will hold
onto. Some are easy to keep: things that I recycle will not end
up in foreign landfills, my freckles will not become skin cancer, snakes do not come into houses.
Others are harder. I tell myself that with Mays commencement anniversary, I will no longer catch myself imagining a
walk across the Quad, or a Coles Tower party. Twelve months,
and Ill be cushioned by the new, raw post-grad state of the
Class of 2015. I think of it almost on medical terms. Get
through this flu season, and Ill breathe easy for decades.
And in reality, that Portuguese beach was a rare indulgence. I rarely let myself miss Brunswick these days. I miss
friends, sure, but with Facetime and Facebook and facing
emails, those ocean-miles can quickly feel insignificant.
At dinner that night in Lisbonafter over-sauced fish,
fluorescent lighting and a free round of porta friend had
interrupted the conversation to ask, point blank, if I felt lonely
in Sicily.
I surprised myself when I realized that, at the end of the
day, I was not.
This is one thing I am removing from my lore package,
then: hyper-connection as a means of self-betterment. I hauled
this aim through adolescence without questioning it.
Now, apart from the handful of people I work with every
week, there is nobody to make me wonder if I should be con-
necting more, or if Im connecting right. There is nowhere to

go after 10 p.m., so there is nothing to FOMO. Sheer physical impossibility means social interaction cant be my goal.
Strangely, its a relief. Its life off the hook.
Im living a sort of grotesque caricature of the watered
down life per second that Toph Tucker 12 wrote about as a
post-graduate on this same page last year. Its glaringly obvious that my life here cant approximate the density of college.
I might be spared something in this.
When I visited home for the holidaysflying both transatlantic and trans-America, across over 6,000 miles of salted
water and frozen earthI happily resumed my social rhythms.
But on the days and nights when I stayed home, I let myself
feel a flicker of satisfaction.
I felt a thrill of self-sufficiency, a slight shock that I wasnt
trying to distract myself from myself. Bowdoin taught me lots of
thingsits people taught me lots of thingsbut Im not sure I
learned how to sit tight with my own heartbeat. I didnt have to.
On January 30, Brazil celebrated Saudade Day, in honor of
the Portuguese word that imbues Lisbons blue-tiled alleys and
seven hills. Saudade connotes a state of deep nostalgia and,
often, a repressed knowledge that the object of longing will
never return.
In 1660, Portuguese writer Manuel de Melo described the
feeling as a pleasure you suffer, an ailment you enjoy.
The sentiment seems an inevitable part of growing up,
taking stock and looking back. I dare you to stare across the
ocean and not feel a tinge of it. But if I sometimes feel this
waya loss of community or childhood or dreamits on de
Melos terms.
After all, there is a quiet pleasure and enjoyment in realizing you have something to miss.
And when it feels lonely, you have your lore.

My first year out of Bowdoin, I spent a lot of time talking to fellow graduatesnot just about
our new lives, but about how our perceptions of college had changed, and how we felt the same or
different since leaving. This piece came out of those conversations. I realized that my combination
of feelings (some amount of grief/nostalgia as well as just general gratefulness/joy for having lived it
all) was framed differently than some of my peers, since I was so isolated, and literally unable to try
to replicate any sort of Bowdoin-style friend group. But I was glad to get feedback from alums who
said this piece resonated with their aloneness whether or not they were teaching in rural Thailand
or back at their parents house or in a new city. Now Im at graduate school, and I feel like that postgrad year in the country taught me how to be content even on days when life isnt hyper-connected
or over-scheduled. I guess thats my advice to current students: if you can, go be (relatively) alone for
a bit post-graduation. It builds up some inner store of self-sufficiency, and that seems likeperhapsone of the only things Bowdoin wont easily offer.
22
t
r
n
t
y
o
d
d
r
-
MY EXTRACURRICULAR IS NOTHING
Raisa is a member of the class of 2017.
BY RAISA TOLCHINSKY
ANNA HALL
At the first affiliate event we hosted at Burnett House, a few first

years asked me, What do you do here? They did not ask, What
is your favorite meal? Who are your friends? What classes do you
like? How do you survive the workload? They also did not ask,
Are you happy? Have you found love? Have you found yourself?
I was struck by this question because I was at a real loss for how
to answer it. We were standing in a small circle, one of many small
circles at the party, holding cups filled with cider and eating a lot of
cheese. Theres something about a small circle of people that makes
it easy to forget you dont know anybody in it. After all, we have
been practicing standing and sitting in circles since pre-school.
Two of my best friends were standing on either side of me.
They answered orchestra and a womens discussion group,
Student government and organic gardening, Peer Health and
outdoor leadership.
Feel free to contact me if youre interested in any of these,
they said to the first years.
Their lists probably could have gone on, but these were their
main activities. These two friends of mine are bright eyed and
beautiful and funny and smart. They are musical and mathematical and read entire books in one morning.
Upon hearing their lists, the first years looked energized instead of intimidated. So many options, so many ways to get involved. It was just what was promised in the college brochure.
I had no idea what to say. I could not answer with a list. I wanted to say, Sometimes I watch cooking tutorials on YouTube. I fill
up journals and cant read my own writing. I struggle to finish all
my essays and readings and take-home exams. Sometimes I call my
mom and talk for forty-five minutes.
What do I do at college? I spend hours lying on the Ikea rug in
my room on the third floor of an old house listening to Patsy Cline.
What else? Well, Im in love with someone 3,000 miles away,

and loving someone takes more energy than any extracurricular
Ive ever done. Sometimes I unroll my yoga mat. When I feel sick
with worry, I walk to the next town over. I get coffee and let people
rant to me about the things that hurt. Often, I bake bread and it
goes horribly, horribly wrong. Im not the head of an organization,
but I have conquered an eating disorder.
If theres anything Ive done here, its learn that it is so much
harder to slow down than to speed up.
So heres to doing nothing. To the quiet moments. To the days
you sit within yourself and just watch. To soft music, handwritten
words, silence. To listening to the way snow sounds underfoot. To
watching dusk and dawn come and go.
We should be proud of the moments we do not try to fill. Not
that activities and extracurriculars and essays arent tremendous
and important. But sometimes I want to gather the busy students,
the ones with crunched faces and big backpacks, and say, Shh. It
will all be okay. Let yourself settle. Enjoy the nothingness.
There will be times in our lives when the car breaks down,
when the children are cryingtimes that will be much noisier and
certainly more difficult than college. And even then, we must commit to the moments of nothing, the moments of sheer, simple joy.
Eating a perfectly fried egg. Opening an untouched notebook.
Doing nothing does not mean failure. Pausing does not mean
stopping. We are stirring up the dust by learning so much, and we
must create a space for that dust to settle.
We are all superheroes with an Achilles heel: We are afraid to
stop moving, afraid that if we for one second return to our introverted Peter Parker/Clark Kent selves, the world will be too far
gone to save. But the reality is, it wont. After all, it does take some
time to figure out what our powers are in the first place.
23
TRADITION AND RITUAL

Helen is a member of the class of 2018.
BY HELEN ROSS
I grew up in the Catholic Church. I went through it all quite
unwillingly, of course, but I was raised in it nonetheless. I got a lot
of things from the Church and from my Irish Catholic mother, like
the ability to recite the Nicene Creed on demand, a strong sense of
family and a familiarity-bred hatred for red wine, but prevailing
among them is a certain sense of time and ritual.
The Church year is cyclical, turning from Ordinary Time to
Advent, from celebration to grief, over and over. There are signposts at which Catholics can nod and say, Ive made it to Epiphany,
Im getting through Lent, this too shall pass. As I was being taught
the joy of Easter mass or the solemn anticipation on Christmas
Eve, I was also being taught an idea much older than the Catholic
Church. The years follow a rhythm, and as we celebrate tradition,
we also celebrate how weve bettered ourselves (or, sometimes,
worsened) as the years have passed. And this is what Ive retained,
even as Ive left most of the Churchs religious teachings behind.
I spent a lot of the summer thinking about annual cycles. The
end of May this year picked up for me nearly exactly where last
August left off. I was spending time with the same people, doing
the same job, in love with the same man.
Nine months had gone by, but it felt like I had paused the TV
and then continued right where I had left off, cycling around again
to the beginning of summer. And its surreal, to feel like youre
picking up a conversation and that the pause you waited in lasted
months. But, even as I loathed the certain sense I felt of never moving on, I could still stare into a backyard fire pit on the Fourth of
July and remember so clearly where I was last year when fireworks
went off overhead. I knew that things were changing, even against
this background of consistent sameness.
Theres this same consistency here on campus, the reassuring
ticking over of the wheel of the year, and we similarly look for the
subtle alterations to prove that weve done something with ourselves over the past 365 days. We like tradition here, surrounded
by reminders in the buildings through which we pass that many
others have come here before us and lived as we are living. Things
follow a course throughout the year, and then we come back in
the fall with the uncanny sense that we never left, that nothing has
changed in the past three and a half months.
It has to do with being in New England, in part, I think; how
many colleges are so imbued with a regional sense of place? Maine
has the prototypical seasons: the bonfire falls and heavy snows of
winter, the rainy soft springs and the most perfect summers on the
East Coast (and I can promise this, as a veteran of 20 years of MidAtlantic summers). We take a certain comfort from the inevitability
of the changing of the seasonsif nothing else, complaining about
the third blizzard in as many days brings people together here to an
extent that is the stuff of Orientation icebreakers dreams.
I was sitting in the back of the chapel at the opening a cappella
concert a few days ago, and I realized it felt like hardly any time had
passed at all since I was a first-year sitting in nearly the same place,
watching nearly the same show. We have such strong rituals here,
24
DIANA FURUKAWA
such codified traditions that mark the passing of the year and the
turning of the seasons. And we use these moments to stop and realize how far weve come in the interim, whether weve surrounded
ourselves with a stronger group of friends (I have), whether weve
had our heart broken (I have), whether we can rebuild and whether
weve become a better version of ourselves (Id like to think I have).
In a few weeks, well hit Epicuria, and well hopefully hit it with
all the strength that a years worth of wisdom can provide, and
then well get through the fall and well break out the Bean Boots.
Therell be campus-wides, and the long-standing divide between
Thorne and Moulton will continue. Well hit finals and then sleep
through a lot of winter break, and then return to the snow. Then
itll be the Cold War party, and itll just be cold, and itll blizzard in
April. Well pretend its warm for Ivies, and well regret our choices
during reading period, but well grow. And well be back. And well
grow and well be back and well grow. And this too, whatever it
might be, shall pass.
TBT ABROAD
Published on October 2, 2015.
Phoebe is a member of the class of 2016.
BY PHOEBE KRANEFUSS
I had been excited to study abroad. Like going to overnight camp in
Maine and attending Bowdoin, studying abroad in France was something that my mom had done. Shed told me what an important experience it was, and, like any privileged middle-class American small liberal
arts college student, how formative it had been for her.
I was looking forward to gaining perspective away from Bowdoin,
improving my French, learning about a new cultureyou know, living,
loving, laughing abroad. The food! everyone would rave. Youre going to just adore French food! Thanks! Id say, not knowing how to
respond.
I got to Paris and my host dad hugged me, asked if I was scared of
motorcycles (no), and the two of us promptly zipped off to late-afternoon Vietnamese food in the thirteenth. He and his ex-wife lived together in a loft in the ninth. She cleaned, he cooked. They took me to art
exhibits and I posted Facebook photos and I considered staying a year,
because it was exciting.
The honeymoon period with Paris wore off, and the excitement
stopped shrouding the intense OCD Ive been dealing with since I can
remember. I would post photos on Facebook in front of the Eiffel Tower
and at bars and with the kids in my program, who thought I was silly
and crazy and fun, but not a real person or something. They would always tell me, Youre not even real, Phoebe! Youre like, not a real person! And Id laugh but be like, well, actually, I am. I looked like I was
having fun, but slowly I was becoming kind of miserable.
So one time, I decided to eat lunch alone. It was
relaxing. I felt less lonely alone, actually. I started to
eat lunch by myself most daysId go to a restaurant and treat myself to steak at noon and watch old
French people take their lunch breaks to polish off
a burger and a beer. But then this sneaky diet I had
kind of been on for the past year or so started to keep
me company, and soon this exciting preoccupation
became consuming and scary and my only friend.
Soon I was eating alone every day, not because
I was enjoying my own company anymore but because I didnt want anyone to call me out on the
food choices I was making. There was this store by
school that listed the calories in every single item and
I would stand there by the cold case for 10 minutes
examining every single thing and deciding which
I could rationalize eating, and then I would use up
my international phone data googling the calories in
each food item, too, because one could never be too
sure when it came to these things.
When my mom called me to tell me that she had
booked a ticket home and it was for tomorrow, I had
gotten down to mostly just five major food groups:
coffee, sparkling water, cucumbers, radishes, gum. I
was always hungry. I was exhausted and headachy
and faint and one time I fell in the metro and I almost
choked on the celery stick I was eating to will away
my hunger pains. I bruised, because I was pretty bony, and I cried and
people walked past me. I hated Paris and I hated myself.
Needless to say, none of the things that were supposed to happen
in France happened (well, except for Oktoberfest. That was epic.). One
day I was starving myself by the Seine and the next I was in a hospital
where a dietician named Nicole held a peanut butter and jelly in front of
my face and I started to cry. Not in a cute way, but like, really awful tears.
We did a lot of drama therapy with this guy named Doug whod
bring his guitar every Tuesday and then never actually use it. And I
spent a lot of time with Nicole, going over my meals and arguing with
her about what I had to eat and always losing. And I made friends and
got better.
The point is this: I worry that we at Bowdoin have a tendency
in all our high-achieving, outwardly squeaky-clean perfectionismto
shroud the rough stuff. And Im taking the risk of sharing this with you
because I still struggle sometimes, and because I cant preach mental
health destigmatization without attempting to destigmatize my own
stuff. I care about my Bowdoin community too much to let my own fear
of being judged impede my potential to let someone whos struggling
know that theyre not alone.
No matter what youre going through, or where youre coming from,
know that your struggle is valid, and that there are more people on this
campus than you think who know exactly what youre going through.
Lets talk to each other. Youre not alone.
HY KHONG
25
BUILDING AND BREAKING WALLS

Published on October 30, 2015.
Hy is a member of the class of 2016.
BY HY KHONG
I dont remember dialing my sisters
number. It was the Saturday of Ivies, and
under whatever influence I was under, I
unintentionally came out to her. So when
she told me she was coming the next week
to talk, I was afraidI had let my walls
down for half a moment and didnt know
what the repercussions would be.
My sister and I dont talk regularly. We
realized we were very different people early
on and its not unusual for us to go months
at a time without speaking to each other.
When she arrived in Brunswick that rainy
Wednesday afternoon, she said she had
known all along and asked for explanationswhat other things did I keep locked
inside? I felt helpless and exposed, in a way
that makes me still cringe. I wasnt used to
the words coming out of my mouthhonest, open and vulnerable. After 20 minutesthe longest conversation wed had in
five yearsthere was a silent and mutual
understanding that the process of opening
up had been hard for both of us, and she dropped me off before I realized I had forgotten to tell her how much her visit meant to me. To be
honest, I didnt really know how.
This weekend is Family Weekend and Im thinking about how my
family is 3,000 miles west. This weekend, Ill see countless pictures of
families smiling against a backdrop of autumnal colors. Ill meet parents and tell them my major, my ambitions, how I found Bowdoin.
This weekend will be another quiet reminder that my dad doesnt
even know what my major is and that the last picture my mom took
of me on campus was in 2012, on move-in day. This weekend Ill be
thinking about when, and how, the communication broke down.
I was 12 when I first started developing feelings for other boys. I
was entering a new school and at the age when being different resulted in being excluded, I masked how I felt with fake female crushes.
I was an obedient and good kidmy grandmas favorite, the young
artist of the familyand I didnt want to cause any unnecessary drama in my devoutly Catholic home, so I chose to keep quiet. I was
young, I was confused and I was alone.
I came to terms with who I was by the time I entered high school,
a feat that was emotionally and mentally taxing. I believed that unless I was strong, everything would fall aparthappy home would
be no more. I understood strength as having tough skin and thought
that if I evaded my emotions, they wouldnt bother me. So in turn, I
piled on the extracurriculars and coursework and built an image of
myself that was composed and collected. I built walls in an attempt
to protect myself (and my family) from the truthand I shut my
family out.
Its hard for my Bowdoin friends to believe that my parents dont
26
know Im gay, and I can see why. Bowdoin

was a fresh start, in every cliched sense of
the phrase: I was free, for the first time, to
openly be whomever I wanted and could
write my sexuality in capital letters onto my
identity. I could walk around campus confident and proud, and I think my friends
will agree that my footsteps are loud and
my opinions are even louder. I didnt have
to hide.
Im always nervous before boarding the
transcontinental flight home for breaks.
Family get-togethers are nice, until family
members begin disparaging same-sex marriage and relentlessly asking what kind of
wife I want. In my youth, I shrugged these
things off. But recently, my strength has
failed me, and their anti-gay sentiments
have began seeping through the cracks of
my tough exterior. Ive recently begun feeling guilty and a little lost whenever I see the
Out Peers list on a bathroom stall, wonderHY KHONG
ing what my parents would think if they
saw my name on there when they come for graduation in May.
It took leaving home for four years to understand the importance
of being open with the ones you love. I once thought that the continual act of suppressing emotion after emotion and not talking about
how I felt would make me more resilient and stronger, but it made me
callous, cold and silent. I didnt know how to converse with my family
anymore because I was always fearful of revealing something and being disowned. There were no thoughtful discussions over meals, no
heart-to-hearts for nine years and slowly, the periods of time between
check-in phone calls and texts grew.
There will always be things certain families do not discusshow
much junk food you actually eat, what you spend your money on,
mistakes you make on the weekends. But my family has been shut
out of too many things for too long. They dont know what I did this
summer, where I want to be after college, or that I had my first art
show this year. In the nine years I spent hiding myself, I stopped being a member of my family.
Theres still a lot I dont tell people, and Im certain everyone on
campus has secrets and issues they dont want to or dont know how
to talk about. But Im starting by breaking down the walls I built
when I was 12 and allowing myself to be vulnerable and open. In
doing so, Ill finally confront the pent-up feelings and take the right
steps forward.
If love inherently comes with acceptance, then Im grateful that
my sister made that visit. Im grateful that my parents still call to
check in every few weeks. And Im grateful that Ill have the community Ive made here when the process of coming out and returning to
my family gets difficult.
ALL ALONE AT THE GRAND OLD PARTY

Published on December 4, 2015.
Joe is a member of the class of 2016.
BY JOE SHERLOCK
DIANA FURUKAWA
New Hampshire holds its presidential primary first in the nation, which means candidates spend more time in the Granite
State than they would otherwise. I watch U.S. politics closely, so I
was shocked when I saw a name that I had never seen before on
a list of candidates. Who the hell is that, I thought, and why is
he speaking at the same event as Carly Fiorina? I was convinced
I knew every candidate in this election, Republican or Democrat.
A web search revealed that the man exists, and is indeed running
for President. Former Virginia Governor Jim Gilmore has been
routinely garnering between zero and less than one percent in
every poll. In most polls, hes not even mentioned.
I obsessed over the idea. Who runs for president while consistently polling at zero percent? Given a margin of error, my roommates could poll higher in the U.S. presidential election than him.
Why would someone choose to subject himself to this? This is a
man who was an intelligence officer in the military, an attorney
general, the governor of Virginia, the chair of the Republican National Committeeand yet the Orient has more Twitter followers
than he does. I had to meet him.
Dover, New Hampshire is about 90 minutes away from
Brunswick and frequently hosts presidential candidates. Jeb
Bush, Hillary Clinton and anyone else who is waging a halfway-decent campaign has rallied there and probably will again
before the February primary. Carly Fiorina was headlining the
free pasta dinner event, followed by former New York Governor George Patakiwho I at least knew was runningand then
Governor Gilmore was scheduled to speak last, because, well,
of course he was.
It was an intimate soireesome 200 people gathered in the
function hall for the Red Rally, where the lights, dinner tables,
27

balloons, chocolates, clothing and even pasta was themed Republican red. I stood off in a corner, by the autographed books
of Anne Coulter and Ted Cruz, Googling Jim Gilmore on my
phone so I could remember what he looked like. I spotted him
near the back of the room sitting next to who looked to be his
campaign manager.
She got up and walked over near me, frantic and nervous. She
grasped the pens next to the autographed books, looked at them,
and then guiltily put them back, saying she needed a pen but felt
bad stealing. You didnt bring a pen? I asked the presumed campaign head. No, she said, embarrassed.
I bargained to lend my pen to his state campaign director in
exchange for an interview with the governor. She eagerly agreed,
snapped up my pen, and scurried back to her seat with the governor. Their table had four Fiorina supporters and four elderly and
seemingly disinterested people wearing Gilmore stickers. He had
only been the star of a few stories over the past months, mostly
about his indignation over his exclusion from debates, and, ironically, about his lack of coverage.
Fiorina was introduced as the next president of the United
States. She gave a lengthy speech, mostly drawing from lines Id
see her use in debates and interviews, and was so popular that the
event hosts asked her to come back up and talk about her similarities with Margaret Thatcher. Fiorina was the clear reason for the
nighteveryone else was supplementary. I stood near the governors table, eating my plate of genuinely decent ziti alla vodka,
when I was approached by a New Hampshire television reporter.
She asked if I were with the Gilmore campaign, or if I were a
member of the New Hampshire Young Republicans. I explained
I was neither. She slumped her shoulders, disheartened, and then
whispered her question to me.
Okay, well do you know what this Jim Gilmore guy looks like,
and where he might be in this room?
Gilmore is only campaigning in New Hampshire. His
press relations were more dismal than I couldve expected.
The newscaster was holding his campaign literature, some of
which was on black and white printer paper, hand cut with
scissors. Not to mention his staff lacked basic office supplies
and stole my pen, a campaign donation I have not disclosed to
the Federal Election Commission.
I halfheartedly pointed out Gilmore to her and plodded back
to the media circle to see the other camera crews packing up.
Half the room had left now that Fiorina was done and Pataki
was speaking. I sat next to a national cable news cameraman and
asked about how they cover candidates. Sure, we care about all
the candidates...but for what its worth, Im leaving now, he said.
I brooded alone in the now-emptied media circle, eating more
Republican-themed pasta as Strafford County Republicans and
local party hacks traded the microphone around. Three hours
into the event, he was given the most irreverent, underwhelming
possible introduction: Jim Gilmore, why dont you come up and
say hi? It sounded like he was running for Dover dogcatcher.
But once he took the microphone, I quickly began to understand why Gilmore has had such an illustrious career. Hes everything the Republican Party should want. Hes a plain-spoken
governor with a southern drawla military veteran with a back-
28
ground in executive leadership and national security. He wants

lower taxes. He talks about character, principle, devotion to country and looking people in the eye.
Gilmore is clearly no amateur, but its not easy to try to climb
up after a decade-long fall from relevance. He harped on the establishment press in combination with the big deals in Washington DC, who had denied him a spot on the most recent debate
stage, again. Hes the kind of guy who never uses abbreviations or
acronyms, always speaking with intensity.
The people that remained came to life as he talked about his
military experience, the national security crisis, his support of
veterans and contempt for regulation. He vowed to veto gun control faster than Hillary Clinton can delete an email. The crowd
quietly roared in crescendo.
He finished his speech with unwavering passion and humbly
asked for votes. Gilmore sat back down, pestering his state director for how long hed spoken and how that compared to Pataki
and Fiorina. She mumbled inaudibly and he looked frustrated.
The event ended, and I now had my time to speak with him.
He came over after taking a few pictures, looking dismayed
that I, an uncredentialed college kid in a cheap tweed jacket, was
his media coverage. He sat like he hadnt sat in days, crashing his
fists on the red-clothed table full of half-empty wine glasses and
dirty dinner plates.
Gilmore conceded that the election has been hard and will be
an uphill battle, to say the least. I was jarred by the fact that he has
to frame sentences with when Im president, because it felt like
I was breaking the news to him that his campaign wasnt exactly
gripping the nation.
He was quick to reiterate what he believes are his strengths:
his qualifications and experience. I pointed out that Scott Walker
and Lincoln Chafee dropped out already and they had more of
everythingdollars, staffers, percentage points in polls, pens. He
pointed to his lack of name recognition as just making him the
candidate with the most room to grow, which to me sounded like
saying Im not short, I just have the most height to achieve.
He counted his entire campaign staff on two hands; it took an
elongated uhh to get from the seventh staffer to the eighth. He
leaned in real close when he was being serious. He pointed his
finger at me when making important points. He told me when to
write things down.
Its been three weeks since I met Gilmore. And despite the
recent emphasis on national security giving his experience its best
shot at being considered important, little has changed, though he
did poll around two percent in one poll, one time. While the primary is a few months away, I feel confident predicting that Jim
Gilmore will not be the next President of the United States.
Im not a Republican, and I disagree with Gilmore on pretty
much every issue other than our mutual belief that the Trump
campaign exemplifies fascist talk, but something about his campaign is wonderfully quixotic and beautifully tragic. What motivates someone to run for president when they have absolutely no
chance, when no one will even listen? I had to ask.
Because Im the best person to be the president. Ive always
loved my country and served my country so now weve arrived at
2015 and were in a lot of trouble, Gilmore explained. I have the
experience and the credentials to help my country, what do you
want me to do? Go home and sit? Pray?
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TALK OF THE QUAD

The Bowdoin Orient January 2016

FROM THE EDITORS

OUR BIG APPLE

BLOW, BUGLE, BLOW!

SENIORS LEFT ASTRAY

THE BOWDOIN MYSTIQUE

LIVING HUMBLY FOR A CAUSE

WHERE THERES A WIL: THE STORY OF WIL SMITH 00

A CASE AGAINST DIGITIZING SPACE

LIFE PER SECOND

THOUGH A HOUSE IS NOT A HOME, A LIBRARY MAY BE

A DREAM POP LEGEND DIES AT BOWDOIN COLLEGE

BENEATH THE BIRCHES AND THE PINE

THE LORE PACKAGE

TRADITION AND RITUAL

Helen Ross, page 24

BUILDING AND BREAKING WALLS

Back Cover Illustration

ALL ALONE AT THE GRAND OLD PARTY

OUR BIG APPLE

On July 4th, 2011, at around 9 oclock, a crowd gathered on

Cerf and Folkman have been married since their ceremony in

see. This allure, however, is accompanied by an unsettling effect that

BLOW, BUGLE, BLOW!

doins director of special collections. There was a general lack

SENIORS LEFT ASTRAY

Continued from the previous page (5).

selves. This is not fair, and should be changed. Campus-wides

THE BOWDOIN MYSTIQUE

remained. My beard was a rebuttal

that he would do so while bearded.

LIVING HUMBLY FOR A CAUSE

Anxieties over grandeur and fulfillment were not luxuries they

Reflections from the author

WHERE THERES A WIL:

them on reserve in the library. In the Navy he had learned how

A CASE AGAINST DIGITIZING SPACE

wielding polycarbonate device for a few days, I started to use it for

LIFE PER SECOND

Reflections from the author

THOUGH A HOUSE IS NOT A HOME,

of Ann Beattie. I uncovered the

slow because it often happens in late night conversations between

A DREAM POP LEGEND DIES AT BOWDOIN

ing more to say to us, Yang recalled in a 2010 interview with

to some dude in his apartment in Chicago. You were talking

BENEATH THE BIRCHES AND THE PINE

trees. Id like to watch as my campers try to navigate a twenty-five foot,

THE LORE PACKAGE

signpost, a 1940s-era sign displaying directions toamong

Continued from the previous page (21).

necting more, or if Im connecting right. There is nowhere to

Reflections from the author

At the first affiliate event we hosted at Burnett House, a few first

What else? Well, Im in love with someone 3,000 miles away,

TRADITION AND RITUAL

BUILDING AND BREAKING WALLS

know Im gay, and I can see why. Bowdoin

ALL ALONE AT THE GRAND OLD PARTY

Continued from the previous page (27).

ground in executive leadership and national security. He wants