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(02/24/22 10:57am)
This week, four years ago, I took my first steps as a Middlebury student. My dean told me, the first of many times, that new Febs bring new energy to campus just when it’s needed most. I was eager to see if this was true.
(11/18/21 10:56am)
Leave the elaborate set and extensive casts to faculty shows. Theses, in contrast, are the simpler, single-celled protozoa at the root of the theatrical tree of life. “No One is Forgotten,” Gabrielle Martin's ’21.5 acting thesis and Madison Middleton’s ’22.5 500-level work in directing, written by Winter Miller, revels in the power of this streamlined medium. The play opens with two assumed journalist captives in a concrete cell. Contrary to journalism’s concise exposition, details in this play are provided only as frequently as the prisoners’ oatmeal.
(10/14/21 9:58am)
As I sit down to write this, I ask myself, “why bother?” It is common and far too accurate to joke about the absence of young people in concert halls. Such jokes were made to me at least twice in reference to last weekend’s concert by the Doric String Quartet and Jonathan Biss. Of course, the stereotype is not entirely true — there are a few young people who still enjoy hearing, as composer Felix Mendelsohn put it, “songs without words.” Yet the question remains — why do some of us enjoy what so many others on this campus do not?
I’d like to bring up a theory which I believe is refuted by last weekend’s concert: so-called “classical” music lacks the vivacity to engage younger audiences. Regardless of the fact that the pieces played on Sunday — quartets by Beethoven and Béla Bartók, and a quintet by Edward Elgar — would be more accurately classified in the Romantic and Modernist periods, I can certainly understand why one would believe this proposed theory. The audience at last Saturday’s concert was, at times, verging on catatonic. The only head-bopping to be found in the audience may have been my own. After the concert, I walked past a number of thumping, sweaty dorm parties. The juxtaposition between these two ways of listening to music was not lost on me. Popular music, by any definition, is made for dancing.
It’s a shame that the bourgeois history of “classical” music in the last two hundred years has led to such stoic practices. The music performed last Saturday was every bit as physical as the music played through dorm speakers. Biss and the Doric String Quartet are well aware of this fact. Leaning together, swinging apart and swaying side-to-side, the quartet embodied the music’s swells and drops. The right foot of violinist Alex Reddington never seemed to stop tapping. At moments, I half-expected the group to leap out of their seats and perform a jig.
These musicians were, in a very literal sense, a sight to be seen. Many of them forwent the traditional black suit for those of striking blue. Reddington even sported a pair of brightly colored, striped socks, which nicely highlighted his active feet. The musicians’ outfits brought a touch of levity, as if to say, “We’re here to have fun.”
Dismissing the pretentiousness that has built up around “classical” music, the performers seemed more like children at play than bastions of European high culture. They seemed to play for the love of the activity itself. As a piece hurtled to its finale, bows were flourished like raised rapiers above the performers’ heads. One could imagine them in some melodrama on an Italian piazza, perhaps costumed as Mercutio or Tybalt.
Theatricality is no trivial element when it comes to music. Good music deserves to be fully embodied. It is no coincidence that, in English, music is played just the same as a theatrical play. All of these activities share the adoration of life found in child’s play. That adoration is communal. We feel the highs, the lows and the middling stretches together. Music has an inherent togetherness.
Even if the quartet hadn’t introduced pianist Biss as “our really dear friend,” the comradery between all five musicians would have been obvious. They passed themes and motifs one to the other with as much playfulness as technical skill. The folk-dance-inspired second part of Bartók’s Third String Quartet was announced with a sudden plop which violist Hélène Clément sent deftly to violinist Ying Xue. Xue held the note’s tension through a gorgeous passage of pizzicato, or plucked, folk themes. This is music that rewards close cooperation. The Doric String Quartet and Jonathan Biss played excellently together.
To the skeptical listeners who are still reading: “classical” music is no less lively, emotional or personal than anything else on Spotify. Sure, it can be esoteric and sometimes just bizarre, but there are outliers in any genre. If you’re still unconvinced, I encourage you to give the next Performing Arts Series concert a try. My meagre 700 words can’t convey the joy and aura of a concert, but I can assure you, there is a particular joy reserved for the musical. That joy is, at its essence, the same you’ll find in a packed Friday-night dorm party or a Wednesday-night open mic.
(09/17/20 9:58am)
Two years ago, Middlebury announced a community study titled “How Will We Live Together.” The study examined community building efforts at Middlebury, focusing particularly on the commons system and ResLife. The “How Will We Live Together” committee recommended dissolving the commons system, a recommendation that is only going into full effect this semester. With additional Covid-19 guidelines, this semester more than ever we should be asking ourselves: How will we live together?
The commons system was designed 22 years ago as a framework for intentionally creating community. In an ideal form, a commons would act like a college family: a place to find support and encouragement from peers, staff and faculty; it would be a source of pride and belonging for a student.
In my experience, Atwater commons was particularly successful in building community. Many of the freshmen for whom I was an FYC, for example, are still close friends as juniors. In my past conversations with former Atwater Dean Scott Barnicle, I’ve understood that this closeness wasn’t unusual for Atwater students, perhaps due to the centrality of the Allen common room to the Atwater Freshman community.
This echoes the How We Will Live Together Executive Summary, which states, “spaces for socializing, [including] informal ones such as residence hall lounges . . . are extremely limited and in some cases and buildings, nonexistent. Put simply, there needs to be adequate spaces available for communities to form.” In Allen, there is such a space.
As an innovator at heart, I am thrilled by some of the improvements that “How We Live Together” suggested. Let’s create better common areas. Let’s allocate resources, including deans and faculty heads, more equitably across campus. Let’s improve our faculty-student connections. Let’s create communities that seniors and first years alike can hold dear.
All the same, I’ve been wearing my Atwater sweatshirt more in the last few weeks than I have in a long time.
Is it silly to cling so hard to an arbitrary housing allocation named after a long-dead college president? Perhaps. But symbols of a well-built community become identical to a set of important memories and relationships. Atwater is my FebYC celebrating my entry to ResLife. It’s late night Ben & Jerry’s with my hallmates during my first year. It’s my three-person Quidditch team at the Commons Cup. It’s dinners at the commons house and long talks with my dean. It’s my fellow Atwater Febs and my former residents from when I was an FYC (whom I missed as much as anyone while I was abroad). Community provides a lasting sense of belonging, and Atwater was, for me, a true community.
With the loss of the commons, we’ve traded previously existing communities for the opportunity to ask: “How could we live together?” How can we build communities that we can be proud of? How can we connect students across ages, majors, student organizations and extracurricular interests? How can we connect students, faculty and staff outside of the classroom?
Covid-19 complicates these questions and our answers. Many of our community-building strategies — concerts, parties, hall activities — are more complicated this year, if they’re possible in the first place. At the same time, we’re depending on one another to stay healthy for the sake of our in-person classes and our physical health.
I’ll only note in passing the obvious: life on campus in times of Covid-19 is more difficult and more stressful than in years past. In the understatement of the year, the CDC’s website tells us that “The coronavirus disease . . . may be stressful for people.” CNN suggested that we look out for feelings of helplessness and a lack of interest in pleasurable activities as early warning signs of severe anxiety, but this year many pleasurable activities are cancelled and out of our control. If there were a time to have a strong community support system, this would be it.
This is simultaneously the year to recreate our community support system and to rely on that system more than any of us have before. It is a time that demands community solutions while those communities are being fundamentally recreated. Once again we must ask: How will we live together?
An important presumption I’m making is this: community ought to be built intentionally. There’s nothing about the end of the commons, or even Covid-19, that requires us to create community frameworks to replace (or improve upon) the commons. Many of us will be fine without intentional community; we have our friends, our clubs, our classes — in short, our communities — already formed for us. But for those who fall through the cracks, there will be a world of difference. I have no interest in my community being one in which a first year (or sophomore, junior or senior) can get lost in the crowd. When I ask how we will live together, I mean to ask how we will intentionally ensure that everyone has the opportunity to find community here if they look for it.
I don’t have a good answer to that question. Taking care of our mental health will be paramount; our ability to take care of one another in stressful times depends on having spare mental and emotional capacity. Reaching out to others, especially first years, is important—as is smiling more and bringing extra patience, care and love to everything we do. Every little thing we do in service of our community is a way of saying, “Won’t you be my neighbor?”
This is no easy task, but it will make a difference. Do we want to remember our Covid-19 year as one characterized by ill will, paranoia, frustration and worry? Or will it be the year in which we took care of one another and created a new culture of community that lasts for the years to come?
Ben Beese is a member of the class of 2021.5.
Editor’s note: Editor in chief Bochu Ding ’21 was a member of the “How Will We Live Together” steering committee.
(05/07/20 10:00am)
Like the class of 2019.75, the class of 1918 was forced to leave Middlebury early. Just before the end of the fall 1917 term, The Campus reported emergency schedule changes that would reduce Christmas vacation by a week and move the class of 1918’s Commencement from June to early May of the following spring. This was to allow students to return home to their farms in time for the spring planting season. Farm workers, as with all types of workers, had been in short supply since the U.S. joined the war in Europe in 1917.
This was just one of many changes that the war would require. The college was raising $400,000 to secure it against wartime changes just as the men’s college senior class was “suffering depletion continually” as “one by one they drop out” to enter military service, according to a December 1917 Campus report. Nonetheless, campus life carried on. KDR continued to hold notable parties. The Campus exchanged heated op-eds about current events.
Little did they realize what was waiting for them when they returned.
The so-called Spanish Flu had been spreading across Europe since the spring. Vermont Secretary of Health Charles Dalton, like many of his counterparts across the U.S., knew it was only a matter of time before the deadly influenza pandemic would reach his state. Finally, it hit Vermont in September 1918, just as students were returning from their homes across the country. By Sept. 21, 40 “Middites” were sick. Five days later, student Charles Thompson had died. His death was followed a week later by that of another student, Charles Dana Carlson. The College implemented a quarantine and, a few days later, the state banned all public gatherings.
Initially, college officials were not overly concerned with the cold-like symptoms displayed by students. Yet, they quickly reversed course as Thompson’s health rapidly declined. The college converted Hepburn Hall, already commandeered for the new Student Army Training Corps (SATC), into an infirmary. Townspeople had set up an armed guard to ensure that students stayed on campus. The town itself was struggling to meet the medical needs of its residents, ultimately leading to a high death rate.
“[W]ires to Middlebury from New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and other states nearby were kept hot with anxious messages,” reported The Campus. “[F]athers and mothers came to town, and all was alarm.”
Middlebury’s quick and thorough response proved crucial; one student complained that six doctors visited her in a single morning. The (delayed) first issue of The Campus on Oct. 16, 1918 reported that the quarantine might soon be lifted. In the meantime, quarantined students were entertaining themselves: Marion Young, the physical director of the women’s college, organized daily hikes, exercises and soccer games for the residents of “Pearsons and Battell Cottage.” The men’s college organized an intramural football game to replace the canceled game against Williams. Classes resumed on Oct. 25.
Despite two deaths and the “military quarantine,” the flu wasn’t the only news story of the day. The SATC had taken over Starr and Hepburn halls. Their Oct. 1 induction exercises took place in a modified, pandemic-response form from the steps of a one-year-old Mead Chapel. Armed, uniformed students could be found patrolling campus day and night for the rest of the semester.
Effects of the war were felt in more subtle ways as well. A myriad of fundraisers, including the continuing endowment fundraiser, the United War Work Campaign, and a collection to eliminate The Campus’s debt, were continuously promoted — all had a connection to war disruptions. Those who remained on campus wished they could “get into the game” in Europe, as a Nov. 1918 Campus editorial read (FOMO, apparently, was as strong then as it is now).
Nonetheless, the college was slowly regaining a sense of normalcy. Although November’s Charter Day festivities had to be reduced, quarantine was lifted only two days later. This prompted an impromptu “visitors’ day on the Hill,” full of friends and family who were finally allowed to visit students.
By the next week, rumors began to spread of peace in Europe. Lieutenant Miles Jones, commandant of the Middlebury SATC, banned the SATC from celebrating until the official declaration of peace the following Monday, Nov. 11. Former college president Ezra Brainerd gave the benediction at chapel services that day. Classes were canceled and the study body flooded into town to celebrate. The troubles of this unusual semester seemed to be firmly in the past.
Now in 2020, as we wait for stay at home orders to end, for vaccines to be developed, for good news regarding our summer and fall plans, we can find comforting words in a December 1918 Campus editorial. “Middlebury faces almost daily changes. It is with a feeling of wonder as to what will come next that we greet each day and it is not strange that under such conditions the student body should be unusually restless and undecided.” Even after the war ended and the campus recovered from the pandemic, change was the rule of the day.
(04/22/20 9:58am)
Being single is more complicated than it seems. As a result, people often provide unhelpful support: messages that have nice sentiments, but miss the point. For instance, be patient and turn to friends, many say, and you’ll find your burden easier to carry. But being single isn’t about patience or friendships; it's about identity.
Somewhere along the line, society rejected the hegemony of coupled people and created the “happily single person.” People in this relatively new category don’t need a “person”; instead, they focus on themselves and their work. Where February 14 was once a day of roses, hearts and dinner dates, it has evolved for many into various forms of “gal-entines” or singles-awareness day. This is for good reason. It makes much more sense to celebrate our friendships and personal strengths than it does to insist on cliché dinner dates replete with roses and cartoon hearts.
That said, there is now a false dichotomy between those who are actively in a relationship and those who are happily “focusing on themselves.” Where does that leave those who are doing neither?
Our relations to external reality, including other people, make up a large part of our understanding of ourselves. Karl Marx described a similar relationship in his “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.” He described how a person’s work naturally produces “objects which confirm and realize [the worker’s] identity.” For Marx, identity was that one manifests in the external, social, world. In a similar way, our interpersonal relations are manifestations of our identity in the external world. We become identifiable with the people to whom we relate.
So what happens when one tries but fails to build self-affirming relationships? Admittedly, some people rely on their relationships with others to construct an identity, leaving themselves vulnerable to existential crises whenever their relationships change. Others, however, have built sturdy, independent identities, which they want to see mixed with the people and world around them. When attempts to do this fail, it can feel existentially isolating. Psychologist Adam Grant provides an interesting parallel with the “Sad Desk Lunch.”A new study, he writes, says that “working through lunch alone doesn’t bother people as long as it’s their choice. It hurts only when people want connection but can’t find it.” If it is painful when someone can’t share their lunch with others, how much more painful must it be when someone can’t share their identity?
Loneliness, according to former U.S. Surgeon-General Vivek Murthy, is like homelessness. He writes, “To be at Home is to be known.” Just as street addresses show where a house is found among its neighbors, so do our relationships show us where we belong in society. Historian Fay Bound Alberti argues that chronic loneliness is a uniquely modern phenomenon, arising in the industrialization of the 19th century. Within the last three years, Murthy has declared a pandemic of loneliness three times. Former British Prime Minister Theresa May even appointed the U.K.’s first Minister for Loneliness. Articles on loneliness have flooded the internet in response to stay-at-home orders brought on by Covid-19. The struggle to share our identities with others is now more relevant than ever.
I recently rewatched “Dan in Real Life,” one of my favorite romantic comedies. Like my other favorite romance, Hemmingway’s “Fiesta,” the love in this film is characterized by romantic struggle and frustration. This is how love works in the real world. Love is a struggle to understand where we stand vis-à-vis those around us. When relationships falter or fail to take off altogether, it can feel like a rejection of our identity. We feel lonely because we don’t see how we fit in with others.
My friends were right to tell me that patience and friendships are important. Friendship and, as Marx argued, work can help us express our identities in the outside world. But these should never take the place of romance. The idea that we should turn away from failed romance to focus on ourselves, our friends and our work, robs us of a struggle that helps us to define who we are. Loneliness is the struggle to express ourselves. The only cure is to continue the struggle.
Ben Beese is a member of the class of 2021.5.
(04/02/20 9:58am)
German philosopher Martin Heidegger is famous for his theory of Dasein, or “There-Being.” For Heidegger, the temporary nature of things renders them meaningful. Thus, meaning in a person’s life comes from the acknowledgement that one cannot do everything before they die. One action or decision precludes others. Anyone who has walked into a bookshop and realized that they cannot read every book will understand this concept. Thus, we exist as Beings limited “There” to a particular stretch of space and time.
Heidegger has been on my mind lately. I, like many others, recently faced several endings in quick succession. A few weeks ago, Phil, a friend and a man whom I very much admire, passed away. A few days later, I was abruptly told to leave the United Kingdom as my visiting student program was one of the first that Middlebury closed outside of China and Italy.
In a sense, both events were long-expected. Over a series of months, I made myself at home in Oxford. My newly-found church family contributed immensely to this sense of belonging. I met with this close-knit group, of which Phil was a central member, numerous times a week for dinners, devotions and lots of coffee. The deeper I laid roots in Oxford, the more I anticipated the inevitable pain of leaving at the end of the year. I spent months looking for ways to extend my stay. When that looked unlikely, I looked for ways to return as soon as possible. By the time our program was cancelled, I had already come to terms with leaving in April. What was it to me, then, that this departure was suddenly a few weeks earlier?
I first learned about Phil’s illness on my return from Christmas vacation. It wasn’t discussed at length but it hung over our morning coffees. When it was brought up, it was discussed with Phil’s usual sense of humour and reflection. One Sunday morning, he and his wife told us about the trials of finding a gravesite. They arrived at a cemetery and Phil introduces himself to the unsuspecting worker as “one of their future residents.” He was then asked, in all seriousness, whether he would like a gravesite with a view. When he wasn’t joking about his death, he took it calmly in stride. One morning as I was leaving coffee, he stopped me to thank me for recognizing his existence. That was so essentially Phil. He may have also been thinking about death à la Heidegger (he was a retired philosophy professor after all) or maybe he wasn’t. Phil could talk on a range of topics, from Nietzsche to limericks, but he was always principally concerned with making a human connection.
The news of Phil’s death hit hard. The sense that time is fleeting was reinforced by the news of my peers’ and my own imminent departure later that week. Many of my peers, naturally, were crushed by the sudden dashing of their semester plans. People had postponed travel plans until the calmer, latter half of the semester. Our triumphal last week before break was filled instead with last-minute travel arrangements, rushed work that couldn’t be brought home and desperate attempts to sightsee.
In the early afternoon of my last day in Oxford, I went to church for Phil’s funeral. Sitting in my pew among people I love, I was surprised to find how much of Phil’s life spoke to ways I had grown in the last several months. He was, in his own words, “a washed-up philosophy tutor” who had no qualms discussing Hegel with his plumber or Nietzsche at church dinners. He was a writer who regularly contributed to his newspaper. He was deeply religious and had even become, for a time, a Carmelite priest. Fundamentally, he was full of love for others. His personability mixed intimately with his religious and academic passions.
Heidegger draws a distinction between one’s “ownmost death” and the death of others. In the experience of someone else’s death, one loses one relationship (to the deceased) whereas, in one’s own death, every relation to the external world dissolves. For Heidegger, one’s death is “ownmost” because it is the reference point which defines all of one’s Being. Another’s death is merely a reminder of one’s own, imminent death. In such moments, one feels “Anxiety,” a term Heidegger uses to denote the specific existential dread that comes from the anticipation of the end of one’s existence.
If this is the case, then the Anxiety I felt at Phil’s passing was not what I would have expected. The drive to throw myself into Being could be described with the imperative “Carpe Diem.” Yet, the well-known formulations of “Carpe Diem,” “to suck out all the marrow of life,” or “that the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse” are now so often repeated they have become cliché. It is easy to forget that the things you do today, in the moment, will forever be part of your existence. In moments of Anxiety, one remembers that we only exist There, in a small stretch of space and time.
“There” hardly seems an appropriate word in this time of self-isolation. At the moment, we all wish we could be “there” — or anywhere, really, but here. I have it easier than most; my self-isolation goals of reading and writing are encouraged rather than prevented by being stuck inside. Still, it seems to me that seizing one’s brief life is easier out there than it is in here. The phrase “Carpe Diem” is most often invoked when we are out in the world, with a myriad of possibilities before us.
It becomes even more important at times when our possibilities are curtailed to what can be accomplished in living rooms while wearing pyjamas. It is much harder to suck the marrow out of life when we are forced inside, Here, away from each other and the world. At a time when nearly everything has been put on hold, it is so much more important not put our lives on hold as well.
As I travelled back to the US, I thought about my classmates’ abroad experiences. Many of them had expected to travel in this latter portion of the term. Having been evacuated, their abroad memories won’t be nearly as full of travel as they may have expected. Instead, their memories will consist chiefly of day-to-day life, when we took time for granted. If that’s true of the unexpected ending to our semester abroad, how much more will that be true when the end of our lives come? Phil made me want to be something more than I am today. His death reminded me that that has to happen now. Our lives will only ever be what we can make of them today. Here and now.
Ben Beese is a member of the class of 2021.5.
(09/12/19 10:00am)
With the start of the new semester, comes the opening of the 2019–2020 season of the Middlebury Performing Arts Series. This season is going to be spectacular, with old favorites such as cellist Sophie Shao (her 12th consecutive season at Middlebury) and pianist Paul Lewis (for his 22nd Middlebury performance); internationally renowned groups including the Grammy award-winning Takás Quartet; new faces like the series’ first quartet in residence, the Heath Quartet; two world premieres, including a new piece by Music Professor Matthew Evan Taylor; and much more. For the 100th consecutive year, Middlebury is in for a treat.
Yet, I get ahead of myself. I, who has an aversion to all things popular and current suitable only for someone four times my age, find all the aforementioned performances thrilling. This, of course, may not be the case for others at the college. While classical music, for instance, is not particularly in vogue this century, one might wonder whether it is still worth all the effort, time, and money invested in bringing such art to Middlebury, Vermont for the 100th year? What is the benefit that we gain from the Arts at Middlebury?
Of course, we should all be able to agree that there is merit in bringing something fresh to our lonely corner of New England. While it still may be deceptively warm and pleasant, we ought not forget how forlorn the campus can get in the bleak month of January, when even the sun has decided it could find more interesting places to spend its time. Middlebury is, in more senses than one, remote, and the arts, whether formally part of the Performing Arts Series or in any other association with the Mahaney Arts Center, bring us a taste of the outside world. This year’s Performing Arts Series artists hail from over a dozen different countries, bringing Irish guitar music, Nordic World music, Bach, Bartók and Jazz to our doorstep. That’s not to mention “SEVEN,” a ground-breaking play coming next March based on the experiences of seven women bringing change to their homes in Pakistan, Nigeria, Ireland, Afghanistan, Guatemala, Russia and Cambodia. That’s a nice journey outside of our insulated pocket of Vermont.
This year’s Art at Middlebury will also, as always, present different voices from throughout time as well. The Museum of Art’s exhibit, “Votes… for Women?” will celebrate the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, granting women the right to vote in the US. Dr. Elizabeth Otto will discuss gender fluidity and avant-garde modern design in her talk titled “Queer Bauhaus” on Sept. 11. The Heath Quartet will present six Bach concerts throughout the year to celebrate the composer’s 250th birthday and the vocal ensemble Stile Antico will breathe new life into renaissance women at their Nov. 9 concert. This year’s art comes from many stretches of the human experience.
While the arts’ origins bring novelty to our campus, its content is even more valuable. Art gets at the core of human experiences. We will see struggle and pain in “SEVEN,” a desire to shape the future in “Votes… for Women?,” dreams and other worlds in Professor Lida Winfield’s dance “IMAGINARY,” love and fear in the J-term musical “Light in the Piazza,” and so much more. These are the subjects we find compelling in art, of course, because these are the themes we find compelling in life.
In a sense, these pieces of art are snippets of life experience, from across time and space, that we can relive. Through them, we can better understand what moves people and why the world beats to the rhythm that it does. Hopefully, it better prepares us, when our chance comes, to contribute our part to the world, as Walt Whitman said, to “contribute a verse.” To this end, the art brought to Middlebury might be as important a part of our education as anything else.
(05/02/19 9:59am)
Posters came up, as they do for all events, announcing author and Holocaust survivor Lore Segal’s reading from her forthcoming book “The Journal I Didn’t Keep”. My attention was caught less than I now wish it would have been. Although I hadn’t realized it at the moment, I had recently read and thoroughly enjoyed one of her stories published in The New Yorker. Although she doesn’t consider herself a Holocaust survivor, she had narrowly fled Nazi Austria in 1938 via the experimental Kindertransport, which had, among other things, served as the basis for the novel that launched her professional writing career. This fact had been widely publicized, although she had not come to talk about the Holocaust, not directly at least. Rather, she came to read from her forthcoming collection of writing, “The Journal I Did Not Keep”.
On Tuesday, April 23, students and community members alike packed themselves into Hillcrest to hear the nonagenarian Segal read three stories spanning, as she described, when you are a “child, a woman, and when you are no longer here.” The room was enraptured. Both “Dandelions” and “Ladies Lunch,” stories she had previously published in The New Yorker, held the rare sort of eager silence most often found when reading to awestruck children. The same cannot be said for “Going to Hell,” her third story, if only because the intervals between peals of laughter were too short for any such silence. Segal is a talented writer.
In the days leading up to her reading, I found myself quickly enamored with Segal’s writing. A Pulitzer Prize finalist (an experience she described as “Irritating. You don’t want to be a finalist; you want to win it.”), she was described by the New York Times as “closer than anyone to writing the Great American Novel.” Segal’s success enchanted me. Then, come Wednesday morning, I found myself sitting in the breakfast room of the Middlebury Inn with Segal, her daughter, and a list of finely crafted questions about life and writing. I pulled out my phone to make a recording, in part for reference but in large part for posterity.
Her thoughts on writing were much as one might expect from the writerly sort. “The real experience is the act of getting the words right so it means what I want it to mean.” She explained in a few different ways throughout our conversation. She made a point that writing is her goal, rather than some reward like, say, the Pulitzer Prize. “I’ll tell you what the satisfaction is in my writing. You get a review and somebody both likes it and understood what you meant,” with an emphasis on the latter half of that equation.
Before long, our conversation turned towards deeper questions. In reference to the state of the world, she said, “People argue with me and say the world is growing kinder and I think that’s probably true too but the rotten part is as healthy as it ever was and will continue to be so. I don’t think we’re improving, I don’t think we’re getting any worse. I think this is how we are.” Without the belief that the world can get better, I, perhaps naïvely, wondered aloud how she found meaning in her life. “Meaning?” she said, “Do you need it to have meaning? ... I enjoy life! My goodness look how pretty it is out there!” and she pointed out the window to a warm, gray morning.
I was similarly rebuffed when asking about her legacy. “I don’t understand about legacy. I would like to be remembered forever. Ah! Big deal!” she rattled out in her sharp, kind accent. “Is my life only worthwhile if I’m remembered? It’s worthwhile because it’s interesting. It’s like my little student who would like to get that first story into a magazine,” she then tells me, referencing an earlier point in the conversation when we discussed young writers. “It doesn’t change your life. It doesn’t make you into whatever it is you’d like to be.”
What does make you into whatever it is you’d like to be? “Writing a good sentence. A good sentence where the words fit and describe precisely and powerfully what the sentence is about. That’s really what I want to do.”
She sent me off, teasing, “I hope your life is meaningful and you leave a good legacy …. And I hope you write truthful sentences. I hope your words mean what you mean. That’s what I really meant.”
(03/21/19 9:58am)
Schubert’s piano pieces for four hands are so mediocre, in a sense, as to be especially excellent.
Piano masters Alexander Melnikov and Andreas Staier, hailing respectively from Russia and Germany, performed a wide selection of these pieces by Franz Schubert last Friday as part of the Mahaney Performing Arts Series.
Mediocre is the wrong word, by far, to be using for these pieces and yet, I struggle to select a more appropriate one: they fall between extremes, occupying a high middle ground of art. A somewhat appropriate description comes from the TV Show A Good Place in which Manny Jacinto’s character explains a “scale from one to thirteen [where] eight [is] the highest. It goes up and then back down like a tent.”
The Schubert pieces played were an eight, middle of the road and yet the best. The problem here is that Schubert is not Bach. His pieces are not dramatic like, say, Bach’s Prelude and Fugue No. 2 or his Toccata and Fugue in D minor. Nor is Schubert Debussy. His music is not dreamlike and ephemeral like Nuages or Clair de Lune. The comparisons could go on; he’s no Liszt or Mozart either. Schubert’s pieces here were not deeply moving per se but nor were they light and frivolous. They were not overwhelming, they did not transport one to a different state, but yet they were consistently intriguing and engaging. As I was trying to find a proper adjective, I considered both “pretty,” and “nice,” — because they were. Although there is no cause to diminish them as such. The pieces were beautiful and seemingly nothing more.
There came a point when this quality started raising particular questions about the state of Schubert’s art. What was the point of such music? It didn’t seem to come from any deep emotions. No anguish or true love stemmed from them. Did they stem from fears? Joy? Awe? Or were they simply playthings for Schubert to share with his friend and student the Comtesse (countess) Caroline von Esterházy? They were too good to be shallow pieces written without emotion and yet not raw enough to be deep personal expression.
Again, I found myself circling around a middle ground — and yet, they were excellent.
There was certainly a range. Some pieces were light and very much felt like a plaything for a Comtesse. Take the first piece, the third of Six Grande Marches in B minor. It slid around, sometimes a light, at times flowery tune punctuated by deeper, stronger interludes. The first of the Ländler also had a prominent sense of levity through much of it. It could easily be an exercise written simply for the amusement of two flirtatious pianists. And yet the second Ländler was much more ominous, more mysterious. The third, exhilarating, producing much the same feeling as one gets when cruising along a sunny road in summer.
Take this in contrast to the closing piece, on the other end of the program: the Fantasia in F Minor. This piece was, of all the night’s program, the most dramatic. Dedicated to the Comtesse, whom one friend called Schubert’s “ideal love,” the piece has a definite sense of wistfulness. This is raw, especially in comparison to the tighter pieces earlier in the program. Still, it seems to restrain the possible outflow of emotions that one might find with a different artist. That is to say, one neither shakes nor swoons upon hearing it, but one is nonetheless entirely engaged.
Ultimately, I cannot answer any of the questions or contradictions raised above, perhaps a musicologist of higher degree would be better addressed, but there is something I find intriguing about the idea of Schubert’s mediocre excellence. He clearly had the technical genius with which he could have unleashed the same shivering chills, bone rattles and heart wrenching emotional catharsis that other composers have left us. Equally possible (although as the vanguard of the budding Romantic spirit, perhaps only anachronistically possible) was his potential to create immersive soundscapes that release into the imagination a Bacchanal flood like the later impressionists.
But he doesn’t. Instead, he produced music that is so simply well-crafted that no other quality distracts from its excellence. The music, and not the effect that it produces, pulls in the listener’s attention. The listener can’t help but acquiesce.
(03/14/19 10:00am)
It was a long day and an even longer week. The weather was hot, the fields labor-intensive. All this poor guy wanted was to relax with a nice drink. So, Friday evening, he pulls together a small lump of clay and with his stylus scratches a note: “4 beer.”
Or, to use a more expert translation, “Three liters of first-rate beer,” according to alumni Seth Richardson ’90. Beer, both a refreshing (and safe!) beverage as well as a gift from the goddess Ninkasi, dates back at least 3,000 years to ancient Mesopotamia (in modern Iraq). Our protagonist’s proto-Venmo request was (hopefully) handed to the local keeper of beer in exchange for a jolly night out. There it sat, possibly until an invading army burnt the building in which it was kept, accidentally firing the clay and preserving it so thousands of subsequent generations can see that, before inflation, a one-inch lump of clay got you three liters of classy booze.
This is all speculation. What is certain, though, is that this beer receipt sat somewhere in the world for the last 4,000 years, outlasting nearly everything we know about human culture and a good deal that we don’t know. This small tablet now resides, available for any student to view, in the college’s Special Collections.
To some (myself included), the prospect of our small school owning a 4,000-year-old cuneiform tablet is amazing in its own right. To others, admittedly less so. It is easy to be impressed by things of extreme age, of ‘historic-value,’ and, frankly, things that sound like they should be impressive. Yet, when we ask what really makes an item like this special, we can find a more human answer.
Poetic license allows me to refer flippantly to this tablet as a ‘proto-Venmo request,’ yet the comparison is apt. Setting aside concerns of technology and fashion, the two are not so different. This is part of the humility of this tablet; it has no real historical importance save for the fact that it’s lasted so long in the same way that 4,000 years from now, your Venmo history could provide archeologists valuable insight into our modern society if only for the reason that it is, in its own time, entirely unremarkable.
It is this common — even banal — aspect of the tablet that now fills it with meaning. In it, we find proof of a long history of enjoying beer, a history carried on by other Mesopotamians, by Medieval knights, by Martin Luther and his fellow Protestant monks, by American founding father Sam Adams and by Middlebury students today, to name just a miniscule few examples.
The past is not a place for strangers, although people in the past seem admittedly obscured to us, clouded by the thousands of intervening miles and years. It can seem that they live worlds apart from our daily lives. Yet if we look closely, we have a lot to bond over with those who have come before us.
After all, if we’ve all been buying beers for the last 4,000 years, what other experiences do we share?
(01/28/19 2:33pm)
On a dark and snowy night, the Middlebury community gathered in the warmly lit Robinson Concert Hall to sing about Love. Mark Padmore and Paul Lewis, a tenor-pianist duo from the UK, performed a selection of “Lieder,” German romantic poems set to music, by Brahms, Mahler, and Schumann. The program was built around Schumann’s “Dichterliebe,” or Poet’s Love, which he wrote in 1840 after being smitten by his future wife, Clara Wieck.
In his book “The Birth of Tragedy,” Friedrich Nietzsche describes two types of art. Drawing from the Greeks (as we pretentious intellectuals tend to do), he describes Apollonian art as being art of forms: writing, visual art, story-telling, poetry, etc.; and Dionysian art as stemming from the “Primordial One,” the underlying essence of existence. The difference is critical; in the Apollonian one desires to understand a tangible, simpler, if not more mundane metaphysical reality whereas this desire is lost to the drunken ecstasy of pure, incomprehensible, terrifying life that flows through the Dionysian. This distinction can also be seen in the different experiences of Friday night’s Lieder: one could follow the Apollonian poetry, the lyrics and their translations faithfully reproduced in the program, desiring to understand what the art is saying, or one can be swept away by the music in its prismatic tones of love, pain, and glory.
While technically beautiful, the music seemed to emphasize a more mental, Apollonian experience rather than an emotional, Dionysian one. It is possible that this shame is no fault of Padmore and Lewis for their performance was certainly awe-inspiring. Hailed as a “Dream Team” by the New York Times, both musicians have an impressive list of accomplishments, performing in some of the best venues across Europe and the World. Padmore studied in King’s College, Cambridge, world famous for their choir, and has since become particularly well known for his performance of Bach’s passions and his work with pieces by Benjamin Britten. Lewis, among many other distinctions, received a CBE from Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth in 2016 for his work. Perhaps most notable in their performance Friday night was their ability to rapidly transition between different tones, tempos, and dynamic levels without ever compromising the powerful and graceful curves of the music. One moment’s reverberating wail of sorrow would flow into folksy contentedness or romantic ecstasy with the ease and capriciousness of one in love. Indeed, one is tempted to describe Padmore and Lewis’s performance as heavenly.
Unfortunately, both Apollo and Dionysus belong to a certain heaven and such a celestial performance does not prevent one from approaching it with a desire to understand, to study, or to rationalize. It is all too easy and it seems all too common at Middlebury, as at other institutions of intellect, to attempt to understand art, to coldly consider it with a critical mindset, and in the process to divorce oneself from the experience in order to see it more clearly. Something important is lost with this mindset. As David Wallace Foster popularly pointed out, one cannot see water while they are in it but then again, one cannot swim while outside of it. The poverty of this analytic perspective became apparent in the program at the point when one could no longer ignore that every piece is a simple, oftentimes cliché, description of a lover’s angst. The poetic and musical technique aside, the pieces could very well have been written by a frustrated 15-year-old or a love-struck Charlie Brown dreaming of The Little Red-Haired Girl. With an academic mindset, this begins to seem frivolous and yet, for this reason, the significance of the event should not be missed.
With what can we justify the work to produce such an event? Do we admit that we have sunk to such juvenility that we drag two world-renowned musicians across the sea, we journey through a bitter snow storm, and we use the college’s limited resources in order to sing about romantic love and the longing for one’s crush? Yet this is what we do. We enjoy it. We rejoice and we praise Love in all of its ridiculousness. For a few moments, life is not about making sense, understanding, analyzing, or trying to be smart. For a few moments, we are invited to live and love and drink deeply of life. Admittedly, this concert was not as moving as many others, the desired Dionysian insobriety was veiled by an Apollonian desire to comprehend the pieces. But perhaps this is all the better to remind us of the importance of coming to life with the closeness and desire to experience it, to drink deeply of life and to let it wash over and through us. Shall we allow ourselves sometimes not to think but to feel?
(01/24/19 10:56am)
“Decisions are made by those who show up.” Such is the idea behind representative democracy. The perennial stress of American politics, one could say, is the lack of control and representation, that the government does not listen to us and, when it does, it listens to the masses with whom we disagree. And yet, on occasion, we have the opportunity, one might even say the obligation, to cast our ballots and elect our leaders. Although there is no election in the immediate future, there is still a current opportunity to influence the future of our government.
The students of J-term course Winning Elections, taught by alumnus Ben Wessel ’11.5, are running campaigns for six declared democratic candidates for the 2020 presidential election with the purpose of getting Middlebury students and community members to vote in their straw poll on Jan. 30. The data from this straw poll will be shared with the actual campaigns of each of these six candidates as well as with whomever the students of the course see fit.
Inspired in part by the Supreme Court simulation in political science professor Murray Dry’s Constitutional Law course, Wessel’s course is more than just an educational simulation. “Middlebury,” he says, “is demographically very similar to other critical towns in Iowa and New Hampshire.” This straw poll will provide some of the first data points on how young voters view the democratic candidates.
“This point in election season is based a lot on the whims of reporters,” Wessel said. “Even if a few people in New Hampshire talk about it, that could have a huge impact.”
This amplification of young voices, Wessel hopes, will inspire the candidates and their campaigns to take young voters more seriously, giving them data to better focus their outreach to communities like ours. Everyone is highly encouraged to vote: more votes correspond to more useful and thus more important data collected from the poll.
The course consists of readings and discussions about various aspects of a campaign, calls with people involved in former political campaigns and lots of time for the students to work on their own strategies. Lily Colón ’21.5, co-leader of Kamala Harris’ campaign, said her team is “planning on canvassing the entire college and select parts of town.” They also, “have stickers, shirts and posters to help with name recognition.”
Wessel mentioned that other teams’ ideas have included playing ads at the Marquis, getting voter commitment cards and running an Instagram account dedicated to their campaign. “Only other young people know how to reach young people,” he said. Campaigns are being run for Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, Cory Booker, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Beto O’Rourke. When asked about her confidence in her candidate, Colón said: “I think it will be an uphill battle here in Vermont where Bernie is also in the race but I do think Kamala’s policy goals align well with what Vermont needs and so in that aspect I think we have a leg up.”
Early voting begins on Jan. 28 with ballot drop-offs in the McCardell Bicentennial Hall, in town and in Crossroads, among other places. Campaigns may also be collecting ballots outside of Proctor dining hall. On Jan. 30, the voting will be held with ballot collection in Crossroads from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Voting is open to students and Middlebury community members.
(01/24/19 10:54am)
To the disgust of most of my friends, I love hamburgers. If you get me talking about food at all, I will almost surely tell you all about the Elk and Bison burger specialties of home, my dad’s collection of photos of a young me trying to eat burgers twice the size of my head, the poverty of the dining hall’s burgers, the right thickness and juiciness of a burger, the various accoutrements that go best with a burger, and what makes a burger great. I would love to break my vegetarian streak for a good burger but, before doing so, I wanted to find out what people’s problem is with our meat here at Middlebury.
There are a lot of well supported reasons to go vegan or vegetarian. None of these are mine. Yet, as one whose friends fall overwhelmingly in those two categories, I have become familiar with many acceptable reasons to avoid meat. There are moral reasons, for example, not to kill or to exploit animals which can, and have, lead to interesting philosophical discussions of souls, violence, and like. There are often forgotten practical religious reasons for being vegetarian; when starved for kosher and halal options, vegetarian options may become an acceptable alternative. And there are environmental arguments for reducing meat consumption of which I have heard both challenges and impassioned defenses.
My motivation to be a vegetarian, on the other hand, is far from reasonable. Whether it was to prove that I can deny myself meat, to better understand vegetarians, an amusement at my own whims, or perhaps a secret desire to prove that vegetarianism at Middlebury isn’t worth all the complaints it receives, I am not sure. All the same, on January 4, 2019, I gave up meat for a month with the vague thought of a bloody carnivorous celebration on February 1.
[pullquote speaker="" photo="" align="center" background="on" border="all" shadow="on"]I have also come to realize that it’s not so difficult to be a vegetarian.[/pullquote]
I quickly came to realize that my friend was right, being vegetarian “for the heck of it” is not the most compelling reason for such an undertaking and one does, in fact, need a good amount of motivation to avoid meat at every meal. Why is it that not one but both entrées at lunch and dinner include meat by default? I had, as I imagine many have, heard ad nauseam the complaint that there are not enough vegetarian options but little did I appreciate that one’s daily meat-free options amount to bad tofu, rice, pasta, salad, or soup. Meanwhile, everyone else is enjoying their steaks, their stews, their hamburgers, their lamb, their gyros, their chicken (in so many different forms!), their salmon and fish, their hot dogs, their pepperoni pizzas, their meat-lovers’ pizzas, their other not-cheese pizzas, their antipasti salads (with chicken, or bacon, or ham, or seafood), and the list goes on. The options for vegans are even more limited: a large amount of the vegetarian options include cheese (in our rice? Really?) or cream. It’s not that vegetarians can’t eat at Middlebury, the problem is that they are subjected to a Spartan dining experience in dining halls ranked #14 on Best Value School’s Best Dining Halls of 2017-2018. That seems ridiculous.
I have also come to realize that it’s not so difficult to be a vegetarian. Admittedly, I’ve taken the easiest possible route. I didn’t start until I left home, so I never had to ask my family to accommodate me. Eating out, I’ve been almost entirely with one or another vegetarian or vegan friend so I know I never have to ask for special consideration with them either. I’m only committed to vegetarianism for a month, making the effort more a postponement rather than a rejection of a meat-based diet. I don’t even advocate for the lifestyle. Try as I might, I have yet to be wholly convinced of the need or even the benefit of being vegan or vegetarian. But, admitting that there may be real health benefits, to ourselves or to our planet, or moral implications or any other benefit of not eating meat once in a while, perhaps it makes sense to hedge out bets and eat a little less meat. Heck! We eat 1.5 times the recommended daily protein per person at this school just via meat.
[pullquote speaker="" photo="" align="center" background="on" border="all" shadow="on"]What if our meal plans didn’t require we eat meat?[/pullquote]
This is not a call to be a vegan monk. This is not another recommendation to watch Food Inc., or read such-and-such book about animals. But what if our meal plans didn’t require we eat meat? What if it was an option, like pizza in Ross or ice cream in Proctor? The problem is not about having more vegetarian and vegan options; it’s about making meat and animal products options. We should have the choice to choose not to eat something without sacrificing our dining experience, the diversity of our cuisine, or the ability to routinely enjoy eating on campus. As a meat-lover, wing-Wednesday-devotee, and burger-connoisseur, I, for one, am thrilled to see the new meat mitigation efforts and hope we all, vegans and carnivores alike, can continue to talk about how to have an accessible, productive, and well-crafted dining experience.
(01/17/19 11:00am)
“NER Out Loud,” New England Review’s new student podcast, shows the power of podcasting done right and the role it can play in our communal lives.
The podcast is the product of the work of New England Review, Oratory Now, podcasting Professor Aaron Davis, executive producers Dana Yeaton and Carolyn Kuebler, student producers Kylie Winger ’19, Juliette Luini ’18.5, Hannah Green ’18.5, Sam Martin ’19, and Ellie Eberlee ’20, sound engineers Sydney Warren ’19 and Emma Schoblocher ’20, managing editors Eli Sutton and Mary Pomerantz, among others. Inspired by the five-year-old NER and Oratory Now live event of the same name, the foundations of “NER Out Loud” were laid during a J-term workshop last year. From there, Martin, Green and Eberlee ran with the project through the spring and summer, honing both recordings from the live event and the nature of the podcast as a whole. In September, Winger and Luini joined the team as the new NER interns.
More than simply producing the program, a difficult project on its own, this team has been tasked to discover “NER Out Loud”: the purpose, style, and direction of the show. It has become increasingly common for literary magazines like New England Review to produce their own podcast, each taking their own approach. One could, for instance, simply read works submitted, or, focus on interviews and extra-textual programming relating to the pieces in the magazine. “NER Out Loud,” remaining loyal to its Oratory Now progenitor, has chosen to focus on the performance of the pieces. Every episode features several theater students who deliver a carefully perfected performance imbued with intention, art and subtlety.
What is most striking about “NER Out Loud” is its intimacy which exists despite the expansive collaboration upon whose shoulders it sits. Listening to an episode, the teams of students, interns, executive producers, writers, readers and editors all fade to the dark periphery allowing only a pure stream of art to shine through. There is a sense of connection that looks in your eyes and says “this is my experience, share it with me” that “NER Out Loud” captures. The podcast pulls on a deep quality of art, its ability to bind us together, feeling each other’s life and presence and uniting us in our humanity. The reader, the writer and the listener are, for about 20 minutes, joined in a communion, feeding on each other’s joys, sadness, memories and dreams. At the end of each episode, with the reading of the credits and the return to the wider world, you remember that you are not the only listener and that what you hear is merely the veneer of a great crowd of invested contributors’ work. Yet this realization only expands the feeling of intimate community. One feels connected with the rest of the world, the unspecified masses among whom we live.
“NER Out Loud” is just getting started, having only published the first two of their semi-regular finely crafted shows. “NER Out Loud” can be found on Apple Podcasts and Soundcloud, and the producers encourage interested listeners to rate and review the show on those platforms. New episodes can be expected roughly once a month.
(12/06/18 11:00am)
When I was young, my parents took me to a dinner concert at our church. I remember my father telling me that he found musical moments like this particularly good for thinking. I sat myself down, back to the musicians, prepared for a relaxing, pensive evening, at which point I was promptly told that it was rude to sit with your back to the music and that I should listen. As a child, I found this a strange contradiction. Now, I understand.
Claude Debussy, the French composer perhaps most famous for his piece “Clair de Lune,” died in 1918. To mark the 100th year since his passing, the Jupiter Quartet came to the MCA last Friday to remind us why we love art and the impressionists in particular.
The program kicked off with a confident theme from Maurice Ravel, admirer of Debussy and an influential French composer in his own right. Although it is typical for the main piece, in this case Debussy’s “Quartet in G Minor,” to be proceeded by complimentary pieces, the inclusion of Ravel’s only string quartet before Debussy’s quartet was duly appropriate. As would be seen later in the evening, Ravel’s piece is highly derivative of Debussy’s. From the wonderful pizzicato with which the scherzo begins to the swooning central themes, Ravel’s homage was well received by the earlier artist.
Perhaps of most interest that night were the themes. I use the term “swooning” to convey the emotional pregnancy, the swaying, the general accord with which the music lays in the world and yet it was unromantic. Tension, melancholy, peace, joy and sadness were all woven together in a way which reminds one of life in all of its muddled facets.
The music of the night, which included Ravel, Debussy and “Ainsi la Nuit,” by Henri Dutilleux, embodied this very impressionistic idea. The music was not nice, per se. It lacked the simple prettiness of some music and yet it was not unpleasant either. The impressionists pioneered new musical strategies, new harmonies (and assonances). They broke away from classical structures and ideas in order to build complex emotional textures that makes one feel, deeply.
This leads us to an element of the Jupiter Quartet’s performance that is essential to great music and yet too often overlooked. Music is more than the sounds that are produced. One can play the score perfectly and still fail to produce the appropriate music if the musicians prevent the music from entering their soul. This was not the case Friday night. The members of the quartet were flooded by the music. When the score went soft, they were gentle. When the music became vigorous, the musicians convulsed along with it. The music was felt the way it is meant to be.
I remembered my father’s words at this concert in particular because the music of these impressionists is not only beautiful, not only emotional, but fertile, ready to embrace those thoughts, reflections, loves and worries that life likes to leave with us, particularly in the cold at the end of the semester. Although we are surrounded by recorded music every moment of every day, there is something special about going to a performance where your activities are limited to listening and thinking. The artists represented last Friday, both the performers and the composers, provided a wonderfully pleasing few hours and, more importantly, an ocean upon which to set our minds adrift in the wonders and contradictions of life. It was a sacred moment of life, of beauty, of strings.
(11/08/18 10:56am)
What makes an idea worth sharing? TED, the global conference organization, addresses this question by inviting thousands of speakers to share their innovative ideas.
Last Sunday, the Middlebury campus was once again included in this confluence of thought during the annual TEDxMiddlebury, this year under the theme “Unhinged,” organized by Middlebury students following the TED model. Starting Sunday morning, attendees quickly packed the Mahaney Center’s Robison Hall for three engaging hours exploring a wide-ranging set of new ideas.
Six speakers covered six diverse topics united by their shared novelty. Rebecca Duras ’19 spoke about her struggles with mental health. Duras described the years of her life in which she worried not only about her mental health but also how it would define her. The thought that her relationship with her mental illness would always outlast any of her other relationships emerged as an insistent theme. Gradually, though, she began to realize the benefits of boldly accepting herself. In the end, Duras finally found a way to reframe her experience.
“I thought my relationship with mental illness would define me,” she said, “but in the end, my relationship with myself will be the longest in my life.”
Reframing is one of the methods last weekend’s speakers used to discover a new idea. Kelly Brush ’08 spoke of reframing her experience after a serious skiing accident seemingly ended her life-long passion for competing in the sport. Paralyzed from the chest down while at Middlebury, Bush had to come to terms with her new reality which included learning how to use a wheelchair and how to play adaptive sports.
Another type of new idea emerged at TEDx as well. Ahmed El-Geneidy, for instance, looked not at reframing reality but at finding novel solutions to existing problems. A Québécois urban planner, El-Geneidy discussed how the future of transportation is not self-driving cars but small, adaptive changes to encourage use of alternative transportation methods, like buses and bicycles.
Similarly, Sixto Cancel talked about his new approach to improving the foster care system. A foster child himself, Cancel learned firsthand how the foster care system largely ignores children’s needs for mentorship, stability and personal development. As an adult, Cancel found an opportunity to leverage the power of technology to fill this need. Now he runs several hackathons a year, during which people collaborate on intensive computer programming, to develop better ways to use technology to connect foster children with the mentors and support they need.
Taking a different approach, Karen Fondacaro brought a moral idea to the event. Fondacaro is a clinical psychologist who has worked within the criminal justice system as well as with immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers. She shared how at first she was afraid to work with a murderer, but that changed once she met him. Expecting a terrifying monster of a man, she was disarmingly surprised to find a very normal older person making her laugh for the duration of their session. She also talked about the horrific stories she heard from the migrants who have come to her organization, Connecting Cultures. For instance, she told the story of a Sudanese man who, after listing all the major events in his life including the murder of his father and other challenges of the civil war, reflected that he had forgotten how many good moments he has had as well. Fondacaro encapsulated her idea by simply saying “leaning in and listening is important.”
As Fondacaro’s talk proves, the event was not solely an intellectual gathering of new and exciting ideas. It was full of emotion: fear, joy, shame and courage, to name a few. It was cathartic.
Lida Winfield, a visiting dance professor, performed about her lifelong struggles with her learning difficulties. Not only was her story a moving one about working through years of shame and tribulation, but she presented it as a talk, a poem and a dance simultaneously.
She was not alone in moving the audience. Cancel explained how “Law and Order” inspired him to self-advocate to get the foster care he deserved before helping provide that care for others as well. Duras put on full display the boldness that she developed to respond to her struggles with mental health. Overall, the effect was eye-opening.
Ultimately, “eye-opening” is exactly what an event like this ought to be. Although we may be tucked in our small corner of Vermont, TEDxMiddlebury allowed the community to experience a larger world, intellectually, emotionally and physically. Last weekend’s conference thus successfully spread ideas worth sharing. With any luck, those ideas will seep through our community and begin to make our world a little bit better.
(10/25/18 9:55am)
As far as community-building measures on campus go, SPECS is one of the most promising new initiatives to build a better Middlebury environment. SPECS, standing for “Sex Positive Education, College Style,” is a gender studies project turned student organization, turned special student organization dedicated to teaching Middlebury students about safe and positive sex.
“It’s just a fun environment where we meet and talk about stuff that we care about,” SPECS Co-President Isabelle Lee ’20 said.
For many, sex-ed is something best left in the past, in uncomfortable middle school classrooms.
“I have a lot of negative associations with my PE teacher whipping out a condom,” Lee said. But it isn’t always as simple as that. “We recognize that people come to Middlebury with varying levels of knowledge,” she said, explaining that can have an important impact on students. “My sex education was very abstinence-based and a lot of other people have experienced the same thing where you’re just taught to not have sex.”
When Lee came to Middlebury, she found herself venturing into new territory as she started to go to campus parties.
“There was just all this information that was thrown at me. I’m really a person who likes to understand things,” she said. “I remember hearing, from my friends the next morning after hookups sitting in Proctor and thinking things like, ‘Well that’s problematic,’ ‘That shouldn’t have happened,’ ‘Why did that happen?’ and not having answers to those questions really propelled me to apply [to join SPECS].”
SPECS sponsors roughly two events every month, such as first-year dorm workshops. The club has several modules, both for first-years and upperclassmen, including “Pleasure and Communication,” “Reproductive Justice,” “STDs and STIs,” “Healthy Relationships” and “Sexual Identity/Gender Identity.”
“We really try to cover everything you get in a sex-ed curriculum,” Lee said.
In addition to teaching workshops, SPECS also sponsors other social events, including Atwater dinners and trivia nights.
“We try to tackle [sex-ed] in a way that makes it approachable and fun and not this big thing that people are really intimidated by,” said Lee.
SPECS’ current healthy load of regular activities is just the beginning. Originally Pippa Raffel ’18 and Natalie Cheung’s ’18 Reproductive Justice project for one of Professor Carly Thomsen’s classes last year, SPECS quickly became an informal group of students meeting to talk about the needs they saw on campus for better sex-ed curriculum. Within a year, these discussions turned into curriculum and an SGA-certified student organization. By the year’s end, they were already talking with Director of Health and Wellness Education Barbara McCall about how they could be even more effective in promoting positive sex on campus.
This year, SPECS became a special student organization, much like MiddSafe, and partnered with the Office of Health and Wellness Education. This expanded SPECS’ budget, giving them easier access to the ResLife system and the school calendar, and allowing them to distribute t-shirts, promotional items and quality, safe sex supplies.
SPECS is poised to make major improvements to the Middlebury sex culture.
“Now is the time to talk about this,” said Lee. “So we are really passionate about opening that space [to talk about positive sex] and fostering it in a way that’s responsible.”
SPECS can be reached through their Facebook page or website (go/specs). While they have already accepted the applications of 15 new members this year, Lee and her co-president Annie Tong ’19 are always interested in hearing from people who would like to get involved or make suggestions.
(10/11/18 9:59am)
The stage is set — or rather, it isn’t. The bare rug and single microphone frame a strikingly empty space. In the coming hours, this space will see death, love, fear, disappointment and a stoned man in the woods named Dave. This is Cocoon.
The show began with Sarah Asch ’19.5 and Elsa Rodriguez ’21 explaining the rules of this particular event, held Friday, Oct. 5 at the Mahaney Center for the Arts: storytellers have ten minutes to tell a story. And it must be true. Asch and Rodriguez, along with their co-organizers Adam Druckman ’19, John Schurer ’21, Zeinab Thiam ’21 and Mahaney Center Director Liza Sacheli, invited seven members of the greater Middlebury community, from students to a local farmer to a celebrity artist-in-residence and more, to speak to the night’s theme of “Origins.”
Asch and Rodriguez left the stage and so started the sometimes painful, sometimes joyous process of metamorphosing seven unknown faces into seven rich, disorienting, frightening, ecstatic narratives. That is to say, into seven very real lives.
Kyle Wright ’19.5 spoke of his starving, backcountry quest to grieve for his deceased younger brother. Jon Turner, of Wild Roots Farm, described his continual struggle with his father, exasperated by a long legacy of military involvement and his own experiences in the Gulf War. Maria Del Sol Nava ’18, now an admissions staff member, searched for her calling amid intense pressure to excel. Megan Job ’21 knew she could excel but struggled to maintain that conviction when her environment did not share it. Recent Middlebury retirees, Linda and Ira Schiffer, had to learn how to be parents while also being immigrants in Israel. François Clemmons, an artist-in-residence, sacrificed his love and sexuality for decades to protect “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood,” weathering a family that rejected him and a failed marriage in the process.
Then, in the dark midst of these trials, there was a break in the clouds. Clemmons put on a wedding dress, raised a toast to himself, and shouted, “I’m finally the bride!” The Schiffer family returned from the Middle East, their children graduated (as Febs) and bravely traversed the world in two different circuses. Job burned the racism and discouragement she found as a freshman to fuel her powerful podcast “BLCKGRLMGC” (and she made the naysayers eat their words through her academic excellence). Del Sol Nava embraced the fire that her father and Rabbi Schiffer lit in her to continually pursue her passions. Turner left the army, fell in love, got married, started making peace with his now late father, and grew determined to give his kids the father he wished he’d had. Wright found that braving the elements in the woods could tell him how much he wanted a cheeseburger, but only coming home to his newborn sister would teach him how to boldly love despite a fear of loss.
In the end, we are our own stories. Struggles and victories define a person. Friday night, seven people — faces one might have seen on campus, driving down College Street, at Hannaford, or maybe never before — became real, four-dimensional people, struggling and rejoicing as much as anyone. It is rare to see another human, a stranger to most, in such completeness. The speakers at Cocoon communicated this completeness in only ten minutes. Ultimately, the event posed the question, “What is a life?” In doing so, the audience was led to ponder what events define their story and was reminded that everyone has just as complicated, messy and real a story as themselves. Life has no extras. These are, perhaps, points that ought to be posed more frequently, but at least one can thank Cocoon for making them in such an entertaining and emotional way as last Friday.
(10/11/18 9:56am)
Two neighbors watch and review the Mr. Rogers documentary.