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(11/20/13 11:17pm)
Renowned Biologist and Science educator Sean Carroll came to the College last Thursday, Nov. 14, and gave two talks, one on his recently published book “Brave Genius: A Scientist’s Journey from the French Resistance to the Nobel Prize” and the other on the field of evolutionary developmental biology and how different forms evolved in animal species.
Associate Professor of Biology Catherine Combelles introduced Carroll on both occasions, citing his award winning research as a Professor of Molecular Biology at Washington University, and his work in science education as the Vice-President of the Howard Hughes Medical institute. She also mentioned his well-reviewed books on popular science and his science column in the New York Times. In his two lectures Carroll lived up to his laurels and combined his brilliant research with an ability to interestingly communicate scientific concepts.
Carroll fittingly began his talk on Jacque Monod with Rudyard Kupling’s quote “if history were taught in the form of stores, it would never be forgotten.” He then related the incredible tale of Jacque Monod, who was both one of the leaders of the French resistance against the Nazi regime and a winner of the noble prize in Physiology.
Monod was a French Jew and a graduate student in biology when the Nazis invaded France. He halted his research, which would one day win him a Nobel Prize, and joined the most militant of French resistance group. His escapades included barely escaping a deadly Gestapo raid, running arms across the Swiss border, and arming French Resistance fighters to help the allied forces during D-day. He eventually became one of the leaders of the resistance movement and helped liberate Paris from the Nazis.
Carroll linked Monod’s efforts during the French Resistance to his biological research saying “chance played a huge role in his personal life, along with his thinking about biology” and because of this “it was really Jaque Monod who drove home the role of chance in the course of life on earth in his 1980 book called chance and necessity.”
During the Q&A session Sean Carroll widened his topic to science and society. Carroll advocated for a greater role of science in culture, saying “cultural impact can happen through science – the Apollo program had a huge impact, we watched that drama unfold day by day. I think there are possibilities to find some galvanizing experiences that we can share that might gives science a little better penetration into the hearts and minds of people.”
Carroll also touched upon the conflict over evolution in America and the fact that nearly 50 percent of Americans believe in creationism. In leading the science education branch of the Howard Hughes Medical institute, which he described as the “largest private supporter of science education in the U.S”, he said that “one strategy I employ is I decided I wasn’t going to argue with anyone over 22. I think there’s no return on that investment, zero. Because I had the experience of seeing glimmers of openness and flexibility in college student and younger when exposed to certain things, such as the idea that lots and lots of large religious denominations fully embrace evolutionary science.”
In Carroll’s more science heavy lecture on Evolutionary Developmental biology he described the importance of evolutionary developmental biology to our understanding of evolution.
“Development is the process that makes form,” he said, “and therefore changes in that process must underlie the evolution of form. That’s why the field of developmental biology is so integral to understanding the evolution of form.”
He also gave a survey of the incredibly surprising finds of the recently created field which few people had predicted.
“The gene that is responsible for the development of the legs in the fruit fly embryo, is also active in the development in the legs of a butterfly, and the appendages of a shrimp, and strangely enough the wings of a chicken,” he said. “So this gene is used in the formation of all sorts of appendages in the animal kingdom. And this was very surprising because the expectation was, that for example furry animals had different gene recipes than bugs. No biologist on the planet predicted these homologs and that there would be similar genetic ingredients in the making of bodies in things as different as earthworms, and fruit flies, and mice.”
Diversity in form, Carroll explained, was not caused by the development of new genes, but rather new ways of regulating existing developmental genes. Thus, although all animals in the animal kingdom have similar genetic toolkits, they utilize them in different ways.
Carroll combined both erudition and eloquence, and entertainingly explained one of the most important concepts in biology and science.
(11/07/13 10:53pm)
Snake Pit with Adeline Cleveland ’13.5 & Alan Sanders ’13.5
Middlebury Campus (MC): How did you form?
Addy: Both of us came together at the beginning of this semester. We’ve been friends for a while and we’ve each had different shows all four years. We’re in our last semester, and our former partners graduated last year, so we were just chatting one day and decided to do a story together.
MC: How did you come up with the name?
Alan: I came over to Addy’s house one day, and her friend from high school was there, and he works in a reptile house.
Addy: He makes snakes, like he alters different parts of their DNA.
Alan: It was a wild experience. And the next day we were supposed to fill out the application. So we came up with SnakePit.
MC: How would you describe the sound of your show?
Alan: We are a hip-hop show, but we also play a lot of new electronic and electronic-pop acts.
Addy: It’s not really a theme every show, but sometimes a common thread will appear as the show goes on and we kind of just go from there, depending on the flow of the show.
Alan: We try to play new music as much as possible – we play what came out each week.
MC: Three adjectives.
Alan: Slithery
Addy: Dangerous
Alan: Venomous
MC: Why should listeners tune in?
Addy: We generally play songs that flow well into each other so it’s nice to listen not only for one song, but the show is pretty coherent as a whole, and our banter is pretty on point. It’s intentional and informative. Alan is pretty knowledgeable and up-to-date on the artists and albums we’re playing, and I don’t know that stuff. So we’re not both talking at people, we’re both conversing.
Alan: It’s a good way for listeners to get to know new music and new artists. Also, our show is on a Thursday night, so people can listen when they’re in the library studying or in their dorm rooms, not studying. Eighty percent of our listeners are from town, not on campus. Our listeners vary between lots of different age groups.
MC: How do you broadcast to listeners across different age groups?
Addy: Making a conscious effort to not just have our conversation center around stuff that happens at the College. We definitely bring things that are happening on campus, but I think by keeping our conversation centered around current pop events and music, that’s easier to relate to than two students talking about Proctor dining hall.
Second Hand Groove Machine with Jebb Norton ‘13.5 and Eric Benepe ‘13.5
MC: How did you form?
Jebb: Destiny.
Erik: We went to the first meeting our second semester, and we had known each other before. We had very similar musical taste and decided to do a show together.
MC: How would you describe your musical style?
Erik: We do a different genre every week, we have different themes. Sometimes we’ll pick a genre, sometimes we’ll pick a period in musical history, sometimes we’ll play instrumental beats with different speeches we’ve gotten by famous people.
Jebb: We did a show for Shel Silverstein a month ago. We played a bunch of his poetry and songs that he wrote and stuff by his friends. We have fun with it.
Erik: Basically, we both listen to a lot of music and on our show we try to play things that we’re interested in and use it as a way to find out more about the music we like.
MC: Three adjectives.
Jebb: I’d say funky. More than most people would think of, I think funk music is about doing what you want to do, and we definitely bring the funk.
Erik: Goofy. We get kind of ridiculous sometimes. We’ve got a solid core of fans, but sometimes we get callers and we have no idea who they are.
Jebb: I like it because every week, we have a two hour period where we never do work. It’s just a period where we can listen to music and talk, or just think. It’s just a separate mind space from normal time at Middlebury.
MC: Do you think that vibe is communicated to your listeners?
Jebb: Yeah totally, I hope so. If we were doing homework, I think they would know. It would change, we wouldn’t be as engaged.
MC: Do you plan ahead?
Erik: We’ve gotten to a point where we don’t know how to plan that much. We know each other’s music style well enough and we have good chemistry. We sort of improvise what sounds good.
MC: Why should listeners tune in to your show?
Erik: Because we emphasize playing good music, and we don’t talk too much. When we do talk, we try to contribute things to teach people about the music.
Jebb: We don’t ask each other what we had for lunch, and then talk about it for fifteen minutes. People should listen to us because everyone needs an escape. And that’s what we give.
Rock in Rio with Fabiana Benediini ‘15 and Jess Parker ‘16
MC: What is Rock and Rio?
Benedini: So Rock in Rio is actually not a world show, it’s Brazilian music – Brazilian country and rock. Brazilian rock says a lot about Brazilian history so most of the bands complain about the government and how corrupt it is. There are a lot of songs about disillusionment and anger and those are really good. And Brazilian country is about Brazilian daily culture, so heartbreak, drinking a lot and women.
MC: How did the show start?
Benedini: Jess and I were having dinner at Proctor. She wants to learn Portuguese so I said okay, let’s have a show so you can practice by listening to music and you can talk in Portuguese. Her mom’s Brazilian and she wants to learn Portuguese so she knows a little bit and she’s taking Portuguese for Spanish speakers right now.
MC: Do you speak Portuguese on the air?
Benedini: We do speak in Portuguese to each other when she asks about the lyrics.
MC: Are the songs from growing up in Brazil or are they more modern?
Benedini: It’s hard to find modern songs but I can usually message my friends in Brazil and they can tell me what good music is going on right now. So I get input from Brazilians.
MC: When does the show air?
Benedini: It airs Wednesdays from 7 AM to 8 AM. It’s super early. It feels like it’s super early. It’s so fun to see Jess there and hang out with her. And it’s a good way to start our morning, especially because it’s music about heartbreak or anger – it’s hilarious.
MC: What you might hear:
Capital Inicial, “It is usually about corruption or disillusionment and it is rock.”
Ivete Sangalo, “It’s pump up music. It’s a style that is very typical of Brazil.”
MC: Any callers?
Benedini: Jess’s mom called once.
Almost Famous with Ben Goldberg ’14 and Maddie Dai ’14
MC: As the General Manger, what is your role at WRMC?
Goldberg: I kind of do a little bit of everything. I am learning as I go. The official description of my position is I’m the student president [of WRMC], I’m responsible for budget and the money side of things. We have a business director for that as well but I’m very much involved. I’m also a link between us and the administration, student activities and probably most significantly, the FCC (Federal Communications Commission). On a day-to-day basis, making sure everyone else is doing what they need to be doing. So, it’s a full time job.
MC: What would be your pitch to listen to WRMC?
Goldberg: It’s nothing like anything else you have on the air in Addison County – commercial free radio, tastefully picked music. We’re not catering to a certain audience, we’re not playing just top 40 hits.
Dai: There’s a lot of banter, there’s a joke a minute.
Goldberg: It’s nice to hear a range of student voices giving input. It’s a surprisingly personal experience to listen to someone’s show and what they’re up to and what they’re listening to.
Dai: If you’re driving a car, what else are you going to do?
Goldberg: All the shows are pretty different. We are predominately music, alternative music (whatever that means), but it’s at least diverse to some degree. We try to make it as diverse as possible but the fact that you’re listening to peers or even to someone you don’t know playing music they care about, have something to say about and want to share that with you, that’s a way to connect with other people. It’s so much more fulfilling than just putting on your iPod or putting on a CD when you have someone crafting a playlist for you.
MC: Almost Famous’ description says, “From boy bands to mental breakdowns.” What does that mean?
Dai: We go through all those iterations. One day we’ll be a boy band and the next we’ll have a mental breakdown. It’s actually our third show together and it’s been the evolution of us. We started in Oxford, we went abroad there.
Goldberg: Oxcide student radio.
Dai: There’s not many things Middlebury does better than Oxford but radio would be one of them. They have more Nobel prize winners in general but we have a good radio station. So we went there and then we had a show last semester called Zig-a-Zig-Ah which was a Nineties tribute show and now we do pop.
Goldberg: It was sort of a natural evolution. On our first show, Back to the Boombox, we would pick a different era of music but focusing on some sort of pop era, more or less.
Dai: We relive a lot of our childhood memories. But at a time when we were extremely awkward probably and it’s not necessarily overly sentimental, at an exciting time of middle school dances.
Goldberg: Maddie and I come from wildly different places but strangely enough we are able to connect through Nineties pop culture. That was the foundation of Zig-a-Zig-Ah and we didn’t want to have to be stuck playing just nineties music and the nineties music we were listening to for the most part was pop or some variation thereof. So now on Almost Famous we’ll do each week a different phenomenon in pop music.
Dai: Not to intellectualize it but it is interesting to look at pop as industrialized, very attuned to different cultural fads and movements and the movement from boy bands to girl bands.
Goldberg: We’re taking a stab at sociology.
Dai: Via Wikipedia.
Goldberg: Neither of us are trained sociologists. I still haven’t taken a sociology class but we can speak at length about Britney Spears or Justin Timberlake or Beyoncé and it’s nice because everyone who’s listening knows what we’re talking about.
MC: What are some typical songs or artists on Almost Famous?
Goldberg: Lately there’s been a lot of Lorde.
Dai: And also because I’m a New Zealander so I’m shamelessly promoting her.
Goldberg: And also her album is just objectively pretty good.
Dai: Britney is often the epicenter from which we like to compare other artists, in terms of her career that’s gone through so many evolutions, rising and falling, so there is some Britney but we talk about her more than we play her.
Goldberg: I don’t feel like there is a pattern in the artists we play but I guess as far as pop goes we play a lot of Beyoncé, Rihanna here and there, Justin Timberlake. Music we respect, whether as individuals we respect them or we respect their music.
Soul Food with Josh Swartz ’14.5 and Alia Khalil ’14.5
MC: Tell me about the formation of Soul Food.
Swartz: I spent part of the summer in New Orleans and inspired by the music culture down there and going to see live music down there and pretty much everyday thing that people do. That’s something that I loved. It’s also just the time of our show from 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. when ppl are just finishing up classes, getting a burger at Proctor and getting ready for the weekend. It’s easy to listen to, puts you in a good mood, old and new. This is the first semester that SF has been in existence. Alia and I have a good rapport. We have a good time.
MC: Explain what Soul Food is.
Khalil: It’s two friends sharing their music with all their other friends. In every set, there’s definitely one song you can fit your taste to. We play a lot of different types of music, but even within the soul genre, there are older and recent songs.
Swartz: A big part of the show is us bantering about Halloween costumes and favorite animals, community events, and things that happen at Middlebury. Our last guest has a particularly good Norah Jones impression. Our conversation focuses on light-hearted fun things, like talking about Halloween or movies. The tone of our conversation is very upbeat and easy to listen to. It is something we’re conscious of: everything we do is geared toward a universal audience.
Khalil: Regardless of if you’re in Middlebury or not, you’re able to understand our conversations. A lot of radio shows have inside jokes, but that is not us.
MC: What does the music do to you?
Khalil: It energizes you. We always say it is music that feeds your soul so it’s not limited. Our generation doesn’t realize how versatile soul music can be which can include lyrical ballads or some songs with strong beats.
Swartz: One tradition is that we always end every show with the same song: “September” by Earth Wind and Fire. That song really legitimizes what our show is about. Everyone recognizes it; it’s a happy song. It used to make more sense because it used to be September. Now we just use it to feed people’s souls.
MC: What is the best show moment to go down in Soul Food history?
Swartz: We got a call from Vergennes, who I think calls in to WRMC a lot — so this might not have been that special — but he said, “Wow, I really loved the show” and was super supportive. I actually think that he is someone who calls in pretty frequently, but I like to pretend that he just called in our show.
Khalil: My favorite moment was when we introduced “September” for the first time and we were just kind of joking about autumn activities and announced that we were going to. Closes the show.
Swartz: From that moment, we could both feel it was the start of a very powerful tradition. It happened in our very first show; it happened so organically.
MC: What can you guarantee that your listener will hear when they tune into the show?
Khalil: You will hear Josh’s awesome radio voice, which a is a bit of an alter ego from his normal voice. He sounds like a radio DJ who plays soul music.
Swartz: We always talk about a concert that is happening or happened at Middlebury. We do talk about local music scenes. In our last show, we played Apenglow to promote that concert on Higher Ground on Sunday. There’s a local consciousness to our show. That’s being part of the Middlebury community and the Vermont community — that’s an important part of being a radio show.
Khalil: We both have different taste in music and we both complement each other in new bands we’ve heard of and introduce each other. Even in my own radio show, I’m always finding new songs.
The Campus Voice with Greta Neubauer ’14.5 and Ian Stewart ’14
MC: Explain to a 5th grader what the Campus Voice is.
Neubauer: The Campus Voice is a way to bring the work of the Middlebury Campus and its writers into broader dialogue with the members of the community who are commenters on the story written in the Campus. They relate to those issues and we make that vocal and in a dialogue, where people can interact beyond the pages.
MC: What is the difference between the dialogue on the Campus Voice and one with your friends?
Stewart: It seems in most conversations with your friends, you kind of try to get to an agreement on an issue. Whereas with the show, no one has to leave agreeing. Part of what we do is to try to tease out the distinct arguments that are being made at different sides of the issue. When you’re with your friends you’re less likely to push your friends that we can be with our host hats on.
Neubauer: The differences among people who go on the show are greater differences than those in our groups of friends. A lot of the friends that I have these conversations with — we all sort of have the same opinions about this issue. The Campus Voice brings the dialogue out of niches on campus.
MC: Why should someone who reads the newspaper want to tune into the show 4 days later?
Stewart: Issues are changing constantly on the campus. The dialogue is changing, new events are coming out, absurd emails are being sent out and are not being sent out and so the story, as with any story, evolves. This is a nice chance to check in a few days later. There’s not that pressure of the 500 or 600 words [in print]. Just tell the straight facts. Get your three quotes in. Tell it in this neat, closed story. Another thing is that it’s different to hear someone’s voice and to hear their pauses and their inflections and their emotions, their excitement. That’s something that no amount of adjectives and adverbs on print will be able to recreate. You’re taking out a layer and so you’re closer to the people and story than you might be with a story on the page.
Neubauer: I also think that we’re taking an issue that’s come up on campus and bringing it back to the broader conversation. Whether it’s homophobia on this campus or the topic of dialogue.
Kyle Finck: Also, moving forward the point is not only to read the news but to interact with the news, so in terms of submitting questions, getting them answered, whether it’s having Dean Collado on or a student provoked by Collado’s blog. This is about interacting with the news.
MC: What is the best moment captured on your show?
Stewart: The one I keep thinking about is when we did a show on spoken word artists and hip-hop rap artists on campus. To see their art on campus and the way they talked about it was almost seamless. I was so blown away by their articulateness in the Q&A part of the interview that I felt like it was an extension of the rhymes and language in their art.
Neubauer: That too was my favorite moment of the show. There was something really special about seeing the performance and the question. I always love when I go to an art museum and I want to hear the whole description of the painting on an audio guide or docent and so I really like to hear interpretation. That was cool to hear them in spoken terms give us that description. Similarly, talking about the interpretation of Chance’s lyrics. I come to a different place on the issue having engaged with people who talking about it a lot.
Stewart: The idea that you can change our opinion in a conversation in the same way it had naturally is unique to the radio. You’re just selecting snapshots in newspaper — that’s what is going to represent what you felt at that moment and that’s valuable, but we have the chance to change someone’s mind over the course of the show and see the evolution the same way it happens to us sitting there and listening.
MC: What’s one thing you can promise listener in every show?
Stewart: Almost everytime when someone says something, they were sincere about it. You will hear a true sincere moment that is not a sound byte. It’s something they thought about or believed.
Neubauer: You think you understand Middlebury, you talk in classes but it’s not the same as hearing people’s perspectives. It’s surprising. I have this idea that I understand Middlebury and its student body, and it’s not true.
(11/06/13 9:33pm)
“So, are you a boy or a girl?” Moments after being asked this question by a suave man in a lab coat, I was tossed out into Kalos to begin my adventure in Pokémon X. I picked my starter, a Froakie (obviously), and soon found myself giggling like a kid again as I tromped through the world, capturing and battling any Pokémon that I could find.
If you are a fan of the series you should stop reading and keep playing because you already have these games. If you are an old fan who has fallen off the bandwagon, or someone looking into Pokémon for the first time, these games have a lot to offer.
If the Pokémon series has ever been consistently criticized for one thing, it is stagnation. “They’re just the same games over and over again!” cry some. In a way, they are right. Pokémon games all follow a tried and true formula. You will be presented with the same starter types, introduced to a rival or two, and face off against gym leaders and some sort of criminal team before finally confronting the Elite Four and becoming the Champion.
Each game offers some new wrinkles and updates, but the basic formula remains the same. If this formula does not appeal to you, I cannot honestly recommend X and Y. While the game boasts a slew of new features which make the experience both on and offline all the more captivating, you will still be tasked with the same goals and challenged by similar obstacles.
Where X and Y shine is in their ability to make the Pokémon formula feel fresh. Earlier games in the series had notoriously slow starts, requiring a good hour or two of play before the real game began. X and Y start at a breakneck pace, handing you a starter and some Pokéballs and releasing you into the world pretty much from the get go.
From there, you will notice that Kalos is home to an almost ridiculous array of Pokémon. Every route is packed full of monsters from every generation of games, allowing you to build a varied team right away. The first chunk of the game is quite spread out, giving you time to adventure and enjoy the world. As you progress, the game’s pacing speeds up by reducing time between gyms as your character hardens their resolve to face off against the Elite Four. The pace of the story allowed me to enjoy my wanderings at the beginning of the game, and by the time I felt ready to be done with the story and move on to creating a competitive team, the pace had accelerated enough for me to do so quickly.
Pokémon X and Y’s most noticeable change is their move to fully 3D graphics. Making the most out of the more powerful 3DS hardware, Game Freak created fully animated models of every Pokémon which replace the old two dimensional sprites. The battles and world look phenomenal. My favorite Pokémon designs came to life through the new graphics, and I found a new appreciation for some Pokémon I was previously not so fond of. The battle scenes also make use of new attack animations, and the whole thing feels snappy and fast paced.
The new graphical style is accompanied by greater freedom of movement using the 3DS’ circle pad and your character’s roller skates. Moving around the world feels intuitive, for the most part. Kalos’ capital city of Lumiose suffers from some difficult controls due to its behind the back perspective, and I often found myself wandering through alleys and shop doors that I had not meant to enter. Aside from the awkwardness of Lumiose, Pokémon X and Y have made the jump to 3D graphics quite masterfully.
For those of you looking to get into Pokémon’s more complicated meta-game, X and Y are by far the best places to start. The breeding and training cycle of old games has been accelerated through a number of new features. With the introduction of the Super Training system and the ability to breed good Pokémon more quickly, I actually found myself having fun with making my team, as opposed to accepting it as a necessary chore.
Pokémon X and Y are great games for getting into this series. The whole experience feels streamlined and fresh, giving players old and new plenty of reason to start out on their own journeys. There is no better time to play Pokémon, just make sure to put down the games long enough to attend classes.
(10/30/13 10:39pm)
Middlebury College, as a part of the Hirschfield Film Series, screened Jia Zhangke’s first award winning film A Touch Of Sin, which was nominated for the Palm d’Or and won the best screenplay. it is perhaps an honor, and an irony, that our screening on Saturday, Oct. 26 preceded its premiere in China.
(10/16/13 10:28pm)
I inch forward along the dungeon floor, my spear clutched tightly in my hands. Brilliantly colored foliage on either side of me, I occasionally pause to jot a note down on the crude map I have with me. I hear a rustling in the underbrush. There are monsters about. The rustling grows louder, I hear a growl, one of my companions screams. A sick guitar lick strikes up and I prepare for battle.
Etrian Odyssey: Untold: The Millennium Girl (EOU) for the 3DS is the latest in the long running and well regarded dungeon crawl series produced by Atlus. EOU is a remake of the original Etrian Odyssey, but adds a slew of new mechanics and story details to go along with its updated graphics and music. Known for being both difficult and time consuming, Etrian Odyssey games are not for those who find themselves strapped for time. At first glance, the gameplay seems like fairly traditional JRPG fare. Dungeons are traversed in a first person perspective, enemies are randomly encountered, and then your party and theirs take turns bashing each other over the head. In between forays into the dungeon you return to town to pick up quests at the local bar, sell the loot you’ve acquired and rest at a comfortable inn.
What sets Etrian Odyssey apart are a handful of unique mechanics combined with a difficulty level that requires some serious strategizing. When preparing for battle you will form a party of five characters. You can assign skills to these characters to allow them to play very different roles, and making sure that your party is properly equipped with both standard gear and Grimoire Stones is critical. An improperly prepared party will find themselves overwhelmed by the various brightly colored monsters that await them in the dungeons below. While questing through the dungeons you will be able to draw your own maps of them on a grid on the bottom screen. Filling out a complete map of a floor will allow you to navigate and complete quests more easily, which is absolutely critical as wandering around blindly is a good way to get yourself killed.
Unlike previous entries in the series, EOU allows you to choose between two modes of play. Classic Mode allows the player to create a full party of characters from the get go. The party can be customized by name, appearance, and character class, which allows the player to create some interesting class combinations. While these created characters can be fun, they won’t have as much of an influence on the game’s story, as they all act as pretty much silent protagonists. Story Mode follows the adventures of the Highlander as he explores the forest around the base of the World Tree, Yggdrasil. Joining him are four pre-created companions. This party is made up of fairly standard classes, but each of the characters possesses some unique skills and abilities that make building them up as a party significantly more interesting.
I found myself enjoying Story Mode much more than Classic. While I have enjoyed previous entries in the series, the addition of characters who actually talk and interact with the world on a narrative level is a welcome one indeed. The narrative is surprisingly strong for a game so focused on dungeon crawling and boss killing. Etrian Odyssey games have always had interesting fiction to go along with them, and seeing one of their stories with a party who can actually talk back to the characters they are interacting with is refreshing. If the Etrian Odyssey games ever felt like they were missing anything it was a cast of speaking characters, and these fit the bill nicely. They all fall into fairly standard anime or JRPG tropes, but with a bit of an Etrian Odyssey flair.
The feel of the Etrian Odyssey games might be what draws me to them the most. The art is brightly colored and sleek, combining the 2D character portraits nicely with well rendered 3D backgrounds and enemies. Because the combat takes place in first person, the enemy design has to shine to make combat appear dynamic and interesting. That, and the music is excellent. The aforementioned guitar licks that play during battle give way to smooth jazz saxophone when the party returns to the bar in town, and all the music is good enough to listen to on its own.
The Etrian Odyssey games have always been fabulous examples of the dungeon crawl genre. Tough but fair, beautiful to look at and to hear, EOU is no exception. The satisfaction of clearing a floor and slaying one of the game’s giant bosses makes the slow trek through the previous floors seem all the more worthwhile. Playing an Etrian Odyssey game can be hard work. You have to be able to juggle numerous statistics, strategies, and inventories, and the actual progression through the game can take quite a while if you are not fighting at peak efficiency. Being an adventurer is not an easy job, but it is an immensely satisfying one.
(10/09/13 9:14pm)
“Are Our Political Beliefs Encoded in Our DNA?”
Surrounded by news of the government shutdown, Iranian negotiations and Obamacare, this was the headline that caught my eye as I scanned the New York Times headlines. I think it was the jarring association of the two phrases, “political beliefs” and “DNA” – which I typically think of as unassociated, at least in the mainstream media — that grabbed my attention.
Written by Thomas B. Edsall, the article documents developments in a new methodology in political science called genopolitical analysis which examines correlations between genetics, physiology and political belief – and critiques of the new analytical method.
Political scientists are researching the extent to which genetics determines an individual’s political beliefs. An abstract from a Science paper from September 2008 entitled “Political Attitudes Vary with Physiological Traits” explains that, “although political views have been thought to arise largely from individuals’ experiences, recent research suggests that they may have a biological basis.”
That biological basis to which the paper refers is a battery of physiological traits that are associated with certain political leanings. The authors found that “the degree to which individuals are physiologically responsive to threat appears to indicate the degree to which they advocate policies that protect the existing social structure from both external (outgroup) and internal (norm-violator) threats.”
However, critics argue that no such correlation exists, or that if it does, it is embedded in such a complex web of factors that extracting any meaningful connections is nigh impossible.
But another paper from the American Political Science Association (APSA), defends the budding field of genopolitical analysis by arguing that, “it is not biological determinism to posit the existence of complex collections of genes that increase the probability that certain people will display heightened or deadened response patterns to given environmental cues. And it is not antibehavioralism to suggest that true explanations of the source of political attitudes and behaviors will be found when we combine our currently detailed understanding of environmental forces with a recognition that genetic variables subtly but importantly condition human responses to environmental stimuli.”
I’m inclined to agree with Alford et al., the authors of the APSA paper. Organs and tissues make up the human body (brain included), and all our interaction with the outside world – experience – is mediated through the physical body by the five senses. New research has found that physiology is tied to political ideology. Intuitively, it seems highly unlikely that a connection between genetic composition and political beliefs does not exist. But if a connection exists, and if current research is elucidating those connections, another issue arises. What do we do with that knowledge?
Edsall suggests using the knowledge to solve the political challenges of the day. He argues that “with so much riding on political outcomes — from default on the national debt to an attack on Syria to attitudes toward climate change — understanding key factors contributing to the thinking of elected officials and voters becomes crucial. Every avenue for understanding human behavior should be on the table.”
Delving into the genetic basis of political ideologies is a bit like cracking the lid of Pandora’s box. Using knowledge of genetic influences on behavior to educate citizens within a democracy about how and why they make choices would certainly be a good use of the information. But it’s not a far stretch to imagine an Orwellian society where that that knowledge is used as a tool to engineer repression and control.
Though I agree with Edsall that the knowledge can be used to elucidate our current political problems, I do not think any one person or group should try and use that knowledge to manipulate political outcomes. I think it’s a fine line that must be walked. The exploration of the human animal and all that it does will continue. Should continue. But as new knowledge is gained, we must, as a society, ask the question: How should this knowledge be applied?
(10/03/13 12:29am)
As someone whose academic interests lie primarily in the humanities and social sciences, I would hardly identify as someone who “does science.” However, I am also someone interested in the environment, specifically the ways our ideas about our environment fit in with the ideas we have about pretty much everything else, including our ethics, our economics, and more fundamental notions about the way our world works. So when I do philosophy – a discipline which, at its core, is concerned with clear thinking – I take it to be of the utmost importance to have clear thoughts about the subject matter I am dealing with. Now where might someone obtain clear, correct ideas about the environment or any other natural phenomena? One of the most reliable sources has proven to be people who actually “do science.”
Some of the most important work in conservation efforts is done by those who might identify as natural historians. Natural history, as defined by Thomas L. Fleischner, Professor of Environmental Studies at Prescott College, consists of “the study of life at the level of the individual – of what plants and animals do, how they react to each other and environment, how they are organized into larger groupings like populations and communities.” Fleischner argues that the human practice of natural history provides the genealogical underpinnings for much of today’s natural science. While its present form can be traced most directly back to the work of Aristotle, Fleischner proposes that natural history may have been practiced for as long as our pre-historic ancestors painted on caves and learned to track the patterns of the animals they hunted. In short, natural history represents the human attempt to put into narrative an empirical record of the natural world. In an ecological context, if we do not know what’s actually occurring in ecosystems, we can’t make judgments about where our conservation efforts should be focused.
I think this represents one iteration of a key insight we might infer about the importance of a commitment to a scientific perspective: that the kinds of normative judgments we can reasonably make about matters face constraints imposed by what we can know about the world. We can make arguments for climate action based on romantic notions of “wild nature” found in literary sources, but a stronger argument might be supported by appeal to, say, trends in organismal populations observed in data provided by long-term studies, or climatological data. The idea that normativity might be rooted in what we can observe about the natural world is nothing new; the underpinnings of Aristotle’s work in ethics and political philosophy can be found in his works on animals, physics, and metaphysics – works that concerned the nature of things, or “first philosophy.” And it would be awfully hard for someone to consider herself a good philosopher of mind without an understanding of what neuroscience can tell us about our physiology.
At the same time, I would hardly admit that science has a monopoly over our possible modes of thinking. I clearly believe that there’s value in doing philosophy, and I enjoy a good book as much as any other pretentious humanities major. I am also cautious about situations where our science gets too far ahead of our ethics (see: climate issues, the nuclear age, etc.), but I am consistently hopeful that we can move past such issues because we have methods of understanding our way out of predicaments by means of explanation. It is a fact of the matter that many of our best explanations are scientific and materialistic — many, but not all. And as Columbia University philosopher Philip Kitcher points out in an article written in response to some of the positions held by Thomas Nagel (who my fellow columnist Harry Zieve-Cohen ’15 quotes in his column “A Defense of Books”) one of the main challenges to science and philosophy consists in trying to provide naturalistic explanations for things like consciousness and our systems of valuing. We can hardly say that things like love and death are topics about which science has no jurisdiction because it is likely that one day they are things we will have explanations for.
Science and materialism have been considered as viable perspectives for as long as natural science has existed as an offshoot of natural philosophy. Just as it would be impossible to provide an accurate natural history of a region while ignoring the role humans play in shaping the landscape, we cannot do good science without remembering the lens through which it develops and is performed – the human lens. I doubt that anybody in our community or academia legitimately questions the value of humanities. We will discover the actual nature of “meaning and truth” inasmuch as science and the humanities are capable of collaborating in writing the human narrative.
(10/02/13 11:39pm)
On every test and paper turned in by Middlebury College students, the honor code is scrawled across the bottom of the page. But outside of the Middlebury bubble, students may encounter a slightly different kind of honor code: ones that exist at meat and dairy farm roadside stalls in the local area.
A mile down Weybridge Road, at Scholten Family Farm, is a tiny cube-shaped structure painted red and marked by a neat white sign advertising the “Farm Stand.” It is an experiment in trust. Anyone can drop in and peruse the fridges full of whole chickens and ground beef sausage while eying a smaller selection of eggs, as well as the Scholten family’s “Weybridge” cheese.
If one finds produce to his or her liking, he or she can consult with a whiteboard hanging on the wall for the price, leave money in a jar while taking the proper change, and head home, purchases in hand.
Patti Scholten, who produces her cheese in a building not 20 feet from the stand, quotes her husband Roger on the logic of the honor system farm stand:
“Our consumers trust us to put up high-quality food, so we should trust them too,” said Scholten.
The Farm Stand isn’t a unique entity in the township of Weybridge, however. Just one mile north of Scholten Farm lies Duclos and Thompson Farm, home to what Middlebury students have nicknamed, “The Meat Shack.” The operation is comparable to the Farm Stand in the way that it is run, but Lisa Thompson, who manages the farm with her husband Tom Duclos, is hesitant to publicly label her store any which way.
“We don’t try to hide the fact that there’s a store, but there’s a reason we don’t have a sign out and that we don’t advertise,” Thompson said. “Because you know, the wrong people learn [how it works] and it gets abused and we have no business left.”
Despite Thompson’s reservations, neither farm has encountered major problems.
“I had a New York plate stop in here once and they took what was in [the cash box],” Scholten said.
Thompson too had the cash box stolen one night seven or eight years ago, but she suspects that it was high school students.
“It wasn’t what they took, it was just feeling violated. In general people are very appreciative of the way we do it and they want the meat … and they’re willing to respect that,” said Thompson
Students at the College rave about the services provided by these two farms. In fact, if you were at Weybridge House on Sept. 28 for the Weybridge Feast, you probably consumed Duclos and Thompson bacon. At 10 p.m. the previous night, Isaac Baker ’14 and a cohort of Weybridge House members ventured out to purchase the bacon. Baker and his friends gathered the meat they needed, left over fifty dollars in the cash box and went home.
If you were one of the lucky ones in attendance at Jordan Collins’s ’15.5 “Local Bacon” themed Dolci shift last spring, you enjoyed the very same bacon. Or, if you managed to make it to Brooker last spring for the Pig Roast, again you would have tasted a Duclos and Thompson raised hog.
Both Collins and Myles Kamischer-Koch, ’15, who helped to plan the Pig Roast, are frequent customers at the “Meat Shack” and can attest to the high quality of Duclos and Thompson bacon and other meats.
For Kamischer-Koch, it is the variety of the meats. He attests that it is a quality that you often can’t find at the store, which brings him back to the Meat Shack again and again.
When Baker wants chicken he skips the Meat Shack and goes to the Farm Stand, which he has also visited about fifteen times.
The Meat Shack and the Farm Stand are, on the whole, profitable enterprises for their owners. Scholten estimates the profits of the Farm Stand to account for only one to two percent of the farm’s yearly income, taking in approximately $600-900 a month. The Meat Shack brings in $4,500-5,500 in business most months, one-third of Duclos and Thompson’s annual income.
Thompson explained that for many years her farm’s focal point was the “hot-house lamb” or “roaster lamb” market, meaning that most of the lambs were sold at Easter and Greek Easter to be consumed for holiday dinners.
“The economy tanked after 9/11 and the people in the cities weren’t ready to celebrate [and as a result business] slowed down significantly. It came to a point where we had been planning on the income from those lambs going and when they didn’t go we had to do something because we had to market the animals. So we built the store,” Thompson said.
Thompson also explained that the Meat Shack is unstaffed, partly to save the cost of labor and partly because the farming schedule keeps them in the fields. And of course, there is the aspect of convenience.
“People come all times of the day and night, because it doesn’t have hours,” Thompson said.
Five years after the Meat Shack opened, the Farm Stand arrived up the road at Scholten Farm with a slightly different origin. Roger Scholten, intent upon producing organic milk and selling his family’s farmstead cheese, started visiting farms to gain a better sense of the industry. What he found was that many of the farms he visited had farm stands, derivative of their inclination towards a local customer base.
Scholten estimates that on average, the Farm Stand will attract six customers a day. An exceptional day might bring twenty.
“Even on our worst days we get someone. It’s a very diverse group,” Scholten said.
At the Meat Shack, Thompson describes a similar situation.
“There is never a day that people don’t come and sometimes there is never a week when we don’t have new customers,” she said. Citing the invoice papers left in the Meat Shack for customers to fill out as her source, Thompson estimates that the Meat Shack sees 300 customers a month.
Customer-producer relationships are a potential subject of debate with the honor system service. For the Scholtens, said relationship was the “inspiration” for the Farm Stand.
“When you’re just shipping fluid milk, milk drivers pick up and leave,” said Scholten. These days, she enjoys receiving notes from the Farm Stand’s customers, many of whom she has gotten to know over the years.
Not everyone is convinced that this kind of connection between consumer and producer exists with such shacks and sheds, however. Meat Shack customer Rebecca Roe ’15 is torn in terms of how she feels about the business model.
“I love that the Meat Shack operates [the way that it does] — but that means that I’ve never met or talked to the people who raise the animals,” Roe said. “I’ve only read profiles of the farmers online, so I’ve lost a key part of the consumer-producer relationship.”
But Nicholas Frazier, ’16.5, a Meat Shack regular disagrees.
“Half the times I’ve been there, [Tom and Lisa] walk in and say hello,” he said. “I think they do make an effort to try to meet as many of their customers as possible.”
Frazier’s testimony is consistent with Thompson’s admission that while there are times during the summer when she and Duclos are “gone on tractors all day long . . . there [are other] times we’re around here a lot, and if I come home and there’s a customer there I always go check and see if I can help.”
Thompson’s check-ins at Meat Shack have given birth to friendships, not only with Middlebury students, but with visiting families as well. Thompson recounted the story of a certain Middlebury graduate of 2012.5 whom she came to know.
Though the student was from the Keene Valley in New York, an hour and 45 minute drive from Middlebury, she had introduced her parents to the Meat Shack on a visit.
“It got to the point that her folks were here almost every week. And even though she’s graduated they’re still here on a pretty regular basis getting their meat,” Thompson said.
“Sometimes it’s the parents, the grandparents, a stray uncle,” said Thompson. “Parents weekend, homecoming, whatever, your folks are visiting, a huge number of kids bring their parents out and say ‘you’ve gotta see this,’ and then the parents say ‘you couldn’t do this where we live!’”
(10/02/13 11:15pm)
A walk in the woods with a forager reveals all the neglected treats. As Jake Faber ’16 strolls along the forest floor he scans the undergrowth looking for edible plants and mushrooms. He lets loose a victorious cry, strides over to a small tuft of weeds, and takes a handful.
“This,” he explains, “is a wood sorrel. It tastes good, kind of like a lemon, and is used as flavoring. Try a little, although not too much because the oxalic acid in it can be poisonous in large quantities. You would have to eat a lot of it though.” I eye it, take a bite, and decide to pick some to munch on later.
Foraging is a growing trend in the U.S. and Faber and Aiofe Duna ’16.5, co-founders of the Foraging Club, are trying to introduce it to the College. Foraging is the act of searching for wild plants, fungi and fruit to consume. The idea for the club started last spring semester in a conversation between the two.
“Aiofe and I found out we were both really interested in foraging,” Faber said, “and when we started talking about it we heard there were a lot of other people on campus who thought that it sounded cool and wanted to learn about it, but were afraid to try it because they didn’t now enough to avoid things that would poison them.”
The two then decided to create a group where students could learn to safely identify and collect wild mushrooms and plants. The club plans on holding expeditions into Middlebury’s surrounding woods for a hands on foraging experience, as well as inviting guest professional lecturers on campus to speak and hold workshops.
Duna and Faber thought students would be interested in foraging on a number of levels. For starters, it’s a valuable survivalist skill. If you ever find yourself lost in the woods, you don’t want to end up like Alex Supertramp and eat a handful of poisonous seeds. And, however unlikely it is to find oneself in such a rough situation, people still enjoy being prepared for the worst and knowing they could do what survivor man does. On another level, it brings a heightened appreciation and understanding of nature.
“There’s the survivalist aspect,” Faber said. “But I think practically it’s something that gets people to become more aware of what’s going on around them in the forest. It changes how people view the landscape. There’s a lot going on in it.”
Foraging is also a nice way to apply the knowledge learned in the class to one of the most fundamental of personal concerns, hunger.
“If you understand the basics of ecology and plant biology,” Faber said, “you can apply it and make it more relevant. A lot of people are turned off by that sort of memorization because they think it’s tedious and abstract, but if you can apply it to something tangible it brings a sense of fulfillment.”
Foraging also taps into the same well of inspiration as the organic farm and Weybridge house, the effort to build a more personal connection to the food we consume.
But foraging also has a darker side. Many plants and fungi have evolved toxins to fight off predators, and some pose health concerns to humans. Faber is well aware of the health threats, and plans to safely avoid anything dangerous.
“The two biggest [concerns] ,” Faber explained, “are the Jack O’Lantern and the destroying angel. They are both very toxic, and look sort of similar to two edible mushrooms that some more advanced foragers try to eat...” Instead, Jake and Aiofe have made up a list of eight safe mushrooms safe for consumption that have little to no chance of being mixed up with other mushrooms.
“Morels, chicken of the woods, lions mane, hedgehog, puff ball, and lobster,” Faber said, listing off the safest mushrooms. “Each of those is pretty easily distinguishable; none of them have look-a-likes that are really dangerous or inedible. Each of them has particular characteristics that give them away, so that as long as you teach someone to look for that one thing they can determine what it is.”
It was this concern for safety that led the club to be initially rejected by the club committee last year.
“The approval process for us is slightly more difficult than other clubs, because foraging has risks that are associated,” Faber said, “So we need to work with risk management before we can officially go out and do activities, so right now we are reworking our constitution that will hopefully allow us to start doing things pretty quickly before the fall foraging season ends.”
The Foraging Club hopes to get approval, because not only is it a fulfilling activity but it is important to spur on interest in a neglected, important scientific field. The fungi kingdom is not only the most diverse in the animal kingdom, but it is also one of the least understood. The fungi kingdom has given us penicillin and many other useful drugs. While the Foraging Club might not find the cure to cancer, it would raise awareness of this often-neglected kingdom of life.
Faber and Duna hope to gain official approval sometime this Fall and start leading expeditions as soon as possible. To contact them to express interest head over to their website, go/shroomsquad.
(05/08/13 9:32pm)
On Sunday, May 12, Weybridge House will host its spring feast on the lawn at 28 Weybridge Street starting at 5 p.m. Having chosen a Mad Hatter Garden Party theme, organizers of the feast promise a bounty of local fare and what they hope will be an impressive array of headwear.
“I don’t know where to find a hat,” admitted Weybridge House resident Jeannie Bartlett ’14. “Regardless of what I find, my expertise on the Mad Hatter Garden Party theme stems from when I played the ‘Head Flower’ in my second-grade play of Alice in Wonderland.”
Yet the feast is not only about Lewis Carroll’s wild garden vision; it will also provide an opportunity for relaxation and further enjoyment of local food for many in the community.
“Feast is a great opportunity for people to relax towards the end of the semester,” said Christian Cain ’13.5, the senior Community Advisor for Weybridge House. “Though we’re a little late with feast this year, we’re hopeful that people will push off finals prep just a little bit longer, throw on a hat and get down to Weybridge for a giant dinner.”
According to Cain, there are typically between 200 and 300 feast-goers each semester, representing the largest celebrations of local food on campus to date. The only requirement for the event is that participants bring all of their own utensils and preferably don’t take them from the dining hall. While Dining Services goes to great lengths to provide local food on a regular basis, they are faced with the challenge of serving over 7,000 meals a day on a fixed budget. With funding from the SGA, Weybridge is able to offer these feasts once a semester to celebrate eating food that is locally grown (in a 100-mile-radius), in season, and highly nutritious.
The “farm liason” for Weybridge House, Melissa Shapiro ’13, has worked a great deal in the past weeks to source food from long-time Weybridge providers in the area, including Elmer Farm and Gildrien Farm. In this way, Weybridge members are able to help distribute more of the college’s food dollars to local growers, particularly to those that typically don’t produce the volumes that Dining Services would be able to purchase.
“It’s going to be an incredible local meal this year,” said Cain. “Due to budget conservation in the fall, we’re actually going to be able to incorporate some meat into the entrees, unlike in past years.”
As animal products like meat and cheeses are often among the most expensive items to buy locally, they are rarely found in the Weybridge kitchen during the year; special events like the feast offer the house an opportunity to celebrate the carnivorous side of local eating that many wish was more accessible.
“I always look forward to these special events with meat,” said Weybridge resident Conor Wakayama ’14. “I mean, I like the food we have at the house, but it sure is better with a little bacon.”
Another new feature of this Mad Hatter Garden Party is music. Playing in their traditional bluegrass style, Nest ‘O Rebels will perform on the lawn while feast-goers move through the buffet line and fine their place to sit. This will be the band’s second performance after playing at Brooker, Meeker and Porter’s Rowdy Roast in April.
“We’re very excited to have music this year,” said Cain. “Local tunes, local fare — that’s the kind of vibe we’re going for. I can’t wait to bust out a few moves on the lawn. I don’t just like to dance, I love it.”
In preparation for feast, the 18 Weybridge House members will set aside a great deal of time to prepare the quantities of food needed to feed such a gathering. Reaching out to Dining Services and other interest houses in the area, Weybridge residents, commonly known as “Weybeans,” plan to fan out to various kitchens across campus to prepare all of the food.
“Cooking for 300 people in just a family-sized kitchen like ours is not that feasible,” said Weybridge resident Katie Michels ’14.5. “Cooking for 30 to 40 people during the week is alright, but for feast we really rely on support from other places on campus with kitchens.”
One of the main dishes of the meal will be a savory flat bread prepared by Weybridge enthusiast Clare Donohue-Meyer ’16 and Weybridge resident Bekah Wilson ’14.
“I am so excited to try out a flatbread recipe based on a famous recipe of some baker friends at home,” said Donohue-Meyer.
“The recipe will incorporate thin potato slices and goat cheese into a delicious cheese experience.”
The meal will also include bread, salad and other entrees along with a number of desserts like frozen yogurt with fruit.
“As God is my witness, we’ll have local coffee,” added Cain, “even if I have to coax it out of the ground with my bare hands.”
Despite Cain’s determination, his comment illustrates the challenges of providing an all-local meal: some staples simply cannot be sourced in a 100-mile-radius. Whether it is coffee, bananas or oranges, there are a number of familiar food items that won’t be found at feast due to Vermont’s cold climate.
“What we do want to do is celebrate the incredible bounty we have available in the area,” said Michels. “While farmers haven’t begun to harvest most of their produce for the season, there are still a number of spring greens available; and as always, we have Vermont meat and dairy to enjoy!”
“When it comes down to it, my favorite part of feast is that there’s sun and food and music and we all lounge happily on the lawn with so many smiling faces,” said Bartlett. “I just hope the cooks get to eat first.”
(05/01/13 11:14pm)
The current debate about the potential expansion of a natural gas pipeline through Vermont to Ticonderoga, N.Y. highlights a seemingly rare instance of conflict between the surrounding community and the College. While the state of Vermont has banned fracking and public opposition to the construction of the pipeline — which would bring fracked natural gas through the state from Canada — continues to build, the College maintains its support for the project. Its main reason for doing so is that the pipeline would help ensure completion of its pledge to become 100 percent carbon neutral by 2016. Thus, this debate raises important questions about the responsibilities of the College, not only as an educational institution, but also as an integral part of a larger Middlebury community and a representative of the state of Vermont.
On a variety of issues, including those involving environmental sustainability, the College, the town of Middlebury and the state of Vermont have taken similar positions. Both have worked hard in recent years to expand access to local foods, for example, and to strengthen the connection between local farms and the College’s dining services. Indeed, in many ways, those inside and outside of Vermont view the College as representative of these shared values. With historical ties dating back to our founding in 1800, the College has always been — and will continue to be — connected to the surrounding community in meaningful ways.
Although there has been clear overlap in the general interests and values among these entities, the proposed pipeline represents a significant break in this pattern, one that may force the school to defend a position that is economically convenient but environmentally and ethically problematic.
Underlying this conflict are important differences that distinguish the town and the College. Perhaps most obvious is the fact that while students are here for a mere four years, many community members are life-long residents of Middlebury and are more affected in the long-term by projects such as the pipeline. Certainly, with over 60 percent of Middlebury students participating in some form of community service, it is hard to argue that students do not give back to the surrounding area in positive ways. Yet it is apparent that they do not face the same concerns as local residents when it comes to the pipeline, which would deliver natural gas to residents in Middlebury and Vergennes. For example, some community members opposing construction for environmental reasons cite potential detrimental effects on local farmland and residential properties. A less vocal group that supports the pipeline points to the fact that natural gas is a cleaner-burning, lower-emitting fuel compared to home heating oil; additionally, they tout the potential economic benefits of a cheaper energy alternative. Still, others may be removed from the debate entirely, predicting that the pipeline’s construction would have little impact on their lives or that their opinions have little impact on the construction.
Like Middlebury residents, the College itself is affected by the pipeline’s construction in the long term. While the College may be conscious of the concerns of local residents and public sentiment across the state, it has its own interests distinct from those of Vermonters. Most notably, the College is under pressure to meet its goal of carbon neutrality by 2016 and the pipeline represents a unique opportunity to do so. In brief, the natural gas pipeline would help the College meet its goal by allowing it to purchase climate-benefitting fuel from a local farm. The proposal involves construction of an on-farm methane digestor, a system which would feed methane produced naturally by animal waste into the pipeline, which the College would then purchase as heating fuel through Vermont Gas. Such a method, however, has produced a great deal of controversy among environmentalists on campus and in the surrounding community.
Completing our pledge to become 100 percent carbon neutral by 2016 by supporting the construction of a multi-million dollar fracked natural gas pipeline, one opposed by many Vermonters on environmental grounds, is problematic. Meeting our goal in this way suggests that despite the genuine efforts of students seeking to translate the College’s commitment to the environment into meaningful action, carbon neutrality has become a marketing tool. Some may rightly argue that to value the stated 2016 deadline over the sanctity of the process itself is to prioritize ends over means. Would it not be better to delay the deadline and meet our goal in more environmentally sound ways? What is the value of reaching the goal if its path is riddled with shortcuts?
At the same time, being a relatively new, self-defined concept, carbon neutrality constitutes a somewhat grey area. As a leader on this front, the College faces the challenge of setting and meeting its goal in seemingly unchartered territory, as has been evident since the declaration of this goal. For example, the College currently does not include athletic travel in its calculations of carbon emissions. The College should be granted some flexibility to alter and improve its methods as the field continues to evolve.
At the end of the day, we must remember that the only people truly holding the administration accountable to its pledged commitment to carbon neutrality are members of the college community. We define this notion on our own terms and owe it to ourselves to ensure that the process aligns with our values. We hope that the College will continue to examine this topic, considering the arguments on all sides of the issue and recognizing the effects of its actions on others. Ultimately, the pipeline presents an opportunity to ask ourselves not merely what carbon neutrality means in a technical sense, but what it means in relation to our ethical commitments as an institution of higher learning and our long-standing relationship with the town of Middlebury and state of Vermont.
(04/24/13 4:38pm)
As the Campus’s editorial staff pointed out last week, on April 3 the National Association of Scholars released a report titled “What Does Bowdoin Teach?” Authored by Peter Wood and Michael Toscano, and funded by Tom Klingenstein (a Williams College alumnus), the report attempts to systematically examine and reveal the various factors it sees as responsible for a supposed “fall from grace” of the American liberal arts college. The report also claims that Bowdoin’s institutional emphasis on sustainability is a product of the same kind of aversion towards what the authors see as the fundamental tenants of Western Civilization.
Wood and Toscano assert that the foundational underpinnings of “the Common Good” and general education at Bowdoin — “virtue and piety” — have been replaced with radical new cosmopolitan ideas of “social justice, transnationalism and sustainability.” While the report singles out Bowdoin, its derision of the school’s sustainability efforts are more a “one-size-fits-all” critique of environmentalism on the larger scale — and we should be worried. Here at Middlebury, we have claims to the oldest environmental studies program in the country, a commitment to carbon neutrality with goals loftier than Bowdoin’s and a mission statement that commits our curriculum to teaching environmental stewardship. For Wood and Toscano, these features of our community are not only ideologically misguided, but an apparent disservice to you and me.
What the authors see as the “sustainability agendas” that pervade dialogue at our colleges has apparently provided a detrimental distraction to our education. Wood and Toscano argue that where a liberal education had historically taught the development of “open-minded seeking of human excellence” and “great-souled men,” it now teaches “environmental literacy” within a larger intellectual climate uninterested in debating the value of what is taught. For Wood and Toscano, an environmentally-minded education comes at the cost of critical thinking abilities, rationalism and the ability to appreciate opposing arguments. I’m not sure they’re quite right.
The fact that learning institutions in our day and age are able to recognize the gravity of the problems facing our species serves as a testament to the vitality of the liberal arts. If critical thinking is about analyzing and weighing perspectives, then Wood and Toscano fail to see that sustainability and environmentalism represent the practical application of a cost-benefit analysis embodying the multi-epochal consideration of how human reason affects the world around us. Wood and Toscano are certainly right to point out that problems of collective responsibility like climate change will not be solved when ears are closed to alternative opinions, but they don’t propose solutions that will get us any closer to solving the problem. What they do offer is an appeal to the conservative ideals that perpetuate our inability to consider environmental issues with the weight they deserve.
Wood and Toscano’s fundamental criticism of Bowdoin lies in what they see as a failure to develop character in its students. The report claims that students are ill-equipped to confront what life has ahead of them because, like Middlebury, Bowdoin lacks a core curriculum that requires students to associate themselves with the intellectual pillars of western culture. Though the authors seem committed to the idea that American liberal arts have come to idolize diversity for diversity’s sake, they fail to acknowledge how the presence of a diversity of perspectives — western and non-western — can allow for the rethinking of how we apply the lessons that the western canon teaches. The principles underlying environmental and sustainability efforts worldwide — justice and equality — are the same principles that western culture has held near and dear throughout its history. Efforts to ensure that humans and other animals have a livable environment constitute no blind pursuit of the undermining of the individual as Wood and Toscano would have it. Rather, the movements seek to preserve the conditions that allow us to care about individual well-being and character development.
“What Does Bowdoin Teach?” concludes that self-restraint, self-criticism, moderation, “how to distinguish importance from triviality” and wisdom are some of the things lacking from a liberal arts education in this day and age. While all of these things seem to fundamentally motivate environmental education and sustainability efforts in American higher education, the authors assert that they can only come from an education committed to parochialism and tradition. If a college education today places an increased emphasis on cosmopolitan thinking, it is only because the problems that face our generation are cosmopolitan in nature and scope. Bowdoin and Middlebury College earn their classification as “liberal” precisely because they offer the opportunity to freely and dynamically craft conceptions not only of the good life, but the good environment.
(04/17/13 4:25pm)
If Patrick Devereux ’15 had a soundtrack, it would be comprised of such princes of southern rap as Gucci Mane, Waka Flocka, OJ da Juiceman and Lil Wayne. For this particular day in the life, track no. 1 would be “Shawt Bus Shawty,” a Youtube sensation that parodies Devereux’s composers.
“I eat the red crayon ‘cause the red one tastes the best,” says an animated caricature of Gucci Mane. “And I cheat off Lil Darryl every time I take the test.”
“I’ve seen this video a lot,” comments Devereux as he becomes the 34,622,675th viewer of the Youtube video through a fit of laugher. “But I’ve never noticed that. He crossed out his own name and wrote Lil Darryl. Cause he cheated off him.”
It’s a scene that hits closer to home for Devereux than for most other students, particularly on the caricatured depiction of high school in the ghetto front.
A day in the life of Devereux begins with abiding to the gendered bathrooms of Hepburn hall, respectfully schlepping with his shower caddy through two sets of doors to the men’s room. Track no.2: “Girl you stank (take a bath),” Soulja Boy.
“Soulja Boy sold this song in a record,” explained Devereux. “It references Doo Doo Head, a character from another Soulja Boy song called ‘Doo Doo Head.’ How did he make money off this?”
Devereux attends Chinese class, a quiet scene quite unlike the high schools of “Shawt Bus Shawty” and Devereux’s alma mater Warwick High School, of Newport News, Va.
“Imagine if you have 30 kids in your class who are just rowdy, loud, talk back to you, don’t listen to anything you say and interrupt you and so it’s impossible for you to talk and the only thing you as a teacher can do is go get security or the principal, but they [the students] don’t care about being suspended,” said Devereux. “It’s not a punishment. What do you do as a teacher? I can see why the teachers just didn’t do anything.”
Devereux’s average day did not include homework.
“The teachers knew that if they assign homework, no one’s going to do it anyway,” he said.
Devereux claims he beat the system.
“I did zero work in high school and got all A’s and ended up at Middlebury,” he said.
But maybe Devereux was just operating on a different system. Track no. 3: “Duffle Bag Boy,” Playaz Circle featuring Lil Wayne:
“If I don’t do nutthin I’mma ball / I’m counting all day like the clock on the wall.”
While many of Devereux’s peers growing up literally lived out Playaz Circle’s narrative, Devereux took a different path.
“I did Quiz Bowl in high school,” said Devereux. He gets his sticky, spongey, hungry brain from his mom.
“Me and my mom always used to watch “Jeopardy” together everyday,” he said. “We’d answer all the questions and probably get 85 percent of the questions between us. Pop culture was always our worst. Anything academic was our best. Literature, geography, natural science. My dad killed pop culture. But that was the only thing he would ever get.”
Thursday night trivia at Crossroads serves as an extension of Quiz Bowl. His team, fielded by several other former Quiz Bowl kids, often wins.
Devereux’s other team is his the rugby team. Before that, there was also his high school swim team; a team within a league that mingled some of the nation’s top swimming recruits with your barely water-safe amateurs in swim trunks.
After rugby practice, Devereux dines at Proctor. It’s a starkly different scene from the Newport News day-in-the-life Devereux, despite the common aspect of free food.
“Some people came to school just because they got free lunch,” said Devereux of Warwick High School.
He fills up his glass from the juicer and is reminded both of his favorite Gucci Mane song, track no. 4 “Lemonade,” Gucci Mane and Community Day at his swim club back home.
“The swim club I belonged to cost $300 for yearly membership,” he said. “That’s probably not that much but my neighborhood’s really poor and most people couldn’t afford that. The city paid our pool $6,000 to have a day where, every Wednesday, anyone could come. There’d be, like, 250 people there. It’s so hot and humid. Everyone would show up. There were huge barbeques; everyone orders pizza. The local Pizza Hut and Domino’s, they would just come by with 80 pizzas already made and sell them at the door.”
Track no. 5: “Yellow Claw,” Krokobil feat. Sjaak and Mr. Polska. Devereux doesn’t believe in studying for tests. Instead, he prepares for his upcoming German test by decoding the similarly-rooted Dutch lyrics of “Yellow Claw.”
“‘Jouw bil is een krokodil,’ that’s basically saying your ass is a crocodile.”
(03/21/13 4:00am)
Intimate communication appears to be a painful endeavor for the modern college student. Indeed, Trevor Powers was a senior at Boise State University when he began writing and recording highly personal tracks under the moniker Youth Lagoon as an outlet for his crippling anxiety and erratic mind. As such, his acclaimed debut, 2011’s The Year of Hibernation, was rife with earnest nostalgia as depicted through anecdotal vignettes from the perspective of a plague-riddled mind.
Roughly a year and a half has passed since Powers embarked into the world of post-undergrad doldrums, which one would think could only be exacerbated when distracted by the mental strain of constant touring.
Yet he displays a marked maturity in terms of both production ability and lyrical exploration in his sophomore effort Wondrous Bughouse.
The album name itself encapsulates the stylistic direction that Youth Lagoon has taken, conveying a striking impression of lush melodies drenched in pastels floating across the expansive landscape of imagination.
That which musically embodied The Year of Hibernation – minimalistic electro-synth beats metrically pulsating through hazy, ambient lyrics – is now replaced with whirling, tumultuous and frequently jovial neo-psychedelic pop, as majestic as it is bold, reminiscent of turn-of-the-century space rock acts.
With seven of the album’s 10 songs clocking in at over five minutes apiece, Wondrous Bughouse is largely defined by ambivalent tensions between artful yet screeching dissonance and euphonious synth-driven melodies; the image evoked is the contrast between errant thoughts clawing at the edge of consciousness while keen introspection somehow keeps them focused.
The most striking example is “Mute,” in which a wavery, scraping instrumental moves teasingly back and forth in opposition to an ethereal and shimmering riff that substitutes for a lack of chorus; meanwhile a towering drum loop, one unlike anything Youth Lagoon has done before, punches through the track as the conflicting forces dance around it.
Though perhaps sonically alienating at first, the continuously powerful visceral response molded by the song’s cycles validates the six-minute ride.
It is easy to find yourself joyfully lost in these summery, sickly-sweet cuts sometimes oddly redolent of cartoony carnival music, but that by no means should suggest that lyrical themes are any less dark and mystifying than past releases.
There’s a noticeable shift in Powers’s mentality in Wondrous Bughouse, most bluntly fleshed out by the recurring discussions of mortality, the bane of the young adult’s existence.
In the warm, sparkly opening of “Dropla”, the artist gives way to a jumbled pot of confusion and anger over a lover lost among unanswered prayers. “Raspberry Cane” bitterly yet quite pointedly calls a toast to death before its climactic whirlwind of a conclusion.
Most disturbingly, “Attic Doctor” concludes with a grim picture: “The doctor conceals her grin/To tell us you couldn’t have babies.”
His thoughts stem from deep contemplation over the role of humanity between the metaphysical and reality, reflecting rather external notions in comparison to the bedroom intimacy of his earlier lyricism. We are no longer company to his self-reflective journeys through campsites, household TV rooms and a stretch of road in his ’96 Buick.
The further Powers retracts into his own subconscious, the closer he comes to stumbling upon the universal within the particular: he returns to reality certainly more assured and accepting of human decay than when he went in.
While the overarching sound of Wondrous Bughouse doesn’t completely redefine what makes Youth Lagoon unique (the opening minute of “The Bath” confirms it; you may as well be listening to “Cannons” from YoH), its rich and cascading textures make up for some lyrical disappointment to produce an immensely enjoyable listen. Admittedly, I was a sucker for his private obsessions on YoH more so than the forays into collective consciousness in this album.
But then again, my strong liking for the album as a whole is a testament to the excellence of this album’s instrumentation. Akin to The Flaming Lips-meets-Animal Collective – more like a regression to the mean, however – this album is meant to be heard through headphones on a tranquil afternoon, so give it a listen and see where it takes you.
(03/14/13 7:44pm)
Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Everything is Illuminated and other international best-selling works of both fiction and nonfiction, will deliver the commencement address to the class of 2013 on May 26.
Safran Foer will also receive a Doctor of Letters degree at the ceremony. Other honorary degree recipients include Edward Burtynsky, artist and photographer, Megan Camp, vice president and program director at Shelburne Farms, Jacqueline Novogratz, founder and CEO of the Acumen Fund and Stuart Schwartz ’62, the George Burton Adams professor of history and professor of international and area studies at Yale.
Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated was the reading for the class of 2013 for their fall orientation in 2009. Members of the class read the novel during the summer and discussed its themes during orientation workshops.
President of the College Ronald D. Liebowitz said he was “very happy and pleased” to host Safran Foer, a commencement speaker nominated by several students.
“We try our best to respond to students’ desires,” said Liebowitz. “I think the orientation reading resonated with many students, so this selection is quite fitting.”
International best-seller Everything is Illuminated was published in 2002 when Safran Foer was just 25 years old. The book, which chronicles the author's discovery of his family's history, was adapted into a major motion picture in 2005 starring Elijah Wood. Safran Foer has also published Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, the inspiration for an Academy Award-nominated motion picture. Eating Animals is the author’s third international best-seller and a nonfiction account of his struggle with vegetarianism. In 2010, the New Yorker named Safran Foer as one of the 20 best writers under 40 years old. He teaches graduate creative writing at New York University and is working on another novel, Escape from the Children’s Hospital.
Burtynsky, who will receive a Doctor of Arts degree, has a collection of photographs of quarries and quarry work, Nature Transformed,that is currently on display at the Middlebury Museum of Art. Burtynsky is an Ontario native whose depictions of global industrial landscape are included in the collections of more than 50 museums, including the Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Canada and the Bibliotèque Nationale in Paris.
Camp will receive a Doctor of Letters degree in recognition for her 30 years of work at Shelburne Farms, a 1,400-acre working farm, nonprofit education center and National Historic Landmark located near the College. Camp’s work has helped create a process that resulted in Vermont incorporating the nation’s first education standards for sustainability. Camp is a recipient of the Outstanding Achievement Award for Environmental Education from the New England Environmental Education Association, the National Wildlife Federation’s Conservation Education Achievement Award, and the United States Environmental Protection Environmental Merit Award.
In addition, a Doctor of Humane Letters degree will be awarded to Novogratz, a pioneer in the field of impact investment. Under Novogratz, the nonprofit Acumen Fund has invested more than $80 million in social enterprises, emerging leaders and breakthrough ideas to solve the problems of poverty. Novogratz delivered the keynote speech at the launch of the College’s Center for Social Entrepreneurship in January 2012.
Schwartz will receive a Doctor of Letters degree for his work as one of the world’s leading scholars of Brazilian history. Schwartz has taught at Yale since 1996 and is the George Burton Adams professor of history and a professor of international and area studies. Schwartz’s most recent work, All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World, received numerous awards, including the 2008 Cundill International Prize in History and the 2009 American Academy of Religion Book Award.
The commencement ceremony for the class of 2013 will be held on May 26 at 10 a.m. on the Central College Lawn, located in front of Munroe and Voter Halls.
(03/13/13 5:10pm)
The banner brandished by the dozens of students marching down Storrs Walk last Monday read “Divestment is a tactic; justice is the goal.” There’s often a good deal of talk about the j-word in any number of settings — legal, environmental, social, economic, etc. — and I think more often than not, we take its meaning for granted. Specifically, taken for granted in the sense that we may actually have some concrete idea of what the word means. While this article won’t attempt to provide a complete account of the nature of justice, it will try to point the dialogue in the right direction.
The argument put forward by the divestment movement, as I see it, seems relatively straightforward: we shouldn’t contribute financially to the functioning of companies that engage in behaviors we consider ethically reprehensible. Alright, fair enough. But are “ethics” and “justice” the same thing? It’s a question that’s plagued the philosophical community in its entirety, and one that probably won’t be resolved anytime soon. One of the more popular conceptions of justice in the Anglophone world offers a contractual conception of justice: that is, relationships take on some quality of justice when two parties enter into an agreement or contract with one another, and each then obtains certain rights. People have come up with other conceptions of justice (see distributive justice, justice as fairness, justice as property, global justice; the list goes on), but this idea of contractual justice is simple and tidy enough such that I think it might take us where we want to go for now. Now if there’s something unjust about, say, investing in oil companies or arms manufacturers, we have just one of the tools necessary to pinpoint what that is.
Seeing as this is an environmental column, we’ll start with environmental justice, and how divestment could somehow right an unjust situation. Let’s say investing in fossil fuel industries is unjust because their entire business model rests upon the combustion of materials which results in the release of carbon dioxide, which contributes to climate change, which will raise sea levels to the point of jeopardizing coastal livelihoods. We may then say that this is an unjust situation because the person whose shoreline property is now slightly more a part of the shore than they bargained for never entered an agreement which said they were alright with rising sea levels. Or maybe there’s injustice because of habitat loss that occurs — one could argue that because humans and animals both inhabit the same planet, each has an equal right to a safe habitat, or some variation on that theme. It’s the same basic premise which is supposed to justify our endangered species laws and other environmental regulations. There are countless other examples we could propose, but half of the challenge seems to be actually proposing them in the first place.
One of the problems that arises when dealing with problems with justice — something on which I was fortunate enough to have an extended discussion with recent guest lecturer David Abram — is that our ethical and moral frameworks are generally limited by our vocabulary and our conceptions of how things relate to one another. Humans have a hard time acting ethically or including non-human nature within our systems of justice because our way of speaking about such things is inherently isolating and anthropocentric. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing — the whole “language” thing has helped our species along its way for thousands of years. However, it also seems like the same manner of speaking has also led to the kind of injustices we find within our own society. I was fortunate enough to be referred, by a friend, to recent JusTalks keynote speaker Tricia Rose’s TEDx talk regarding social justice from Brown University. Revealingly, she observes that one of the fundamental problems in trying to solve issues of justice is that it is generally pretty difficult to talk about structural problems within the contexts of the structures in which the problems arise.
I think all of this helps to show that many of the problems taken on by various groups — those working towards divestment, climate change, food, social and racial equality — can find a lot of common ground once we start working out what justice, conceptually, means. Greater dialogue between all of these groups might help iron out some of the wrinkles preventing us from ending up at the same ends, and increasing communication could enable us to speak more freely with one another about issues which, individually, we’re far less likely to solve. Aristotle conceived justice as a virtue naturally associated with friendship, and that the truest form of justice had a “friendly” quality. While it may seem simplistic, a bit of friendship and some more cooperation could be exactly what our community needs.
(03/13/13 4:38pm)
Throughout the spring semester, the Middlebury College Organic Farm (MCOF) will be making several changes to its current operations, including the introduction of chickens for eggs and meat, the allocation of plots of land to different student organizations and the incorporation of new seeds and farming techniques.
Perhaps the most notable addition to the farm is the chickens. Senior Co-Director of the Organic Farm Katie Michels ’15 said that this spring the farm plans to introduce 12 egg-laying birds as well as 40 chickens that will be raised for later consumption.
With the exception of honeybees in the past, MCOF does not keep any animals. The introduction of the chickens will mark the beginning of the farm’s animal product and by-product operations.
The farm received permission to bring the chickens to campus from the College’s Facilities and Services Office this spring, and three weeks ago they received an Environmental Council Grant to sponsor the project.
Michels said, “[The addition of the chickens] is mostly inspired by the idea that you can’t just produce vegetables. We need animals to eat vegetable waste and to fertilize the vegetables, so they’ll complete the cycle of the farm.”
In terms of other additions to the farm, the MCOF organizers have a project underway to introduce cultural gardens, new plots for student organizations on campus. The farm has been a frequent supplier to the College’s dining services over the years, selling bulk orders of products such as chard, basil and squash.
Michels expressed hopes that these changes will allow for the creation of a new educational space on campus for students interested in food and farm studies.
“We could just keep selling to Dining [Services],” said Michels, “But I think we have more potential as an educational space, and as a place to grow food for a school that’s really interested in food.”
In order to follow through with this mission, the farm plans to allocate plots of land — cultural gardens — to various student groups who show an interest. According to Michels, Hillel has already reserved a plot.
The farm’s staff would care for the gardens over the summer, and then in the fall, the farm will throw a cultural harvest festival where student organizations can cook from their garden “in hopes to create an outdoor community space to share food and conversation,” according to Food and Farm Educator Sophie Esser Calvi.
This project builds upon the farm’s outstanding partnership with Weybridge House, which has sourced its food from the farm since last summer. Farm organizers are also attempting to cement their relationship with Dolci, the College’s student-run restaurant.
Michels stressed the importance of the farm to Dining Service’s access to locally grown foods.
“We’re starting to grow nice lettuces, herbs and other specific things that Dolci uses frequently, so they can get it from us rather than from far away,” said Michels of the farm’s plans for the spring semester.
Not only is the farm expanding its presence on campus this spring, but the farm is also experimenting with new seed varieties and planting techniques. They have recently received a large seed donation from Renees Garden company, a seed distributor located in California.
“The farm is a place where we do what the students want to learn,” said Esser Calvi. “For instance, we will practice different growing methods. We are also growing different varieties of produce this year such as four different types of radish, beets etc. We’ll be doing trials and basically testing [the different] varieties.”
Farm volunteers will be working with many plants that are not typically grown in Vermont climates. According to Senior Co-Director Ari Lattanzi ’13, the farm organizers have hopes of finding a crop that can be grown in this climate with few losses. The directors of MCOF could then share these findings and advise other farmers in the area who do not have the ability to take risks with crop experimentation due to financial instability.
“We’re talking about trying several different techniques, maybe biodynamic farming, [which] is planting with the seasons and the cycles of the moon,” said Lattanzi of the new farming techniques. “[Another technique] is permaculture, a type of low-input farming that involves less interference in the lifecycles of the plants once they are established.”
“The farm will grow because there’s this new energy for a food and agriculture studies program, and there’s more land that we could expand into,” added Lattanzi. “We’re making sure the farm has something for everyone.”
(03/07/13 1:47am)
As film-lovers and celebrity-followers alike settled in for the three-and-a-half hour Academy Awards ceremony last Sunday evening, big name actors and directors were on everyone’s minds — from Quentin Tarantino to Daniel Day-Lewis to the lovable Jennifer Lawrence. However, by the end of the night, everyone who stayed tuned-in long enough had heard of John Kahrs, the director who won an Academy Award for Disney’s short film “Paperman” and whom the Addison County Independent calls “Addison County’s Academy Award Connection.”
While he grew up in the Hudson River Valley in upstate New York, Kahrs spent his summers in Vermont; his parents, Helen and Ed Kahrs however, currently live in West Addison, so why not claim him for a “local boy makes it big” for Addison County this awards season?
Although Kahrs kept his acceptance speech brief, thanking the Academy, his team at Disney, his producer and his wife and kids, a backstage interview with Kahrs by reporter James Molnar allowed the director to speak at greater length about the breathtaking Disney animated short. The seven-minute film tells the story of a chance connection between strangers, a young man and woman commuting to work. Separated from the woman after the fated encounter, the young man spends the rest of the short trying desperately to catch her attention via paper airplanes, resulting in a somewhat predictable, but thoroughly satisfying Disney ending.
“My inspiration for ‘Paperman’ is basically as a commuter, and it’s kind of chance connections you make with strangers and wonder who they are,” said Kahrs. “I just had this idea of an urban fairytale about people who were perfect for each other but lost their connection.”
“Paperman” is notable not only for its beautiful and simple storyline, but also for its innovative combination of old-school 2D animation and new CG technology.
“We took the kind of old 2D animation and the newer CG animation and put them together in a way that I think hasn’t been seen before,” said Kahrs. “But I think you know, what we did is take the drawn line and the expressiveness and the hand of the artist and bring it into the 21st century.”
The return to traditional time-honored 2D animation (with a 21st century update) is complimented by the 1940’s setting, the black-and-white color scheme (with a significant splash of red lipstick), and an homage to the silent film with the short’s wordless script.
“For me the idea of it having no words in it makes it extremely portable, that you can show it all around the world and it communicates,” said Kahrs. “I think the best films to me are the ones that you can understand where the sound is turned off.”
In his backstage interview Kahrs also took a moment to recognize his parents whom he had forgotten to thank in his acceptance speech.
“I forgot to thank my parents. What can I say? So mom and dad, thank you … I’ve been trying to call them but they have a busy signal. When is the last time someone got a busy signal? They live way out in Vermont and there’s more cows than people up there.”
(02/28/13 5:00am)
Although I knew she was recently a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in fiction for her novel Swamplandia!, I hesitated, at first, to read Karen Russell’s new collection of eight stories. This was mostly out of fear that a collection with “vampires” in the title would be too whimsical, too childlike and too lighthearted for me to take seriously and enjoy. And certainly, the worlds that Russell dreams up in her stunning and beautifully imagined collection do differ substantially from the spaces I tend to favor in fiction. But the quality and emotional force of many of these fictions rank at the top with anything I’ve recently come across.
The stories take place all over the world: in a lemon grove in Italy, and an undisclosed location in late 1800s Japan; in the Midwest during the era of the Homestead Act, in Antarctica, in modern day Nebraska and then finally in New Jersey. What is particularly impressive about this is how real she makes each location feel — the family living out west during the Homestead Act lives in a home that is a “ball of pure earth.”
What’s great about this collection is that the locations themselves aren’t just wonderfully imagined — so are the plots and characters. The title story takes a genre-savvy twist on vampires (the narrator sucks blood only because that’s what the “stories suggested”), and in another fantastic story, “The Barn at the End of Our Term,” a group of United States presidents discover that they have been reborn as horses, trapped on a farm. Russell treats both of these topics with a rare and wonderful humor — literally making this reader laugh out loud.
While just as elaborately imaginative, some of these stories take a much darker turn. “Reeling for the Empire,” the best and most staggering piece in this collection, tells the story of a Japanese woman, Kitsune, in Japan during the reign of Emperor Meiji. In order to help her family, she signs her life over to working in a silk reeling factory. What she is unaware of, however, is that all of the women who go to this factory are made to produce the silk within their own bodies. A special tea that they are forced to drink transforms them into hybrid creatures, “part kaiko, silkworm caterpillar and part human female.” Though unquestionably Kafkaesque, this story’s force arises because of its powerful belief in hope against total despair; in a weird way, this story is outstanding precisely because it is not Kafka.
Interrupting the collection is a long story (56 pages) titled “The New Veterans,” which revolves around Beverly, a selfless woman who works at a massage clinic. In comes a veteran of the Iraq war, Derek, suffering from PTSD from the traumatic death of fellow soldier. The story starts out well enough, and the initial scenes between the two make this reader feel a presence in the story. But, unfortunately, this story drags on and on way longer than necessary. And the consequence is that the ending seems not only emotionally unaffecting, but also long over-due.
But not to worry, for the final, haunting story of this collection, “The Graveless Doll of Eric Mutis,” runs roughly the same length but sustains itself both in plot and in language. The narrator, a young boy named Larry Rubbio, discovers an eerie scarecrow tied to an enormous tree where he and his friends (a gang of three other boys nicknamed “Camp Dark”) tend to hang out. Aside from the scarecrows ectopic presence (“A scarecrow did not belong in our city of Anthem, New Jersey,” the narrator thinks), the graveless doll frightens the boys when they notice that it resembles a boy named Erik Mutis, whom the gang constantly beat up in “animal silence.” Suspenseful, honest and funny, this story explores the nature of atonement in a remarkable and unforgettable way.
What links these fascinating stories together, finally, is their entrapment — Clyde, the vampire of the first story, seems stuck in his lemon grove; Kitsune in “Reeling” is trapped in a factory, Rutherford Hayes in “The Barn” is stuck not only in a horse’s body but also in the farm itself, Miles Zegner in “Proving Up, is stuck in the Midwest. Luckily for her characters, and for her readers, these nightmarish situations often move with “the logic of a frightening nursery rhyme;” eerie and despairing for the duration, but ultimately hopeful.
Recommendation: Absolutely read it. It will unlock your imagination, galvanize your feelings and make you laugh.
(02/21/13 5:00am)
This Friday, Feb 22, Christian A. Johnson Professor of History of Art Cynthia Packert will lead a discussion about a new painting that will soon be hanging in the College’s Museum of Art. The College recently obtained the painting, “Illustration from the Ramayana,” which depicts an epic event in Hindu lore. It was purchased with funds provided by the Robert P. and Barbara P. Youngman Acquisition Fund for Asian Art. The discussion is part of the “Off the Wall: Informal Discussions About Art” series.
The Ramayana , or “Story of Rama,” is one of India’s most ancient and revered epics. It is an adventure story centered on Rama, an incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu, and was written in Sanskrit around 500 BCE by the poet Valmiki. Rama was the rightful heir to the throne of the kingdom Ayodhya, and was forced into exile by his evil step-mother. Yet he remained obedient to her, and set off into the wilderness with his wife Sita and brother Lakshmana. Sita is captured by a demon named Ravana, and a monkey named Hanuman teams up with Rama to rescue her. Rama returns to Ayodhya and is crowned king.
The painting illustrates the moment where Rama and Lakshmana, accompanied by an army of Hanuman’s monkeys, begin their journey to rescue Sita. It is a climactic image, with various animals preparing for battle as Rama rides on Hanuman’s back. Gold accents highlight royal animals and the halos behind Rama and Lakshmana.
“Illustration from the Ramayana” is a detached image from an 18th century manuscript. Such a manuscript would probably have been commissioned by one of the aristocratic families of the Rajput ruling class, who ruled over much of northwestern India.
The piece is an anticipated addition to the art Museum’s collection, as it complements another Ramayana painting in its collection. In the painting already owned by the College, Rama, Lakshmana and Sita are just beginning their exile into the forest.
The new addition will add another chapter to the story by showing the preparation for the battle for Sita’s freedom.
The “Off the Wall” discussion will start in the Kevin P. Mahaney ’84 Center for the Arts, Room 125 on Feb. 22 at 12:15 p.m., and then will proceed to the Museum of Art. Lunch will be provided. The event is free to College ID cardholders, and community donations are welcomed.
