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icepixieFor those of you just joining, I went to my college class's five-year reunion this weekend. It was epic, in the way that only a tiny liberal arts college (my class = ~400 people, 170ish of whom were back for the reunion) in a tiny town (full-time residents = ~600ish; "town" is one street in the middle of campus with roughly eight places of business) in the middle of nowhere in Ohio (a dorm on campus with nine stories is the tallest building in Knox County) can be epic. In other words, amazingly so.
Note the first: This will be 75% nostalgia for fellow Kenyon grads, and 25% pretty pictures and explanations for everyone else. Just FYI. But there's a reason Forbes named it one of the world's ten most beautiful college campuses, so, you know, pretties!1
Note the second: All thumbnails are linked to the original photos, which are some 5-6MB rather than the usual scaled-down versions, in case anyone who was there wanted to download them for some purpose that required the big original.
It was, I must say, not as strange as I thought it might be being back. Most of the time, it felt like I had never left. The only jarring moments, really, were the new construction (the art gallery going up between Cromwell and Olin isn't hideous in and of itself, but it doesn't go at all with the surrounding architecture), the remodels of Upper Dempsey and the Peirce and Gund serveries, and the immense number of babies and small children on campus. I don't think anyone from our class had one, but I'm not sure I saw anyone with a year in the nineties on their nametag who wasn't holding or leading a little human by the hand. (In between the copious amounts of free booze, Kenyon tries to be family-oriented. This is kind of what happens when, just to use the people I know as an example, ten of the fourteen married alumni I know are married to other Kenyon alumni.)
Anyway, other than that: Very much like I'd never left. Of course, it helped that I was staying in Lewis, my freshman dorm, albeit about as far away from my old room as you could get and still be in the same building. (Though since Lewis only houses eighty, this is not terribly far.) The Lewis funk, I am either sad or pleased to report, is still very much in evidence.
The main point of these things, I think, supposed to be that you gather with people you graduated with who scattered across the country after school and hear what's going on in their lives. However, with Livejournal, and Facebook, it was more like, "So...what's happened since yesterday, when I saw you post?" Which I think is all for the good, as it left time for literary discussions and puns and band names of the day (Private Armadillos and Excessive Haberdashery, both courtesy of Brian C.). It also made it feel even more like we'd never left.
Before I get into a lot of text, here's the first video. Despite the fact that it was the very last thing I used my camera for this weekend, it sets the scene rather nicely.
[Download]
How I have missed the Westminster chimes! The church down the road from my house in Nashville does them on the hour, but not at the fifteen-minute intervals, and I can only hear them when I'm outside and the wind's right. Chandra and I had our windows open in Lewis, and we could hear them very clearly. It was surprisingly chilly at night, though it warmed up during the day, so while I remembered Lewis as ungodly hot at the beginning and end of the year, it was really quite pleasant this time around.
In addition to much, much wandering around campus taking photos and waxing nostalgic—I'd forgotten how much walking Kenyon requires, and I think my feet have actually fallen off—which I will go into in much more detail in a minute, we crammed rather a lot of other things in to two days. In chronological order:
1. Chandra and I went to Sergei's talk on crime novels and film noir. It was very good, of course, because it was Sergei and really what else could it be? However, it was also kind of a weird experience for me, and one of the few times on campus when I felt like five years had gone by. Despite the fact that this was billed as a lecture, he ran it as the introductory session of a seminar, with plenty of questions and interaction, and I was torn between feeling like a student again and trying to predict where Sergei was going to go with each of our comments and ideas: how he would handle the simplistic answers, what he would respond to the more interesting ones, how he'd play comments off each other. There is, I think, kind of a house teaching style in the English department at Kenyon—it's what I think of as The Way To Teach An English Class, although I suppose there are otherinferior ways—and it's very much what I based my own style on last year. I knew that already, but it was striking to see how closely it mirrored what I'd seen in undergrad.
2. Two hours of Friday night were devoted to Shutt's ghost tour. I've been on it at least twice before, but you can't not go to see Shutt perform. He had visual aids this time; two "ghosts" ran screaming by the group in both the dance studio and the graveyard, and when he got to Stuart Pierson outside of Old Kenyon, the lights flickered in one of the bullseyes to highlight an alum dressed in a suit looking out the window. He hasn't really updated his repertoire—I remembered all the stories he told—but he has slightly rearranged the facts, like telling us that Security's experience with the Caples ghost (screaming calls from various rooms; showers being on full blast when no one was in the locked building) happened only four years ago, when I know it's been considerably longer than that, and he was using that story in my freshman year.
I'm not entirely sure why there were luminarias all along Middle Path that night, but they were very pretty to walk between.
3. Saturday afternoon, Peter, Chandra, and I took a field trip to the Old Quarry Chapel. I never got to it while I was a student, largely because it's a couple miles away from campus and at the time wasn't refurbished or anything. Now it's been renovated and prettified, and though small, is very cute.
There are some very attractive stained glass windows as well.
And I took this shot directly across the street from the chapel. (Uhhh, yeah, Kenyon really is in the middle of nowhere. Farmland and woods are purty.)
4. This year was also a Chamber Singers reunion, so we had the special treat of a CS concert on Saturday night. I saw that on the program and figured that they'd do five, maybe six songs and call it a night. No. No, I should've known better. Doc is ambitious, and the Chamber Singers are awesome, so we got a two-hour concert featuring some eighteen or nineteen songs, and they sounded absolutely fantastic. I liked the Palestrina from the beginning, "Shilohini," and also the arrangement of "Shenandoah" that we did my first year in Community Choir. Those of us who'd sung it were all sort of bummed that they didn't do "Dubula," but there were so many other excellent pieces going on that I'm not sure I can complain.
Stolen from Sarah, who paraphrased one of the Chamber Singers' introductions of "I Love My Love": "In my first year in CS, we sang this one piece that had a horrible line full of sixteenth-note runs, which baritones don't like. One day in rehearsal we did it perfectly, and we were so proud -- and then Doc tells us, 'Baritones... sometimes we must live with what we must live with.' And that was the beginning of my love of tautologies...." Hee.
5. After the concert, we all trooped out and sang the Kenyon songs on the steps of Rosse. Brief explanation for newbies, because this is really one of my very favorite things about Kenyon: Every class has a Freshman Sing and a Senior Sing. The third day of freshman year, on the day the other classes move in after our two-day freshmen orientation earlier in the week, the freshman class has a fancy dinner in Peirce, which is a Hogwartsesque dining hall directly across Middle Path2 from Rosse Hall, our music/general purpose performance hall. At this dinner, Doc Locke, choral director and all-around impressive person, teaches us the four official Kenyon songs. We then process as a class across a couple hundred yards of lawn up to the steps of Rosse, while the upperclassmen line each side of the path and clap, cheer, and lob the occasional insult. Mostly it's clapping and cheering, though, because Kenyon people are on the whole very nice. Anyway, we collect on the steps and sing the songs for our audience of upperclassmen. (One of them is one of the loveliest songs I've ever heard. Note the Westminster chimes at the beginning!) Then, four years later, either the day before or the day of graduation we collect on the steps again and sing those same songs. (My class did it right after the commencement ceremony, then threw our caps in the air, which was very cool.) I don't know of any other college that has a tradition quite like that, although possibly one exists and I just haven't heard of it. I love that music, especially vocal music, plays such a central role in this college's identity. So of course it features at reunions. (It also started to sprinkle just as we were finishing up with "Kokosing Farewell," which seemed especially appropriate.)
6. As if that wasn't enough for Saturday night, there was a dance at the newly-remodeled Philander's Pub, which is now called The Peirce Pub. Laaaame. Though it does look very nice; nothing at all like the old pub. There was a band playing swing music, and naturally the collection of former ballroom dance club members I was with and I were all over that. It was, in a way, like Phling, in the sense that Peter, Valerie, Marta, Scott, David A., Ginger, and I were all together in one part of the room doing actual dance moves while waves of drunk people undulated around us. Ah, memories.
Here I also bring you the second video of this post, which Valerie was kind enough to take for me: Peter and me swing dancing! Listening to it now, that sounds like the slowest East Coast Swing in the world, but at the time, since it was nearly midnight and I'd been on my feet pretty much the entire day, it was plenty fast enough.
[Download]
All right. Now, to wandering and pictures and reminiscing! Perhaps I will just start North and work my way South.
They have changed Lewis! We used to have low, creaky metal beds and an actual dresser off to the left of the bed in this picture, and our desks weren't nearly as spiffy. I wasn't a fan of vaulting into bed, and taking away the dresser took away any chance of a nightstand. Under-bed storage is cool, I guess, but I don't really approve.
(Speaking of changes, some I didn't photograph: The Lewis lounge has all new, way more comfy furniture; Caples has a shiny new elevator that speaks the floor numbers; and Gund Commons no longer has a dining hall—yes, it's like the weekends all week now, as everyone living north has to troop to Peirce for meals all the time—and the servery has been replaced with a row of space-age vending machines, while the dining hall is now offices.)
On the other hand, the view from Upper Lewis over the quad hasn't changed much, except that now some of the gravel paths have been paved. This is from Chandra's old room, which, since it was immediately to the left of my old one, has basically the same view.
The Gund ballroom was reassuringly the same as it was five years ago, despite being filled with tables for a class dinner. Since I spent so much time there at ballroom practice, it's one of my most treasured places on campus.
Peter and I did some Tango. I think my Tango face looks less stern/angry than it does bored. Or perhaps annoyed at having to dance with this Argentinian sailor.
Along Middle Path and the sidewalks in town, all the irises were in bloom. I think they had mostly tulips when I was a senior and taking note of flowers. Of course, this being Kenyon, the irises were purple and white.
I have a version of that last photo from freshman year, when we had the epic two feet of snow that stayed for the entire winter, with snow halfway up the fence. Unfortunately, it was before I switched to digital, and I'm not entirely sure where the print is. Probably in a box somewhere. I remember how we were able to drop off our film at the bookstore and pick it up a couple days later. Now you can drop off dry cleaning at the bookstore and have it sent out.
Speaking of the bookstore:
They have awnings now for both the bookstore and the market. And most importantly, they've replaced the shields naming all the buildings on campus with boring rectangles. I don't approve. The shields were unique; the rectangles look like signs you'd find on any other campus in the country.
(New people: You're looking at the one half of the economic activity of Gambier, Ohio. The Village Inn Restaurant—which is finally open, after being closed for my entire tenure as a student—and Middle Ground café are a few yards up the street to the right, and there's a B&B, a small hotel, and a tiny overpriced clothing shop nearby as well.)
They've also completely reworked the interior of the bookstore. The castle is gone, and there seem to be fewer books in the upstairs part of things. The art supplies have moved to the back room, and the food has moved to where the art supplies used to be. The hardware/general store area has shrunk a bit. On the other hand, a change I highly approve of is the introduction of ice cream by the scoop. $2.00 for a big waffle cone. It's probably a good thing they didn't have this when I was a student.
Oh, and they've updated the Kenyon swag. The new stuff is, in general, more attractive, and they kept old favorites like the Kenyon Is Not Near Uganda shirt. I bought a static cling decal for my car, and it was one of the few other moments where I felt like time had passed, because when I graduated, I did not yet have a car.
The post office is exactly the same. They even still have the deco-ish print of Gambier up on the bulletin board that I remember.
And of course the Amish are still setting up shop on Middle Path! They were doing big business this weekend. (P.S. You have not lived until you've seen Amish teenagers drag racing up and down the main street in their buggies, like I did the spring of my freshman year.)
We spent quite a bit of time in Middle Ground on this trip, because none of us wanted to pay for the overpriced meals the college was having. I think this might've been only the third time I was in the café (although oddly, I was in there a lot when it was still the Red Door and only did drinks and baked goods). I don't drink coffee, and since we had an all-you-can-eat meal plan, I never wanted to spend money for a meal when I could eat in the dining halls for free. They do make an excellent salad dressing, though. I had it during senior week, as I recall, and have never figured out how to recreate it.
And now we've arrived at South Campus! Here we are at the Gates of Hell:
And here are some Kenyon water bottles set up randomly on a table near the church.
The church is very much the same. For old times' sake, I sat in the pew I always sat in when Community Choir sang in the Advent service every winter.
Sadly, there was no Pealing this weekend. :( I wanted to go swing on the F bell, or at least listen to the Imperial March from Star Wars ring out over campus, but nope. I took a picture of the door to the bell tower anyway, though.
They've put the crows back on Ransom!3
AND NOW THE MONSTROSITY. Look, it's great that Graham Gund wants to give the college so much money. But I wish he'd give it without strings attached, as the buildings and sculptures his money funds inevitably clash with the rest of campus. Like, for example, the half-finished art gallery between Cromwell and the library, which looks like it would actually be somewhat attractive anywhere else. I actually like a lot of postmodern architecture, but it really doesn't go well with the Collegiate Gothic of much of the rest of campus. At least the library, done in a similar style, echoes the arches and points of Ascension. This building doesn't even try. And to add to its sins, it cuts off the very useful path between Sunset and Middle Path; now you have to detour around Cromwell or between Olin and Storer.
I visited the library for nostalgia purposes.
I remember spending the time in this chair between lunch and the T/Th 2:40 class I seemed to have every semester.
And here are some Joyce books, just for the hell of it. (I will note that Kenyon has more Irish lit volumes than UT does. *jealous*) I'd forgotten that the PR/PSes and the DA-DCs were right next to each other in Olin. I never really had to go anywhere else in the library. :D
Let us veer west for a moment to the Sunset Cottage area. Which is nigh unrecognizable now. They demolished Walton and Wing Houses in order to make room for the art gallery and the new art building, which is still in the steel girder stage of construction. I don't begrudge the art department new digs, because God knows Bexley has been inadequate for years and it is very, very far north, but I spent a lot of time in Walton. :( Plus, the construction is taking over everything. Like, say, the view from the Sunset balcony:
At least the view to the left is still okay:
And the exterior looks exactly the same, much to Chandra's and my pleasure:
The seminar room is mostly unchanged:
However, now they have inserted some insane technological wonder in the fireplace. CRAZINESS.
I sat in the seat I always sat in when I had class in this room:
And Chandra and I waxed nostalgic about drinking tea and eating cookies while translating Old English poetry every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon in the fall of senior year. Oh, Klein. He's still teaching, BTW. I think he's an institution in and of himself.
We all went into Bailey for a while. I think everyone who's taken a humanities class at Kenyon has had class in the upstairs classroom, and waited on the window seat for the previous class to let out.
Lentz House is entirely new to me. It doesn't quite go with all the other nineteenth-century houses that dot the campus, but it doesn't look as out of place as it could. The seminar table outside is highly appropriate. And it is very shiny inside.
(It looks like they just transplanted the classroom from Walton, kind of.)
Also, the office doors are made of some kind of frosted glass that you can write on with whiteboard markers, so even though we didn't see Matz or McMullen, we were at least able to leave them notes.
I have no actual connection to Finn House, since there was nothing in it when I was a student, but I've always thought it was pretty, and now it houses The Kenyon Review.
Likewise with Palme, which I never had need to go into because I wasn't an Anthro or Soc student, but I think it's attractive.
Going back to Middle Path, we spent quite a bit of time at Rosse and Storer. I got to see Brandi again! I remember that after I was in England for a year, Kenyon felt very strange when I came back for my senior year. Strange, that is, until the first Community Choir rehearsal, when I watched Doc conducting us against the background of all that blonde wood, and everything seemed to click back into place.
We took our pictures in front of Rosse.
There was a bagpiper at one point for the not-as-interesting-as-it-might-have-been procession of classes from Rosse to Peirce
And of course, no trip through Storer is complete without the ugly Chihuly chandelier:
(An exhibit of his work came to the Frist recently, and you know, when he's not making Krakenesque chandeliers, he's actually quite talented, and makes very pretty glass sculptures.)
We spent a lot of time in the Upside Down Tree, which Stewart and Karen tell me is a weeping elm. To me, it looks a bit like a petrified Cthulu. It's one of my favorite places on campus.
Naturally, we climbed it. Chandra got higher than Sarah, Peter, or I, because it's Chandra and climbing things is what she does.
And now, Peirce, site of many changes!
They haven't touched the Great Hall except to take out the tray return conveyor belt, which is actually an improvement. I could smell woodsmoke when we went inside, so there had been a fire in the fireplace recently. There's a new cloakroom, but I bet people still pile their coats and bags on the heat registers in winter, because it was so nice to put on a toasty warm jacket before going out into the snowy wasteland.
(New folks: Does it not remind you of Hogwarts? I heard that it was the second choice for filming the dining hall for the movies, after Christchurch at Oxford, but that appears to be just a rumor. Though that page does say that the campus was second choice for the filming of Dead Poets Society. Anyway, the stained glass windows are illustrations of various pieces of British and American literature. There's a whole alcove devoted to Shakespeare.)
However, they've changed EVERYTHING ELSE. The servery is all new and shiny.
And the little outdoor courtyard that used to exist between the Great Hall and Dempsey has been enclosed and had a staircase added. It looks kind of KACy.
And we all lamented the transformation of Upper Dempsey into whatever it's called now:
Now that I've seen it in person, it actually doesn't look that much different from Dempsey. I actually like the addition of more windows, and the replacement of the long tables with round ones is nice. I'm not fond of what they did to the ceiling; cutting off the tip of the arch and replacing the attractive functional beams with ugly pointless ones was a terrible idea, and I really dislike the new lighting. But on the whole, it's not as bad as the pictures on the website led me to believe.
On the other hand, they did get rid of all but a tiny bit of the balcony, which is very sad. I liked that balcony. And now there is a new, Gund-funded sculpture on the patio. I can't decide if it's bizarre and horrifying or bizarre and amazing.
A couple more things down here and then we'll keep moving south. Karen wanted to go into Timberlake House because she was an IPHS student.
I think this was around the time we ran into Brian C. and Katie J., though I have no pictures of them. Brian has an SLR with an amazing telephoto that I envied a lot.
In Timberlake, we also found this amusing whiteboard graffiti:
Continuing south, we have Ascension, which I think everyone has a class in at some point, as it serves many purposes. I have taken this shot approximately a hundred times, and the one right after it barely fewer, but I took them again for old times' sake:
Ascension is good building for taking artsy shots of.
(The last one demonstrates that the central staircase was obviously added later in the building's life. The hidden stairs lead to an observatory you can't get into anymore—and yes, I tried many times—though, you can see evidence of it in this aerial shot.)
And Philo is just impressive in general and should always have pictures taken of it:
As is the third floor reading room, where I spent plenty of time curled up in a comfy chair between classes.
Finally, the residential area of South Campus. First, Hanna, where I never lived but where several of my friends did:
Here's where I lived senior year. It was an excellent, excellent apartment.
And of course, the Adirondack chairs scattered around campus:
Finally, Old Kenyon.
That's all. It was an excellent reunion, and I'll be coming to the ten-year if I'm able.
1 Although to be entirely honest, based on pure photographic merit, the better pictures are here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
2 Kenyon is laid out in a linear fashion on a north-south axis. Middle Path is a wide gravel path that runs the length of campus, including through downtown, and basically you can't get anywhere without setting foot on it. Wearing sandals while walking on it also leads to inevitable rocks in ones shoes, hence the subject line of this entry.
3 The admissions building is named for John Crowe Ransom, who founded The Kenyon Review.
Note the first: This will be 75% nostalgia for fellow Kenyon grads, and 25% pretty pictures and explanations for everyone else. Just FYI. But there's a reason Forbes named it one of the world's ten most beautiful college campuses, so, you know, pretties!1
Note the second: All thumbnails are linked to the original photos, which are some 5-6MB rather than the usual scaled-down versions, in case anyone who was there wanted to download them for some purpose that required the big original.
It was, I must say, not as strange as I thought it might be being back. Most of the time, it felt like I had never left. The only jarring moments, really, were the new construction (the art gallery going up between Cromwell and Olin isn't hideous in and of itself, but it doesn't go at all with the surrounding architecture), the remodels of Upper Dempsey and the Peirce and Gund serveries, and the immense number of babies and small children on campus. I don't think anyone from our class had one, but I'm not sure I saw anyone with a year in the nineties on their nametag who wasn't holding or leading a little human by the hand. (In between the copious amounts of free booze, Kenyon tries to be family-oriented. This is kind of what happens when, just to use the people I know as an example, ten of the fourteen married alumni I know are married to other Kenyon alumni.)
Anyway, other than that: Very much like I'd never left. Of course, it helped that I was staying in Lewis, my freshman dorm, albeit about as far away from my old room as you could get and still be in the same building. (Though since Lewis only houses eighty, this is not terribly far.) The Lewis funk, I am either sad or pleased to report, is still very much in evidence.
The main point of these things, I think, supposed to be that you gather with people you graduated with who scattered across the country after school and hear what's going on in their lives. However, with Livejournal, and Facebook, it was more like, "So...what's happened since yesterday, when I saw you post?" Which I think is all for the good, as it left time for literary discussions and puns and band names of the day (Private Armadillos and Excessive Haberdashery, both courtesy of Brian C.). It also made it feel even more like we'd never left.
Before I get into a lot of text, here's the first video. Despite the fact that it was the very last thing I used my camera for this weekend, it sets the scene rather nicely.
[Download]
How I have missed the Westminster chimes! The church down the road from my house in Nashville does them on the hour, but not at the fifteen-minute intervals, and I can only hear them when I'm outside and the wind's right. Chandra and I had our windows open in Lewis, and we could hear them very clearly. It was surprisingly chilly at night, though it warmed up during the day, so while I remembered Lewis as ungodly hot at the beginning and end of the year, it was really quite pleasant this time around.
In addition to much, much wandering around campus taking photos and waxing nostalgic—I'd forgotten how much walking Kenyon requires, and I think my feet have actually fallen off—which I will go into in much more detail in a minute, we crammed rather a lot of other things in to two days. In chronological order:
1. Chandra and I went to Sergei's talk on crime novels and film noir. It was very good, of course, because it was Sergei and really what else could it be? However, it was also kind of a weird experience for me, and one of the few times on campus when I felt like five years had gone by. Despite the fact that this was billed as a lecture, he ran it as the introductory session of a seminar, with plenty of questions and interaction, and I was torn between feeling like a student again and trying to predict where Sergei was going to go with each of our comments and ideas: how he would handle the simplistic answers, what he would respond to the more interesting ones, how he'd play comments off each other. There is, I think, kind of a house teaching style in the English department at Kenyon—it's what I think of as The Way To Teach An English Class, although I suppose there are other
2. Two hours of Friday night were devoted to Shutt's ghost tour. I've been on it at least twice before, but you can't not go to see Shutt perform. He had visual aids this time; two "ghosts" ran screaming by the group in both the dance studio and the graveyard, and when he got to Stuart Pierson outside of Old Kenyon, the lights flickered in one of the bullseyes to highlight an alum dressed in a suit looking out the window. He hasn't really updated his repertoire—I remembered all the stories he told—but he has slightly rearranged the facts, like telling us that Security's experience with the Caples ghost (screaming calls from various rooms; showers being on full blast when no one was in the locked building) happened only four years ago, when I know it's been considerably longer than that, and he was using that story in my freshman year.
I'm not entirely sure why there were luminarias all along Middle Path that night, but they were very pretty to walk between.
3. Saturday afternoon, Peter, Chandra, and I took a field trip to the Old Quarry Chapel. I never got to it while I was a student, largely because it's a couple miles away from campus and at the time wasn't refurbished or anything. Now it's been renovated and prettified, and though small, is very cute.
There are some very attractive stained glass windows as well.
And I took this shot directly across the street from the chapel. (Uhhh, yeah, Kenyon really is in the middle of nowhere. Farmland and woods are purty.)
4. This year was also a Chamber Singers reunion, so we had the special treat of a CS concert on Saturday night. I saw that on the program and figured that they'd do five, maybe six songs and call it a night. No. No, I should've known better. Doc is ambitious, and the Chamber Singers are awesome, so we got a two-hour concert featuring some eighteen or nineteen songs, and they sounded absolutely fantastic. I liked the Palestrina from the beginning, "Shilohini," and also the arrangement of "Shenandoah" that we did my first year in Community Choir. Those of us who'd sung it were all sort of bummed that they didn't do "Dubula," but there were so many other excellent pieces going on that I'm not sure I can complain.
Stolen from Sarah, who paraphrased one of the Chamber Singers' introductions of "I Love My Love": "In my first year in CS, we sang this one piece that had a horrible line full of sixteenth-note runs, which baritones don't like. One day in rehearsal we did it perfectly, and we were so proud -- and then Doc tells us, 'Baritones... sometimes we must live with what we must live with.' And that was the beginning of my love of tautologies...." Hee.
5. After the concert, we all trooped out and sang the Kenyon songs on the steps of Rosse. Brief explanation for newbies, because this is really one of my very favorite things about Kenyon: Every class has a Freshman Sing and a Senior Sing. The third day of freshman year, on the day the other classes move in after our two-day freshmen orientation earlier in the week, the freshman class has a fancy dinner in Peirce, which is a Hogwartsesque dining hall directly across Middle Path2 from Rosse Hall, our music/general purpose performance hall. At this dinner, Doc Locke, choral director and all-around impressive person, teaches us the four official Kenyon songs. We then process as a class across a couple hundred yards of lawn up to the steps of Rosse, while the upperclassmen line each side of the path and clap, cheer, and lob the occasional insult. Mostly it's clapping and cheering, though, because Kenyon people are on the whole very nice. Anyway, we collect on the steps and sing the songs for our audience of upperclassmen. (One of them is one of the loveliest songs I've ever heard. Note the Westminster chimes at the beginning!) Then, four years later, either the day before or the day of graduation we collect on the steps again and sing those same songs. (My class did it right after the commencement ceremony, then threw our caps in the air, which was very cool.) I don't know of any other college that has a tradition quite like that, although possibly one exists and I just haven't heard of it. I love that music, especially vocal music, plays such a central role in this college's identity. So of course it features at reunions. (It also started to sprinkle just as we were finishing up with "Kokosing Farewell," which seemed especially appropriate.)
6. As if that wasn't enough for Saturday night, there was a dance at the newly-remodeled Philander's Pub, which is now called The Peirce Pub. Laaaame. Though it does look very nice; nothing at all like the old pub. There was a band playing swing music, and naturally the collection of former ballroom dance club members I was with and I were all over that. It was, in a way, like Phling, in the sense that Peter, Valerie, Marta, Scott, David A., Ginger, and I were all together in one part of the room doing actual dance moves while waves of drunk people undulated around us. Ah, memories.
Here I also bring you the second video of this post, which Valerie was kind enough to take for me: Peter and me swing dancing! Listening to it now, that sounds like the slowest East Coast Swing in the world, but at the time, since it was nearly midnight and I'd been on my feet pretty much the entire day, it was plenty fast enough.
[Download]
All right. Now, to wandering and pictures and reminiscing! Perhaps I will just start North and work my way South.
They have changed Lewis! We used to have low, creaky metal beds and an actual dresser off to the left of the bed in this picture, and our desks weren't nearly as spiffy. I wasn't a fan of vaulting into bed, and taking away the dresser took away any chance of a nightstand. Under-bed storage is cool, I guess, but I don't really approve.
(Speaking of changes, some I didn't photograph: The Lewis lounge has all new, way more comfy furniture; Caples has a shiny new elevator that speaks the floor numbers; and Gund Commons no longer has a dining hall—yes, it's like the weekends all week now, as everyone living north has to troop to Peirce for meals all the time—and the servery has been replaced with a row of space-age vending machines, while the dining hall is now offices.)
On the other hand, the view from Upper Lewis over the quad hasn't changed much, except that now some of the gravel paths have been paved. This is from Chandra's old room, which, since it was immediately to the left of my old one, has basically the same view.
The Gund ballroom was reassuringly the same as it was five years ago, despite being filled with tables for a class dinner. Since I spent so much time there at ballroom practice, it's one of my most treasured places on campus.
Peter and I did some Tango. I think my Tango face looks less stern/angry than it does bored. Or perhaps annoyed at having to dance with this Argentinian sailor.
Along Middle Path and the sidewalks in town, all the irises were in bloom. I think they had mostly tulips when I was a senior and taking note of flowers. Of course, this being Kenyon, the irises were purple and white.
I have a version of that last photo from freshman year, when we had the epic two feet of snow that stayed for the entire winter, with snow halfway up the fence. Unfortunately, it was before I switched to digital, and I'm not entirely sure where the print is. Probably in a box somewhere. I remember how we were able to drop off our film at the bookstore and pick it up a couple days later. Now you can drop off dry cleaning at the bookstore and have it sent out.
Speaking of the bookstore:
They have awnings now for both the bookstore and the market. And most importantly, they've replaced the shields naming all the buildings on campus with boring rectangles. I don't approve. The shields were unique; the rectangles look like signs you'd find on any other campus in the country.
(New people: You're looking at the one half of the economic activity of Gambier, Ohio. The Village Inn Restaurant—which is finally open, after being closed for my entire tenure as a student—and Middle Ground café are a few yards up the street to the right, and there's a B&B, a small hotel, and a tiny overpriced clothing shop nearby as well.)
They've also completely reworked the interior of the bookstore. The castle is gone, and there seem to be fewer books in the upstairs part of things. The art supplies have moved to the back room, and the food has moved to where the art supplies used to be. The hardware/general store area has shrunk a bit. On the other hand, a change I highly approve of is the introduction of ice cream by the scoop. $2.00 for a big waffle cone. It's probably a good thing they didn't have this when I was a student.
Oh, and they've updated the Kenyon swag. The new stuff is, in general, more attractive, and they kept old favorites like the Kenyon Is Not Near Uganda shirt. I bought a static cling decal for my car, and it was one of the few other moments where I felt like time had passed, because when I graduated, I did not yet have a car.
The post office is exactly the same. They even still have the deco-ish print of Gambier up on the bulletin board that I remember.
And of course the Amish are still setting up shop on Middle Path! They were doing big business this weekend. (P.S. You have not lived until you've seen Amish teenagers drag racing up and down the main street in their buggies, like I did the spring of my freshman year.)
We spent quite a bit of time in Middle Ground on this trip, because none of us wanted to pay for the overpriced meals the college was having. I think this might've been only the third time I was in the café (although oddly, I was in there a lot when it was still the Red Door and only did drinks and baked goods). I don't drink coffee, and since we had an all-you-can-eat meal plan, I never wanted to spend money for a meal when I could eat in the dining halls for free. They do make an excellent salad dressing, though. I had it during senior week, as I recall, and have never figured out how to recreate it.
And now we've arrived at South Campus! Here we are at the Gates of Hell:
And here are some Kenyon water bottles set up randomly on a table near the church.
The church is very much the same. For old times' sake, I sat in the pew I always sat in when Community Choir sang in the Advent service every winter.
Sadly, there was no Pealing this weekend. :( I wanted to go swing on the F bell, or at least listen to the Imperial March from Star Wars ring out over campus, but nope. I took a picture of the door to the bell tower anyway, though.
They've put the crows back on Ransom!3
AND NOW THE MONSTROSITY. Look, it's great that Graham Gund wants to give the college so much money. But I wish he'd give it without strings attached, as the buildings and sculptures his money funds inevitably clash with the rest of campus. Like, for example, the half-finished art gallery between Cromwell and the library, which looks like it would actually be somewhat attractive anywhere else. I actually like a lot of postmodern architecture, but it really doesn't go well with the Collegiate Gothic of much of the rest of campus. At least the library, done in a similar style, echoes the arches and points of Ascension. This building doesn't even try. And to add to its sins, it cuts off the very useful path between Sunset and Middle Path; now you have to detour around Cromwell or between Olin and Storer.
I visited the library for nostalgia purposes.
I remember spending the time in this chair between lunch and the T/Th 2:40 class I seemed to have every semester.
And here are some Joyce books, just for the hell of it. (I will note that Kenyon has more Irish lit volumes than UT does. *jealous*) I'd forgotten that the PR/PSes and the DA-DCs were right next to each other in Olin. I never really had to go anywhere else in the library. :D
Let us veer west for a moment to the Sunset Cottage area. Which is nigh unrecognizable now. They demolished Walton and Wing Houses in order to make room for the art gallery and the new art building, which is still in the steel girder stage of construction. I don't begrudge the art department new digs, because God knows Bexley has been inadequate for years and it is very, very far north, but I spent a lot of time in Walton. :( Plus, the construction is taking over everything. Like, say, the view from the Sunset balcony:
At least the view to the left is still okay:
And the exterior looks exactly the same, much to Chandra's and my pleasure:
The seminar room is mostly unchanged:
However, now they have inserted some insane technological wonder in the fireplace. CRAZINESS.
I sat in the seat I always sat in when I had class in this room:
And Chandra and I waxed nostalgic about drinking tea and eating cookies while translating Old English poetry every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon in the fall of senior year. Oh, Klein. He's still teaching, BTW. I think he's an institution in and of himself.
We all went into Bailey for a while. I think everyone who's taken a humanities class at Kenyon has had class in the upstairs classroom, and waited on the window seat for the previous class to let out.
Lentz House is entirely new to me. It doesn't quite go with all the other nineteenth-century houses that dot the campus, but it doesn't look as out of place as it could. The seminar table outside is highly appropriate. And it is very shiny inside.
(It looks like they just transplanted the classroom from Walton, kind of.)
Also, the office doors are made of some kind of frosted glass that you can write on with whiteboard markers, so even though we didn't see Matz or McMullen, we were at least able to leave them notes.
I have no actual connection to Finn House, since there was nothing in it when I was a student, but I've always thought it was pretty, and now it houses The Kenyon Review.
Likewise with Palme, which I never had need to go into because I wasn't an Anthro or Soc student, but I think it's attractive.
Going back to Middle Path, we spent quite a bit of time at Rosse and Storer. I got to see Brandi again! I remember that after I was in England for a year, Kenyon felt very strange when I came back for my senior year. Strange, that is, until the first Community Choir rehearsal, when I watched Doc conducting us against the background of all that blonde wood, and everything seemed to click back into place.
We took our pictures in front of Rosse.
There was a bagpiper at one point for the not-as-interesting-as-it-might-have-been procession of classes from Rosse to Peirce
And of course, no trip through Storer is complete without the ugly Chihuly chandelier:
(An exhibit of his work came to the Frist recently, and you know, when he's not making Krakenesque chandeliers, he's actually quite talented, and makes very pretty glass sculptures.)
We spent a lot of time in the Upside Down Tree, which Stewart and Karen tell me is a weeping elm. To me, it looks a bit like a petrified Cthulu. It's one of my favorite places on campus.
Naturally, we climbed it. Chandra got higher than Sarah, Peter, or I, because it's Chandra and climbing things is what she does.
And now, Peirce, site of many changes!
They haven't touched the Great Hall except to take out the tray return conveyor belt, which is actually an improvement. I could smell woodsmoke when we went inside, so there had been a fire in the fireplace recently. There's a new cloakroom, but I bet people still pile their coats and bags on the heat registers in winter, because it was so nice to put on a toasty warm jacket before going out into the snowy wasteland.
(New folks: Does it not remind you of Hogwarts? I heard that it was the second choice for filming the dining hall for the movies, after Christchurch at Oxford, but that appears to be just a rumor. Though that page does say that the campus was second choice for the filming of Dead Poets Society. Anyway, the stained glass windows are illustrations of various pieces of British and American literature. There's a whole alcove devoted to Shakespeare.)
However, they've changed EVERYTHING ELSE. The servery is all new and shiny.
And the little outdoor courtyard that used to exist between the Great Hall and Dempsey has been enclosed and had a staircase added. It looks kind of KACy.
And we all lamented the transformation of Upper Dempsey into whatever it's called now:
Now that I've seen it in person, it actually doesn't look that much different from Dempsey. I actually like the addition of more windows, and the replacement of the long tables with round ones is nice. I'm not fond of what they did to the ceiling; cutting off the tip of the arch and replacing the attractive functional beams with ugly pointless ones was a terrible idea, and I really dislike the new lighting. But on the whole, it's not as bad as the pictures on the website led me to believe.
On the other hand, they did get rid of all but a tiny bit of the balcony, which is very sad. I liked that balcony. And now there is a new, Gund-funded sculpture on the patio. I can't decide if it's bizarre and horrifying or bizarre and amazing.
A couple more things down here and then we'll keep moving south. Karen wanted to go into Timberlake House because she was an IPHS student.
I think this was around the time we ran into Brian C. and Katie J., though I have no pictures of them. Brian has an SLR with an amazing telephoto that I envied a lot.
In Timberlake, we also found this amusing whiteboard graffiti:
Continuing south, we have Ascension, which I think everyone has a class in at some point, as it serves many purposes. I have taken this shot approximately a hundred times, and the one right after it barely fewer, but I took them again for old times' sake:
Ascension is good building for taking artsy shots of.
(The last one demonstrates that the central staircase was obviously added later in the building's life. The hidden stairs lead to an observatory you can't get into anymore—and yes, I tried many times—though, you can see evidence of it in this aerial shot.)
And Philo is just impressive in general and should always have pictures taken of it:
As is the third floor reading room, where I spent plenty of time curled up in a comfy chair between classes.
Finally, the residential area of South Campus. First, Hanna, where I never lived but where several of my friends did:
Here's where I lived senior year. It was an excellent, excellent apartment.
And of course, the Adirondack chairs scattered around campus:
Finally, Old Kenyon.
That's all. It was an excellent reunion, and I'll be coming to the ten-year if I'm able.
1 Although to be entirely honest, based on pure photographic merit, the better pictures are here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
2 Kenyon is laid out in a linear fashion on a north-south axis. Middle Path is a wide gravel path that runs the length of campus, including through downtown, and basically you can't get anywhere without setting foot on it. Wearing sandals while walking on it also leads to inevitable rocks in ones shoes, hence the subject line of this entry.
3 The admissions building is named for John Crowe Ransom, who founded The Kenyon Review.
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no subject
Date: 2011-05-31 12:55 am (UTC)Are some of the classrooms really in old houses? That's super cool. Florida State campus definitely as the college gothic thing going on (my Iraqi professor still insists that the FSU auditorium dating from the early 20th c. looks very much like Iraq...I think it has something to do with the giant palm trees outside), but the other half of campus is 60s modern ugly. I think having a few old houses around for academic use would've made my campus so much nicer.
Also, I totally remember the Amish drag racing story! Best ever!
no subject
Date: 2011-05-31 03:29 am (UTC)Are some of the classrooms really in old houses?
Indeed! I had about half my classes in converted old houses (and most of the others were in Ascension, which is also old and quirky), and most of my professors had offices in them. It does seem to help with the air of informality Kenyon cultivates between students and professors, and it was really nice to walk into a cute old house instead of a bland concrete bunker for class.
Also, I totally remember the Amish drag racing story! Best ever!
Hee! Awesome! The Amish really added a certain je ne sais quoi.
no subject
Date: 2011-05-31 01:59 am (UTC)I too loved that library chair! Excellent people-watching when your reading was dull, too!
A flat-screen in Sunset??? I remember Sergei hauling a 90s-esque giant CRT in on a gimpy A/V cart for our noir classes, awww. (I bought a huge box of Irish Breakfast tea bags for work a while back, and as soon as I opened them I thought, "Oooh! Smells like Beowulf!"
Perhaps I will make it to the ten-year...
no subject
Date: 2011-05-31 03:31 am (UTC)Sacrilege!
I too loved that library chair! Excellent people-watching when your reading was dull, too!
It was indeed! Although it was always too cold in the spring/fall and too warm in the winter. But at least it was soft and squishy.
A flat-screen in Sunset???
HERESY.
I bought a huge box of Irish Breakfast tea bags for work a while back, and as soon as I opened them I thought, "Oooh! Smells like Beowulf!"
Tea often reminds me of Klein's class, yes.
Perhaps I will make it to the ten-year...
YOU SHOULD COME.
no subject
Date: 2011-05-31 06:08 am (UTC)Pealing was like half the reason I was tempted to go!
YOU SHOULD COME.
SO I HEAR.
no subject
Date: 2011-05-31 02:16 am (UTC)I can't thank you enough for posting and including such great pictures! I'm so glad you and Zilla got to go and that you met up with so many old friends from our class (Peter, Sarah, Stewart, etc). I'm definitely coming to the 10 year, though by then I'm sure a lot more of our peers will be 'carrying or leading small humans' around. Maybe even some of us Pezzers, you never know. Maybe by then we'll even be able to afford campus meals again.
So many happy memories of Kenyon and of times with you guys; I miss our hindered implosions.
Thanks again for letting me relive the reunion vicariously from way out here!
no subject
Date: 2011-05-31 03:34 am (UTC)10 year for sure!
by then I'm sure a lot more of our peers will be 'carrying or leading small humans' around
Perhaps...although I didn't really see any of the '01 people with kids either. It was mostly the '96 and '91 folks, along with various Chamber Singers from the nineties.
Maybe even some of us Pezzers, you never know.
I would officially freak out. Weeeeeeeeeeeird.
Maybe by then we'll even be able to afford campus meals again.
Bwahahaha! Yeah, I could've afforded what they were charging, but...why bother when the food is better and cheaper elsewhere? We went to Hunan instead of the class dinner, and it was very much worth it.
I miss our hindered implosions as well. We should have one in LA...
no subject
Date: 2011-05-31 03:31 am (UTC)! When were they gone?
no subject
Date: 2011-05-31 03:34 am (UTC)Lots of capslock. You are warned.
Date: 2011-05-31 03:46 am (UTC)The Lewis funk, I am either sad or pleased to report, is still very much in evidence.
Wait, what's the Lewis funk? I'm not sure I was ever aware of this! (Probably just reeeaaally out of it as a freshman.)
The Caples ghost story may be my favorite "real" ghost story ever. Although I also like the one… was it Old Kenyon with the fire? And when it was rebuilt they put the second floor higher than the original second floor, so you can see the ghosts' legs from the point where the old floor used to be up to the ceiling?
which is now called The Peirce Pub.
What. "Philander" remains the best first name of a founder EVER; why wouldn't you continue to use it anywhere possible?
Caples has a shiny new elevator that speaks the floor numbers
They got rid of Otis?! Noooo!
Gund Commons no longer has a dining hall—yes, it's like the weekends all week now, as everyone living north has to troop to Peirce for meals all the time
ahahahaha, SUCKERS.holy crap, the bookstore and environs now look like… part of a real town. This is mind-boggling.
they've replaced the shields naming all the buildings on campus with boring rectangles.
WHAT. WHAT. WHAT.
And to add to its sins, it cuts off the very useful path between Sunset and Middle Path
Now this may be one of the most upsetting things I have EVER HEARD. I spent, like, 50% of my life somewhere between Middle Path and that Sunset-Walton-Bailey parking lot.
Oh, Klein. He's still teaching, BTW.
That is just. wow. wow.
Aww, I'm so glad Ascension is the same.
And finally: oh god, "Kokosing Farewell." I get lines from that stuck in my head every now and then, for no earthly reason. Old Keeenyon, weee are liiike Kokosing, obeeedieeent to some strange spell….
(Thank you for the mp3! Somehow I didn't have my own copy.)
Re: Lots of capslock. You are warned.
Date: 2011-05-31 07:15 am (UTC)Re: Lots of capslock. You are warned.
Date: 2011-05-31 11:49 pm (UTC)Re: Lots of capslock. You are warned.
Date: 2011-05-31 11:48 pm (UTC)Eau de gym sock, overlaid with stale beer, which suffuses the hallways.
The Old Kenyon fire story is my favorite as well. It's the most haunting, IMO.
What. "Philander" remains the best first name of a founder EVER; why wouldn't you continue to use it anywhere possible?
I KNOW! What IS that?
They got rid of Otis?! Noooo!
REPLACED. ENTIRELY. There's still a mural, though!
ahahahaha, SUCKERS.
Living in Bexleys or New Aps must be hellish now.
holy crap, the bookstore and environs now look like… part of a real town. This is mind-boggling.
Eh, I dunno that the outside looks much different. It still looks like a town owned by the college to me.
WHAT. WHAT. WHAT.
I KNOW! The shields were one of the most visually distinctive aspects of the college, and now they're just GONE.
Now this may be one of the most upsetting things I have EVER HEARD. I spent, like, 50% of my life somewhere between Middle Path and that Sunset-Walton-Bailey parking lot.
To be fair, it won't cut the path off once it's done. It's just that now, with the construction, they've temporarily walled off the whole expanse. Still, it doesn't make me any more favorably disposed to the building.
Re: Lots of capslock. You are warned.
Date: 2011-06-01 12:36 am (UTC)Oh, oh, I see. I thought you meant "funk" in a less literal sense-- like THE CURSE OF GUND, at least my year.
Re: Lots of capslock. You are warned.
Date: 2011-06-01 03:14 am (UTC)Re: Lots of capslock. You are warned.
Date: 2011-06-01 03:37 am (UTC)1,2. ...I swear, I didn't personally drive all these people away.
omg what if I was the curse of GundRe: Lots of capslock. You are warned.
Date: 2011-06-01 09:31 pm (UTC)My hall in Lewis didn't have anyone transfer, but we had a girl commit suicide in November that year. In fact, I think there was a death every year I was at Kenyon; there was another suicide my sophomore year, then the drunk kid who died of exposure while I was at Exeter (he was in your class, right?), and the freshman who...hit his head in the bathroom? my senior year. Kenyon's kind of deadly for such a small school.
Re: Lots of capslock. You are warned.
Date: 2011-06-01 11:11 pm (UTC)Oh, wow. I don't think I knew there were two suicides in a row right before my year. :/ God. Did they happen on campus?
And yeah, the guy who died of exposure was my year; he lived in... Norton I think? But not sure. Possibly Lewis. A lot of people in my sophomore-year social group had known him.
I thought the freshman who passed out in the bathroom was 2007? Or, wait. When even was that. It's all a blur.
Re: Lots of capslock. You are warned.
Date: 2011-06-01 11:52 pm (UTC)How very strange. I can see why people who transfer would go somewhere bigger/more urban, but I would think that the lists of where people applying to Kenyon also apply to would be filled with Williams, Davidson, Carleton, Macalester, etc.
I don't think I knew there were two suicides in a row right before my year.
I think they kept them pretty private, both out of respect for family/friends and because at least one of them happened off-campus. My freshman year, the girl on my hall took a leave of absence about a month into the year (I think she had a history of depression), and it happened at her home in PA. The other one was a guy from '05 I didn't know, and I think it happened over winter break, but I don't really remember.
Bathroom guy was definitely my senior year. I remember thinking that there had now been a death every one of my four years.
Peter and I were talking about Colin's death at the reunion; he says that he thought it really changed, for the better, the way the college handled the rather alcoholic culture on campus. Honestly, I didn't notice much difference, but I was away that year and wasn't really paying attention to much besides comps and classes my senior year, so...yeah.
(And of course, before either of us got there, but still kind of casting a pall over things my freshman year, was the '02 girl who was kidnapped and murdered while walking back from her job at the Cove--which I guess is now the Gambier Grille? Whatever, the bar behind the market--in a really random and terrifying manner. The trial was going on my freshman year, and the newspaper basically ran weekly reports for a while.)
WHY SO DEADLY, KENYON? JESUS.