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sign up today—it's free! On This Day2000 — Not-for-profit entrepreneur Ellen Baxter '75 presents a lecture entitled "Homelessness in New York City: The Courts, the Politics and Pragmatic Solutions,” in the chapel. StorePurchase Bowdoin merchandise online. |  Last week in its series on creativity, CNN profiled writer, composer, and multimedia artist Paul Miller ’92, aka DJ Spooky, aka That Subliminal Kid, who could be the spokesperson for the liberal arts. Miller intellectualizes and fuses apparently disparate images, sounds, and ideas, across genres to create new discoveries.
For instance, last fall, Miller introduced an audience at the New York Academy of Science to “Sinfonia Antartica” — a presentation of classical, electronic and go-go musical interpretations of physicist Brian Greene’s research. His 2011 book, The Book of Ice, presents charts, graphs, and alarming images of the effects of human-caused climate change that Miller noted on his 2008 expedition to Antarctica. A series of shorts by Lost and Found films explores the notion of home, including “This Must be the Place,” about photographer John Coffer and his log cabin on 50 acres in upstate New York. I live in my house as I live inside my skin: I know more beautiful, more ample, more sturdy, and more picturesque skins, but it would seem to me unnatural to exchange them for mine. —Primo Levi
 Longfellow around 1850, daguerrotype, Southworth & Hawes, Boston Nearly two centuries after Henry Wadsworth Longfellow introduced students to the “soaring” poetry of Dante’s The Divine Comedy, two recent Bowdoin grads have published new findings about the Longfellow-Dante connection in the prestigious journal Dante Studies. Both alumnae worked with primary documents in Bowdoin’s Special Collections and Archives to aid in their research. “I was looking at marginalia, Longfellow’s handwritten notes,” says Kelsey Abbruzzese ’07. “It was so amazing to think that Longfellow held this, he wrote on it, and here it is at the College where I can hold it and incorporate it into my essay.” Read the story.  Camille Dungy and Matt O'Donnell at the Fishouse, October 2011. Bowdoin Magazine Associate Editor Matt O’Donnell is a renaissance man. In addition to his journalistic duties chronicling the life of the College and its alumni for the magazine, the Bowdoin Daily Sun, and the College’s ever increasing social media effort, and leading Bowdoin Outing Club groups up and down mountains hither and yon, he is at work as editor of From the Fishouse, an online audio literary journal. O’Donnell founded the non-profit From the Fishouse with poet Camille T. Dungy, a professor at San Francisco State University, to promote the oral tradition of poetry. Fishouse takes its name — and spelling — from the writing cabin of the late Maine writer, Lawrence Sargent Hall ’36, who taught English at Bowdoin from 1946 to 1986. The actual Fishouse now sits in the woods behind O’Donnell’s home. Along with its online offerings, Fishouse runs a visiting poet reading series on campus, co-sponsored by the Bowdoin College Alpha Delta Phi Society Literary Fund. O’Donnell and From the Fishouse were profiled this week on the website of 32 Poems Magazine. 
Professional typographers and just about every style guide out there agree that there should only be one space between sentences, yet the notion there should be two, held over from last century’s manual typewriter days, is a strongly held belief. Slate columnist Farhad Manjoo lays out irrefutable proof why “if you type two spaces after a period, you’re doing it wrong.” 
Although introverts can be quickly overshadowed by their charismatic counterparts — those garrulous, witty extroverts — author Susan Cain says introverts should not be so readily relegated to second-class citizen. Cain, a so-called “introversion expert,” has just published, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, arguing that quieter personality types deserve greater appreciation, USA Today reports. (The article also includes a test to determine where you fall on the introvert-extrovert spectrum.) Cain’s backed up by other researchers who’ve found that while introversion can at times be linked to certain disorders, such as depression and anxiety, it can also be a strength. “If you want to do something that requires sustained performance and paying attention for long periods of time, introversion is beneficial,” psychology professor William Revelle of Northwestern University says. Cain praises introverts even more highly: “the most spectacularly creative people in many fields are often introverted … They’re extroverted enough to exchange and advance ideas, but see themselves as independent and individualistic. They’re not joiners by nature,” she writes in The New York Times.  Given the onslaught of graphics, digital photography, videos and busy websites that most people consume and often produce these days, it might make sense to incorporate design into schools’ curricula. Jon Freach, a professor at the Austin Center for Design, argues that teaching design to students in K-12 along with science and the humanities could help people become more comfortable making things.
 Abelardo Morell '71 In a new book, Penelope’s Hungry Eyes: Portraits of Photographers, photographer Abe Frajndlich focuses his lens on fellow celebrated photographers, including renowned camera obscura artist Abelardo Morell ’71 (image #10 of the slideshow). The Bowdoin College Museum of Art will feature an exhibition this summer by another of the distinguished subjects from Frajndlich’s book, part-time Maine resident William Wegman (slide #15). Singer-songwriter Sarah Ramey ’03, who goes by the stage name Wolf Larsen, recently debuted a new album, Quiet at the Kitchen Door, “and it is not your normal record release,” she says. Sarah paired up with the social microloan site Kiva and The Girl Effect, a non-profit that seeks to abolish poverty for adolescent girls, to release the album “as an Idea, rather than as a record.” The idea—when you invest in a girl’s education, the entire community improves—takes shape through a video explaining The Girl Effect. “Not my idea,” Sarah admits, “UNESCO and The World Health Organization are the biggest proponents.” Sarah is donating one-third of all proceeds from Quiet at the Kitchen Door to these two organizations that invest in education for girls, as well as microloans for women entrepreneurs through Kiva’s www.joinfite.org program. This is not a women’s rights issue—it’s a human rights issue.
The late John Gould ’31, H’68, novelist and long-time columnist for The Christian Science Monitor, mentor to Stephen King, and widely considered the dean of Maine writers, lived for decades on a farm in Lisbon Falls, Maine, where he wrote much of his work in a small log cabin just a short drive up Route 196 from Brunswick. The current owner of the property recently listed Gould’s original cabin on Craigslist. In true Maine fashion, the crumbling building is “free for the taking,” ostensibly for salvage purposes, though the “person removing cabin must provide excavation work and fill.” | Bowdoin Athletics 2/3/2012 Women's Track & Field at 1st/4 Maine State Meet (Bates) | Recap 2/4/2012 Men's Ice Hockey Video 2/4/2012 Nordic Skiing at Vermont Carnival (Trapp Family Lodge) 2/4/2012 Women's Swimming & Diving at Colby 2/4/2012 Men's Swimming & Diving at Colby 2/4/2012 Men's Track & Field at Maine State Meet (Bates) 2/4/2012 Women's Squash Bowdoin at Bates 2/4/2012 Men's Squash Wesleyan (Conn.) at Bowdoin 2/5/2012 Nordic Skiing at Vermont Carnival (Trapp Family Lodge) 2/10/2012 Nordic Skiing at Dartmouth Carnival (Oak Hill) 2/10/2012 Women's Squash Bates at Bowdoin 2/10/2012 Women's Ice Hockey Bowdoin at Hamilton Video |
