Blue Book, May 2014

Letter from the Editor

Here it is. That special time of year when the campus is full of obstacles.

Exciting isn’t it? Each of us walking around w, perplexed: Which side of Low Plaza will be blockaded today? Why is this gate here?

Fuck. I mutter to myself, walking along Kent, turning towards Philosophy. Already late and thinking it would be a mistake to take the steps (“the steps”), I choose a route on the right that turned out to be stupidly circuitous.

Oh, but detours are what make life incalculable and wonderful, yeah? All of a sudden things aren’t the way you thought and you need to make a spontaneous choice. You stumble into an old friend. You see something you would have otherwise passed by. You loosen your grip on the world and see where it takes you. Good. Very good.

An obstacle to an intended direction is the essence of drama. Is there anything more stupefyingly symbolic than a wall? What are the Columbia event managers but insightful plot-builders and daring Pucks with their gates and fences and poles!

In my experience, when the quest and the barrier are non-symbolic—when you’re really trying to get from your house to somewhere else—the charm and intrigue wear off. This is because, along with its symbolic resonance, the practice of travel unlocks unimaginable depths of anger in human beings. Some of the most furious, hopeless moments I’ve had in this last year have been subway experiences: the train stopping in a tunnel; the train that stays “2 min” away for 10 minutes.

It’s stupid and trivial. But the symbolism is…not.

This is what I think I as I walk toward St. Paul’s clenching my teeth. Why me? Why today? What the FUCK. 

— Torsten Odland

TRANSACTIONS

ARRIVALS

Pita Grill

Senior Wisdoms

Spring, genuinely

New Law Dean

Your twitch

DEPARTURES

A “Daily” Spectator 

Conor Skelding

The Card-O-Mat sign

Institutional memory

Student Affairs

Joffrey Baratheon

Come Again!? 

“‘CHUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU UUUUUUUUCK.’ It was loud and obnoxious and brutal and uncomfortable. It grated on my fucking soul. And I reveled in it.”

– Daniel Garisto 

in The Eye

Themes and Variations 

On the second Sunday of May, Americans and the citizens of dozens of foreign countries will celebrate Mother’s Day. The editors at The Blue and White, momma’s boys and girls up and down, express maternal love from northwest England in the nineteenth century, to modern-day Virginia Beach. 

Mama I’m so sorry, I’m so obnoxious

I don’t fear Tubbs and Crockett

Mama I’m so sorry, I’m so obnoxious

Got two hot rocks in my pocket

Mama I’m so sorry, I’m so obnoxious

Big home palm trees and watches

Mama I’m so sorry, I’m so obnoxious

My only accomplice is my conscious

—Malice, from Clipse’s “Momma I’m So Sorry” (2006)

Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own;

Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind,

And, even with something of a mother’s mind,

And no unworthy aim,

The homely nurse doth all she can

To make her foster-child, her Inmate Man,

Forget the glories he hath known

And that imperial palace whence he came.

— William Wordsworth, from Ode: Intimations of Immortality (1807)