…It’s a small liberal arts college in the middle of nowhere.

"I will punch you in the Thoreau-t"

I attended Kenyon College in Gambier Ohio. When I meet alumni from other small schools there is usually something to talk about.  More often the only question I’m asked is “why did you go there”?  I’m going to try and explain why in the most self-serving way possible.  Just sit back, relax and try to peer through the nerdiness into the unadulterated awesome.

I think the real reason anyone goes to school in the wilderness is that they need to focus. Walt Whitman, who incidentally was a great fighter, knew this.  Henry David Thoreau, who could swing a mean stick and set pretty good traps, also understood the intrinsic intellectual value of a secluded setting.  You might point out that we still had running water, toilets, fire extinguishers, and alcohol.   How then did the secluded intellectual sanctuary manifest itself?  The main elements were uninterrupted quiet and time and long distances to walk between buildings.  Time to come up with weird ideas and time to make other people listen to them.   There were late nights reciting poetry about pez, and many lunches playing my favorite game.

My friend and I used to sit at wide solid tables in a long hall for lunch. The sun would lazily saunter in through stained glass windows decorated with themes from Great Books.  The two of us were usually trying to prolong lunch as much as possible, procrastinating in increasingly complex ways.  One of our favorite games, which we occasionally coaxed others into playing, was called something like “author war”.  Shakespeare and Marlow are both great writers, but are they both great fighters?

The basic premise is which authors would win in a fight. As on any schoolyard, we would first decide on a number of authors per team and a list of more or less evenly matched opponents. By the time we had hashed out what authors were fairly matched it was pretty clear who was going to pick which author for their team. The fun really began as we worked out the details of the brawl.

Hemingway was a staple because of his man-bear strength and alcoholic pain tolerance. Ginsberg was usually a setter of maniacal traps and thrower of molotov cocktails.  If you watch It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, we usually played Ginsberg like Charlie…WILDCARD! I took a lot of Latin American literature, so I liked to pick Borges whom I described as a Napoleon; capable of understanding the entire battlefield at once.

The idea is to take some element of their writing style and translate it into a fighting skill.  Using the example of Ginsberg again, the prospect of finding a dirty asshole in my sandwich always stuck out, hence the surprise attack or WILDCARD!  Being horrible chauvinists we usually played Emily Dickinson as a sacrifice piece.  She would play the injured fawn and then kill Pablo Neruda or Hemmingway.  She spent a lot of her life secluded, which meant to us that in a fight, she was good at hiding.  To our credit, I’m pretty sure we also had a game that ended with “that’s why you don’t fuck with Susan Sontag”.  If you can write fiction and theory you are definitely badass.

So, next time you are stereotyping liberal arts schools, just thing of this story and validate yourself completely.