Writing this Senior Retrospective would always be challenging for me—I tend to wear my heart on my sleeve, especially in my writing. This quality makes doing anything for the final time painstaking. When I was much younger, I cried like clockwork every time the sun set, pleading for it to crawl back up from the horizon. Recently, life has felt like a series of those sunsets, every moment heavy with meaning by virtue of their finality; especially weird is the experience of consciously writing my last time for The Misc. So, I come to this article from a sensitive place, trying not to be too woe-begotten in expressing what this paper means to me.
The first time I wrote for The Misc was a piece on King Crimson’s “Larks’ Tongues in Aspic,” which ended up being so long that it was only published online. Looking back, I think this article was a little overwrought. At the time, it was my ostentatious step into a big new world of student journalism; I view my sincerity and confidence with retrospective reverence. As college continued, the Misc became the expressive modality for all the lovely art in my life, a space to share all the transformative media that provoked my tears, laughter and passions with others. Whether the articles I published introduced people to new art or just satisfied my own need to write about the things I love, each piece allowed me to put forth an element of myself. The biggest continuity in my philosophy from when I was a young journalistic upstart and today is that art is a connective force—learning about the art those in our lives cherish allows us to learn about the people around us and grow to understand ourselves better. I grew as a person through sharing with the campus the art that I love, learning to write critically about the social qualities of artwork along the way.
The Misc—specifically its Arts section—has given me a home which takes the form of a weekly publication. It has allowed me to embark on a challenging pursuit throughout my tenure as editor—trying to transmute the ineffable viscera of my emotional connection with art into language and, maybe even more dauntingly, allow others to share those feelings. Whether or not I feel I have achieved this pursuit remains to be said; I continue to work towards it today. I know now that the pursuit of writing about art is the movement of empathy into words, capturing the abstract in the linguistically bound. All my favorite art is able to package empathy into mediums that show rather than tell. Consequently, my time trying to turn that empathetic art into empathetic journalism has felt like a game of telephone dealing with a degree of separation. Working in the alchemy of language and beauty, the magic that we partake in as editors of this paper has developed my personhood and my ability to make the immaterial tangible.
I want to thank everyone who has been part of The Misc staff throughout my time on the paper for making college such a formative and rich experience. I love the copy staff, contributors, guest columnists and reporters and editors who constitute the human side of our weekly publications—you all make the world spin, populate mastheads replete with beautiful names and bring an infectious intellect and passion to all you do. Working alongside you all as fellow staff and friends has imbued me with courage and perspicuity, as well as a vigor that comes with spending time with people voluntarily committing to turning article ideas into a final layout in a week’s time.
To celebrate my love for this paper and the people on it, to honor the sounds of my time at college—and perhaps to voluntarily lean into a stereotypical Arts editor form of homage—I have created this YouTube playlist meant to dovetail with the end of this article. On it is my favorite music I have found and extensively listened to during my time with The Misc, as well as the songs I most associate with this beautiful paper. Thank you all so much for an incredible four years of student journalism; I cannot wait to see what the future holds for all of us!