Articles from: 2012

The Bird is the Word

July 2, 2012 by Brenda Bolinger Comments Off

Wearing her “Shake Your Tailfeathers” t-shirt, Jessica Blickley ’02 is ready to face the flock: “I’m excited to see so many Sagehens in the room!” This time, Blickley is referring to the audience eagerly awaiting her Alumni Weekend lecture on the College’s quirky mascot. More often, however, when Blickley expresses excitement over a group of sagehens—known to ornithologists as sage grouse—she is on the plains of western Wyoming, conducting research on thebizarre and beautiful birds.

A Ph.D. candidate in ecology at UC Davis, Blickley recalls hearing colorful stories about the College’s beloved bird while a Pomona student, and being unclear at the time which were true. But now she is ready to debunk a number of myths about the fascinating fowl.

Among the falsities she exposes is the notion that sage grouse don’t fly. Yes, they do, up to 50 m.p.h. And thank goodness, lest the Pomona fight song lyrics require amending: “Our foes are filled with dread/Whenever Cecil Sagehen flies overhead!”

But a misnomer still exists in the song’s title, “When Cecil Sagehen Chirps.” He doesn’t. The bird’s unique vocalization is more of a “coo-coo-pop-whistle-pop,” explains Blickley, who majored in biology at Pomona.

Here, Blickley addresses both the science and the sublime of the sage grouse, which ranges across much of the Western U.S., but also faces a variety of environmental threats.

How did you get interested in the sage grouse?

I always heard stories and rumors about the sagehen while I was a [Pomona] student, but I didn’t start off wanting to study them, probably because I didn’t know how cool they were. Then, at UC Davis, my advisor, Gail Patricelli, was studying them and I became intrigued—it was sort of a fortuitous accident. I had originally been interested in noise issues as related to birds and, with all of the noise pollution problems that sage grouse are facing, it worked out well to apply this interest to this species. It started to become clear to me that there’s a real need for work and research related to the sage grouse, and it’s really great to have an influence on what happens with conservation.

There’s talk of placing the sage grouse on the endangered species list. Is the bird in trouble?

Currently, it’s a candidate for listing under the Endangered Species Act because the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has determined they warrant official protection. But the species isn’t in immediate danger of going extinct—there are still as many as 200,000 birds, which sounds like a lot until you consider that there used to be as many as 16 million. There are many things causing populations to decline, including wildfires, invasive [plant] species, livestock grazing and, probably most importantly, habitat loss due to human development. I wouldn’t be surprised if they are listed in the near future, but right now, there are still enough sage grouse that other species closer to extinction take priority. But even so, there’s a lot of work already being done to help protect them.

What’s it like to hold one?

Well, they are very large birds, and they have very strong, powerful wings. The good news is that if you hold them properly, they don’t struggle. But if a wing gets away and hits you, it’s a little startling. Generally, they’re pretty docile.

Is it hard not to laugh at their elaborate mating display, or is it all about serious science?

We definitely have to laugh. Part of it is that they take it so seriously—[the males] strut around, they fight, they do their displays to impress the females, but from our perspective, they look pretty silly. And while it’s hard for us to tell the males apart based on their display, the females are very picky. There may be as many as 200 males, but most of them will never see any action in their lives. One of the things that my lab at UC Davis is trying to figure out is what makes some males’ displays so much sexier than the rest.

For research purposes, how do you tell them apart from each other?

When we’re able to capture them, we put colored bands on their legs, and then it’s really easy. But there are so many and they’re hard to catch. So, for unbanded males, we rely on their distinctive pattern of white dots on their tail plumage.

I understand there’s a layman’s term for this?

Yes, we call that the “butt print.”

I’ve read that the sage grouse is known for its loyalty to a certain area. In what way does this make it a fitting mascot for Pomona?

It’s true, male sage grouse are very loyal to their home lek [a.k.a. “strutting grounds”]. Both males and females tend to return to the same one every year. In the same way, I think a lot of Pomona alumni have loyalty to the school and are excited to come back. I certainly feel that way. Also, the sagehen is a pretty quirky bird, and I’d say the average student at Pomona is pretty quirky as well.

Applied Sci-Fi: In Class with Professor David Tanenbaum

July 2, 2012 by Mary Marvin Comments Off

In today’s first-year seminar, Nanotechnology in Science and Fiction, students visit a lab in Millikan, where Professor David Tanenbaum grows carbon nanotubes. Particles of iron and molybdenum are combined with methane, hydrogen and argon and heated to 1,000 degrees to create cylindrical molecules, with diameters of one to two nanometers.

Next, a student-led discussion focuses on I’m Working on That: A Trek from Science Fiction to Science Fact by William Shatner and Chip Walter, and covers topics ranging from wearable computers and biowarfare to cryogenics and virtual reality.

Tanenbaum asks the students to consider whether scientific developments have an effect on science fiction or whether the stories we read lead to innovative ideas for new technology, and the abridged and edited discussion follows:

Tanenbaum: There are a lot of virtual 3D video games where you wear glasses and play them, and you feel pretty much that you’re inside the virtual reality space. … Virtual reality is used in rides where people are in a room that is shaken or accelerated or pushed or pulled, so they think the shaking could be associated with a rocket blasting off or an earthquake. We’ve also read about the idea of live feedback in clothing. If you can put on the right gloves and shirts, those things can give you physical tactile responses. It can feel like someone put his hand on your shoulder, even if it’s just your shirt getting tighter.

Connor: Shatner also has a chapter about wearable computers, and I realized that Apple has done a lot of that by combining the iPhone and an mp3 player and PDA (personal digital assistant).

Tanenbaum: How many people do you see wearing their earpieces 24 hours a day, seven days a week? I think we’re already there. I want to ask a question that gets at both virtual reality and the wearable computers.

Can we say anything about the interplay between fiction and reality? Is there a connection between what we see in the science fiction we read and futuristic technologies? For example, the cell phone we have today is modeled—no doubt—on the flip communicator in the 1960’s Star Trek series. Science looked at that and marketing looked at it and said it would be cool to have a communicator. Before the new iPhones and flat tablets, all the sexy phones were flip phones. Do you think the science fiction is inspiring companies to develop the products, or is it the other way around?

Mathieu: It makes a lot of sense that when scientists are growing up they would be influenced by science fiction that they read, and it would definitely have an impact on them.

Mauricio: I think it’s more a mix. I feel that a lot of science fiction writers look at what’s being developed and then come up with applications, which in turn are taken by the science community. A science fiction writer might see a regular telephone and think it would be cool to take that everywhere and build on each other.

Andy: I know a lot of scientific pursuits are not just “Can we make a hologram?” but “Can we make the hologram from Star Wars?” It’s to set a goal for what you want to design.

Hanna: In the article they talk about the back pack, which takes GPS to the next level. It not only knows where you are but nudges you in the right direction, which is one step from the technology we already have.

Tanenbaum: How many have read the preface to The Diamond Age or the book we’re going to read, Katherine Goonan’s Queen City Jazz? In the prefaces and author’s comments, both writers include Eric Drexler [sometimes called the godfather of nanotechnology] in their lists of what inspired them to write their books. We’ve talked a lot about science fiction leading science, and people who say it’s a two-way thing with science sometimes leading science fiction. If you look at Arthur C. Clarke’s novels, the fact that we had a space program and were putting up satellites and people in orbit had a great influence on his being able to write 2001: A Space Odyssey because it was an extension of existing science. That science helped inspire the trajectory for the story. The influences work in both directions.

Immigrant Stories

July 2, 2012 by Adam Conner-Simons '08, Hugo Martin '87 and Mary Marvin Comments Off

AMY MOTLAGH ’98: REVOLUTION & REDEMPTION

Amy Motlagh’s life journey has been bookended by revolutions. Born to an Iranian father and American mother, she was 2 years old when her family left Iran for San Diego just months before the overthrow of the Iranian monarchy. Now a professor of English and comparative literature at the American University in Cairo, she has found herself caught in the middle of another series of uprisings in Egypt that have inspired her to see her own people’s struggles in a new light.

“When we left Iran, my family settled in a very white neighborhood in San Diego, but I grew up hearing Farsi and knowing a few words. At that time, there was a lot of bad feeling surrounding Iran; particularly in the wake of the hostage crisis, I tried to distance myself from my Iranian heritage. Although he had lived in the U.S. before, my father was ambivalent about living there permanently, and he would often wonder aloud about the life we would have had if we had stayed. During the Iraq War there was a lot of tension at home. I remember intensely watching news from Iran. It could be your family’s house that was being bombed.

I didn’t start thinking about studying Iran until I took a Pomona class with Zayn Kassam called Women in Islam and did a project on [Iranian novelist] Nahid Rachlin. After graduating I finally returned to Iran with my dad, which changed my perception completely—I witnessed a very different Iran from the one I had seen on TV, and was amazed to find that even under this oppressive regime, there was such a vibrant culture. I loved hearing Persian. It’s a language that values wordplay and takes poetry seriously, and I quickly understood how important it was for me to master it.

Eventually, I enrolled in a Ph.D. program in Near Eastern studies at Princeton University. Although I was studying Persian literature, I also felt called to respond to questions about the Iranian diaspora being raised by books like Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran. As somebody familiar with the American and Iranian literary traditions, I thought I could offer a critical perspective on how these works fit into a longer history of immigration, assimilation and life-writing in the United States.

It was initially frightening to be in Cairo during the demonstrations in January and February. We would hear gunshots or tanks driving by and be scared for friends who were participating. But once we saw what was happening in Tahrir Square with our own eyes, we could see that the protestors were peaceful and well-organized. Their courage has been inspiring. It’s a bit ironic to be experiencing a revolution when my family tried to leave one, but in certain ways [being in Cairo is] redemptive for me: I always felt like I missed out on something that was a huge part of my generation’s experience in Iran. My cousins grew up in a culture that was being radically remade, where people led double lives at home and in public, and where they had to deal with so many issues I didn’t have to deal with. It seems important to now be part of what’s happening in Egypt, even if it’s from the sidelines.

ALDO RAMIREZ ’00: MIGRANT TO MENTOR

For Aldo Ramirez ’00, school was an escape from a hard life toiling in the orchards and fields as a young boy. So, it is no surprise that after graduating from Pomona, he pursued a career in education. He is now putting his experience to work by helping young, low-income immigrants as principal of a small elementary school in the city of San Bernardino.

I was born in L.A. and very shortly after, my family had to move back to Mexico. We lived over there for three or four years. It was a very happy time. My parents and my grandparents were hard workers. They had cattle. They had some crops. So, that is what we did out there. Then my family started moving back to the U.S. as farm workers, moving up through California, Oregon and Washington.

My earliest memories of that time were picking apples and pears and peaches, nectarines and things like that in Washington State. … We would get up really early in the morning, sometimes before the sun was out. It was not fun, I can tell you that. It was very hard, carrying a ladder in the morning. Your hands would freeze. Pulling the cherries from the trees, the stems would wear your fingers down. But during that time my parents always tried to stay positive. They always told us they wanted us to go to college and get a college degree so we wouldn’t have to work out in the fields.

It definitely helped with my endurance. I mean, in school it was pretty easy to put forward a lot of effort. When I was going to school, I didn’t have to work in the fields so I loved school. Most of the teachers that I had were fantastic. They wanted us to do well. But my 8th grade teacher, Mrs. Copeland, she was especially kind. She taught me a lot about writing and literature. And she kept track of me when I was going through high school. And in my senior year, I had a 4.0 grade point average so she came over to the high school and she pulled me out and she gave me literature on Pomona College. And she said ‘I think this is a very good school for you to go to.’ She’s the one who steered me that way and helped me put my application together. She just cared. She wanted me to be successful.

One of my first courses I took at Pomona was Raymond Buriel’s Psychology of the Chicano. And that just resonated with me. It was so interesting to start thinking about the psyche of immigrants, specifically from Mexico. Because education was such a positive experience for me, I did some work as part of a mentor program for students from one of the Pomona Unified School District’s middle schools. And so when I graduated I decided to go into teaching. And it was a perfect fit. I mean it gave me the opportunity to give back. Just like Mrs. Copeland helped me, I found myself in the position of being able to help the families of the students I was teaching. I find as soon as I share my experiences with them and I show them pictures of my family, they relate really quickly. And they do look up to me and a lot of them aspire to do what I have done. The city of San Bernardino has a high concentration of English language learners. About 40 percent of the district is English language learners. About 95 percent of the district gets free or reduced-price lunches so we are working with a very needy population.

JOE NGUYEN ’05: A FUNNY THING HAPPENED …

Joe Nguyen ’05 grew up in the Deep South as the son of immigrant parents whose roots stretch from Germany and Austria to Vietnam. So, perhaps it’s only natural that he decided to become a stand-up comedian. Nguyen holds on to his day job working for the state of California and does standup at night in Los Angeles and San Francisco.

“My mom’s parents met and got married after World War II in a Jewish refugee camp in Shanghai. They wanted to move to the United States but, because of quotas, went to the Dominican Republic, where my mom and her sister were born and raised. My dad was an officer in the South Vietnamese army. He and his family narrowly escaped when Saigon fell at the end of the Vietnam War. His brother, who was in the Navy, was able to get them all on a ship to Guam.

My parents met while they were in college in Michigan. They moved to Atlanta when my dad got an engineering job there, and that’s where I grew up. When my family all gets together, it’s a very interesting mix. I think that, apart from the kind of food that I enjoy, there’s an open-mindedness that comes from growing up in a multicultural household.

I never considered myself a funny guy until sometime during college, when I realized I enjoyed cracking jokes and entertaining people. At some point, I started watching and listening to more standup comedy and thought, ‘I’d like to try that; I think I can do it.’

I didn’t have a job lined up after graduation, so I moved north with my girlfriend at the time. I took courses and performed at the San Francisco Comedy College, produced and hosted my own comedy show and, after a few years, started opening for some clubs. I moved to Los Angeles a few months ago and am learning the scene here and lining up shows.

My show used to be mostly about being different. From start to finish, it was ‘Hey, I’m a Vietnamese-Jew.’ I think that’s OK for a five-minute set, but when you do 15 minutes, people want something that is little more relatable. A lot of the newer material is less about my racial background. My style is slower paced, kind of dry and generally, pretty clean, like observational comedy. So far, my parents seem supportive. I don’t know if it’s because they’re my parents or if they really approve of me doing standup comedy. They’ve been to a few shows in San Francisco, and I also did one show in Atlanta.

My dad still encourages me to go to law school, but we’ll see about that. Whatever I end up doing, I don’t think I’ll ever quit standup.

I get a little crazy sometimes and look at reviews of my shows online. I’m happy to say that most have been pretty positive. But there was one about a routine I did for the Kung Pao Kosher Comedy show, which is held every Christmas in a Chinese restaurant in San Francisco. It said, ‘Joe was OK, but his material was too much about being Vietnamese and Jewish; he needs to focus more on being a philosophy major at Pomona.’ And I said, ‘Damn, I thought I was giving the people what they want.’ You can’t please everybody.”

PETER WERMUTH ’01: AMBASSADOR OF BASEBALL

Peter Wermuth ’00 is trying to get cricket nation excited about that other bat-and-ball sport. Sent by Major League Baseball to oversee the six-team Australian Baseball League as CEO, Wermuth was first exposed to hardball as a kid growing up in Germany. He played on the Pomona-Pitzer squad and coached on the German national team before heading to the big-league boardroom.

I started playing baseball at age 10—my older brother went to college in America and brought some equipment back to Germany. We had no clue what we were doing: our first time out, we went to a schoolyard and set up a field with two bases and home plate.

The catalyst for me was attending my first German-American Baseball League game in Mainz, my hometown. It was a great atmosphere: a big barbecue going, old men playing dominos on the side of the field, people playing music and even some Latin dancing.

There wasn’t any German youth baseball in the country at the time, but the U.S. Armed Forces ran its own Little League, which I joined. I’d travel from one military base to another, competing against American teams and gradually losing some of my German accent. When I was 12, I applied to be the club’s treasurer; they wouldn’t let me, which I didn’t think was reasonable at all, so I went off and started my own club.

I wanted to attend college in the U.S. All the other top liberal arts schools were in the Northeast, and with baseball being a big part of the decision, [Pomona] was an easy choice. At Columbia Business School, I ran the Sports Business Association and brought an M.L.B. executive to campus. After the talk he asked me what I was planning to do that summer and I told him, “I’m going to work for you.” I did—and have been since.

I always knew I wanted to set up a professional league. Baseball in most countries outside the U.S. is not the national sport. It’s difficult for an American to understand that ‘if you build it’ they will not necessarily come! In Australia there’s cricket, rugby union, rugby league, Australian-rules football. You have to treat baseball as a niche sport. That’s something I bring to the table because I lived in that sort of environment in Germany.

We’re hoping to reach that second tier [in Australia]. My U.S. experiences inspired me to use what I think of as the minor league model, where it’s framed as a fun family night out. Exciting promotions, mascots, upbeat music, a safe environment—baseball is almost secondary.

I’d love to grow the league as fast as possible, but we don’t want the resources that we put in to exceed demand. It’d be a disaster to play in venues that we can’t fill. Though we’ll never be cricket or the Australian Football League, I think we can establish a really attractive product. This is likely the last chance baseball has to establish itself as a relevant sport in Australia, and I feel great responsibility for the future of the sport in this country.

ANBINH PHAN ’01: CREATIVE EMPATHY

Anbinh Phan ’01 was born in a refugee camp in Malaysia after her parents fled Vietnam by boat during the exodus of the late ’70s. The family eventually settled in Torrance, Calif. After graduating from Pomona, Phan earned an M.P.A. from Princeton and a law degree from Georgetown, and now she is starting a social-justice venture revolving around stateless persons and human trafficking victims in Southeast Asia. Her work has spurred her to reflect on her family’s risky journey to America. In the photo, Phan holds a shapshot of herself with her mother at the refugee camp in Malaysia.

My parents worked really hard in Torrance. We lived modestly so that they could send money home to Vietnam. At Pomona, my whole experience made me think much more deeply about self-identity, Christian faith and civil rights. Having that multidisciplinary education helped me start to see things through numerous lenses.

I focused on international trade after graduating: I did a fellowship in Vietnam for eight months and worked at the U.S. Treasury for several years. I got interested in human rights, since a huge part of international trade revolves around labor, the supply chain and how products are manufactured.

In the summer after my second year of law school in 2009, I worked for [the human rights organizations] Global Centurion and Boat People S.O.S. in Southeast Asia, and met human trafficking survivors in shelters and asylums in Thailand, Vietnam and Malaysia. I only got glimpses of their lives, but they made a big impression on me, and I realized these people have aspirations like my family. They just want to create better futures for themselves.

During the trip I returned to Pulau Tengah, the Malaysian refugee camp I was born in, which was an amazing experience. To me it was this mythical place where my family had put so many hopes after surviving war and poverty. They were so brave to leave their country and have a child in the middle of the ocean. It wasn’t a coincidence that my name means “peace” in Vietnamese—that’s what my parents hoped for me on these shores.

When I came back to law school, I couldn’t get the experience out of my mind, and I started devoting my research to that region. Even though I’m American, I can relate as a member of the Vietnamese diaspora—I speak the language and understand the pressures and fears they face. It’s a natural empathy.

I feel privileged to be in America. I always wanted to pursue public service, because I didn’t want my family to work for all these things just so I could benefit individually. My ultimate dream is for these people I’m trying to help to gain some sense of optimism about their future. I’ve not seen the things I’m doing accomplish that yet, but I deeply hope that’s where we’ll be soon enough.

Recently, I presented at the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Cambodia. It was an opportunity to emphasize the challenges stateless people face—no access to education or social services, and a high vulnerability to labor and sex trafficking—as well as to advocate for a solution. As much as it was about legal rights, it was also a human story. It was fulfilling to share information to empathetic ears; the stories we chose to tell reflect who we are and what we hope for in the world.

New Book Looks into the Birth of Mirth

June 26, 2012 by Glenn Whipp Comments Off

If you’re reading James Thurber and Robert Benchley and composing comedic poetry at the tender age of 7, then writing a book that examines humor from every conceivable angle doesn’t feel like that much of a stretch. Indeed, when David Misch ’72 began putting together Funny: The Book three years ago, it felt like the next logical step in a four-decade career that has included stints as a comedic folk singer, stand-up comedian and writer for such shows as Mork and Mindy and Saturday Night Live.

Misch credits his days at Pomona for both the beginning of his life’s work and its latest chapter. During his senior year, Misch was goofing around, making up songs on guitar with some friends in his Clark dorm room.Their laughter prompted a concert booking at the Smudge Pot coffee house and a postgraduate career as a “professional funny folk singer,” an occupation that, Misch notes, “went out around the same time as ‘buggy whip maker.’”

Misch adapted, though, writing for sitcoms, selling a handful of screenplays and serving as a special consultant on The Muppets Take Manhattan. When it came to time reinvent himself once again, Misch thought about teaching and remembered a multidisciplinary course he took during his senior year at Pomona titled Freud, Marx and Contemporary Literature. “I remember my mind being blown by the way the class brought all these things together,” Misch says. “So I got the idea to study comedy from every conceivable angle—science, biology, history, philosophy and psychology—and not just its manifestations in movies and television, as it’s usually studied.”

As Misch dove into the research, a literary agent friend told him he should fashion a book out of the material. Funny: The Book stands as the greatly abridged version of two years of study, as well as something of a companion to the course, Funny: A Survey of American Comedy, he taught last fall at the University of Southern California. In it, the witty Misch surveys the history of humor, considers the scientific nature of laughter and, amid a fart joke or two, makes a convincing case for comedy to be taken seriously.

“You’re up against it when you have people like Woody Allen saying that comedy is frivolous and inferior to drama,” Misch says. “But in my study, I was unable to discern any difference in the properties of comedy and drama, nor any difference in their complexity. The only difference: one produces laughter, the other tears.”

Misch blames the Greeks—Aristotle and Plato—for the persistent idea that laughter is cruel and immoral and thus somehow shameful. He trots out his own heavy hitters, citing Carl Jung’s belief that frivolity makes life worth living and functions as a crucial aspect of what makes us human. Misch also loves the notion propagated by author Philip Pullman that laughter ranks as one of life’s greatest pleasures, a simple delight that people can summon at will. And, of course, there’s Norman Cousins, who believed a daily dose of the Marx Brothers, along with a lot of Vitamin C, helped him live another 36 years after doctors diagnosed him with heart disease. Scientific studies of the correlation between humor and health aren’t conclusive, Misch says, but there does appear to be evidence that laughter does help a little. “And a little is better than nothing,” Misch says.

But what’s humorously healing to Misch might be a source of irritation to someone else. And vice versa. Misch didn’t need to endure the quizzical stares of some of his USC students or the occasional wave of head-scratching he noticed while teaching a course in musical satire last spring at UCLA to know that comedy is totally subjective. For him, that’s just another aspect of humor that elevates it above drama as an art form. “That subjectivity gives comedy a mystery that drama lacks,” Misch says. “What makes something funny? After all the scientific dissection I do, it’s still a little mysterious why one sentence is funny and why another sentence, that’s almost identical save for one word or sometimes one piece of punctuation, isn’t. To me, there’s magic in that mystery.”

Everything Must Go!

June 13, 2012 by emae2021@pomona.edu Comments Off

Before moving on, Pomona’s Class of 2012 first had to move merchandise and shed accessories. So, for weeks before this year’s Commencement, the daily Student Digester turned into a swap meet laden with “SENIOR SALES!” We looked past the expected futons and floor lamps for the finer things, listed here with the original asking price:

• Tempur-Pedic pillow: $40
• Half-used 3.4-oz DKNY perfume: $10
• Top hat: $10
• Chin-up bar: $15
• Cocktail shaker: $5
• “The cutest toaster you’ll ever see”: $10
• Pioneer PL-530 Turntable: $120
• NFL Fever 2004 for Xbox: $9
• Ski goggles: $15
• Pair of sake cups: $8
• Mosquito net “that you can hang over your bed to make you feel like a princess”: $10

Professor’s Praise Launched Prolific Children’s Author

June 7, 2012 by Sneha Abraham Comments Off

Children’s author Barbara Brooks Wallace ’45 has racked up more than her share of awards and rave reviews in a career spanning five decades. And, at 89, she’s still at it, with the Cinderella-themed Diary of a Little Devil released in December and another book in her Miss Switch series coming in the fall.

But she hasn’t forgotten her shaky start. Wallace, who today lives in a retirement home in McLean, Va., credits her success to an initially-nerve-wracking encounter with her freshman-year English professor at Pomona College.

Wallace had always pleased her high school teachers. But at Pomona she came to realize she was prone to “flossy” overwriting and for the first time in her life, she was making C’s on papers. Then English Professor Charles C. Holmes called her into a meeting.

“He pushed my two essays across his desk and said, ‘There really isn’t much I can say to you.’ My heart nearly stopped because my immediate thought was that my writing was so bad, there was no hope for me,” Wallace says.

His next words stunned her: “If these were done by a professional writer,” Holmes said. “They’d be good enough for The New Yorker.”

Holmes went on to tell Wallace to continue taking English and writing classes—advice she heeded some years later. But first she transferred to UCLA, majored in international relations, got married and had a son. It was her sister Constance Brooks Schindehette ’43 who reminded Wallace of Professor Holmes’ advice.

Wallace enrolled in a creative writing course at Santa Monica City College, and eventually tried using her childhood in China as a setting for a fantasy children’s story—resulting in a book that Wallace says was terrible. “But that story hooked me on writing for children, so that’s what I’ve done ever since.”

Claudia, the tale of an 11-year-old girl overcoming the ups and downs of that age, was Wallace’s first published book.

She has earned acclaim ever since. Praised by the American Library Association, The New York Times and Kirkus Reviews, Wallace has been honored with two Edgar Allen Poe Awards from the Mystery Writers of America for The Twin in the Tavern and Sparrows in the Scullery. She also earned the NLAPW Children’s Book Award and International Youth Library “Best of the Best” for Claudia.

Her many works include Victorian-era mysteries, fantasy novels, a biography of her mother, her autobiography, picture books, teleplays and musicals. The Trouble with Miss Switch and Miss Switch to the Rescue were made into Saturday morning animated specials for ABC, both of which were the highest-rated films in the TV series.

Wallace’s latest book is Diary of a Little Devil, a Cinderella-themed story (“No handsome prince, but a happy ending nonetheless!”) of a young girl, Andy, whose widowed father remarries someone with twin daughters who—once they all return to their home in China—make life miserable for Andy.

Between shooting a YouTube video of her reading a chapter from Diary and preparing for the fall release of Miss Switch and the Vile Villains, this octogenarian is keeping at her keyboard. “What’s next for me is to go on writing one way or another,” she says. —Sneha Abraham

Students give vinyl records a spin at KSPC

April 23, 2012 by emae2021@pomona.edu Comments Off

Digital rules these days in commercial radio, but the turntables are still turning at KSPC (88.7 FM). Last Friday, the campus radio station held a “Vinyl 101” workshop to “encourage students who didn’t grow up with records to get to know” the medium, says station director Erica Tyron. “There are a lot of things that we have that were never re-issued digitally.”

While visitors hung out and played old records from the station’s still-extensive collection, Tyron noted that some students find working with LPs a tad intimidating because of the direct contact with the surface of the record: “People just get nervous that you’re going to break something.”

Not so for jazz deejay Nathan Schauer ’12, who likes records, in part, because they make it easy to play a particular part of a song. When Schauer was growing up, his dad sometimes played LPs, but “I never really knew how vinyl worked until I started here.” He is one of the roughly 30 percent of KSPC deejays who still make use of the vinyl collection. And with the medium’s recent comeback, the station is even seeing more new releases arrive in LP form these days.

Still, for student deejays the thrill is often found in thumbing through the well-worn album sleeves of yore. “It’s a lot of fun to just find something,” says Ella Schwalb ’14, who has an underground music show. “You don’t really know what to expect.”

Stray Thoughts: When Bad Things Happen

April 10, 2012 by Mark Wood Comments Off

It’s a famous truism that bad things happen to good people. What isn’t so clear, sometimes, is that bad things also happen to good institutions.

This thought came to me recently as I contemplated the black-on-black cover of the latest issue of the Penn State alumni magazine—about the terrible scandal that has rocked that university to its core—and thought about another, very painful situation closer to home: the work authorization dilemma that in recent months has left many here at Pomona feeling saddened, disillusioned or angry. (If you aren’t familiar with this situation, I suggest that you visit www.pomona.edu/work-documentation before reading on.) After a great deal of thought, we at PCM have decided not to try to cover these events hurriedly in this spring issue of the magazine, but to wait until the summer issue, which we plan to devote primarily to the issues surrounding immigration and borders here in the U.S. and around the world. However, as I was considering what I should do in this little introductory missive, my thoughts kept turning back to why bad things happen to good institutions.

Besides costing 17 longstanding Pomona employees their livelihoods, the chain of events unleashed by a complaint to the Board of Trustees last year has plunged us all into the midst of a divisive political issue, strained the College’s relationships with important segments of the College community, generated a range of conspiracy theories, threatened the College’s reputation for inclusivity, driven many to tears of sorrow or anger or frustration, and raised legal and moral questions to which there are no easy answers—or, at least, no answers that satisfy everyone. When must complaints be investigated? What do our immigration laws really require of us? Must we always obey those laws? Can anyone commit an entire institution to a path of civil disobedience? Who can we blame for the bad things that happen in our midst?

Few today take the Medieval view that bad things happen as a judgment from God. Still, when we hear about bad things happening to presumably good people, our sympathy is sometimes leavened with judgment. Lung cancer? Must have been a smoker. AIDS? Probably promiscuous. Auto accident? Careless driver. At heart, we may understand that sometimes bad things really do happen to people for no good reason, but it’s more comforting to think that they somehow invited it. It’s easier to sleep at night when you believe that character is synonymous with fate.

Maybe that’s why, when bad things happen to good institutions, we’re so quick to assume that maybe they weren’t quite as good as we thought. Or even that there was something sinister going on behind the scenes. An assumption of ill will simplifies matters. It makes it easier to believe that if we had been there making those decisions, things would have turned out differently. We would have been wiser, better, braver, more perceptive, more compassionate—more something.

It’s much less comfortable to imagine good, smart, caring, thoughtful people agonizing over intractable problems without the benefit of hindsight and making hard choices from a range of painful options, knowing full well that their actions will have a ripple of consequences only some of which they can predict but for which they will always be judged.

Memories of War

March 5, 2012 by Anna Miller '13 Comments Off

Students in Professor Tomás Summers Sandoval’s Latino Oral Histories class spent the fall semester interviewing Chicano Vietnam veterans as part of a project that will live on for posterity.

The histories will be added to the Veterans History Project at the Library of Congress, which compiles first-hand accounts from U.S. veterans so that future generations may “better understand the realities of war.”

The number of histories in the collection from Vietnam veterans is growing, but Summers Sandoval notes that only a small minority of those histories are from Chicanos. Contrast that with estimates that Chicanos, who often served on the front lines in Vietnam, accounted for a disproportionately high percentage of U.S. casualties in comparison to their proportion of the U.S. population.

To Summers Sandoval, who grew up in Southern California, the stories he’s collecting hit close to home—his father, uncle, and “pretty much every male I knew growing up” were Vietnam veterans. “I approach it as a historian, but it also has a very personal connection for me,” he says. “It’s an endeavor to retrieve and start to analyze what is part of larger [Chicano] history.”

The project involves recruiting volunteers, recording their oral interviews and compiling the interviews in a digital format to eventually be posted online. To find participants, Summers Sandoval and his students first targeted alumni networks of 1960s grad classes from East Los Angeles high schools, and have collected about 25 oral histories so far—in a year, he hopes to have 100.

“They’re not just interviews about Vietnam, they’re life stories,” says Summers Sandoval, assistant professor of history and Chicano/Latino studies. “There’s a strong sense of the entire process of surviving— adapting and learning to be a veteran of this war, learning to be one of the ones who survived, learning to live with post-traumatic stress disorder. It’s a culture of survival.”

The interview process isn’t always easy, dealing with subjects that can be hard to talk about, not to mention events that occurred 40 years in the past.

A Vietnamese American, Evyn Le Espiritu ’13 noted in her final reflection piece for the class that she had initially felt some wariness about how the veterans might view her. But her fears were not realized and the interviews were “intimate but not threatening.”

“I felt honored that the veterans shared their stories with me,” she wrote. “I was struck by their intimate association with death, by the fragile miracle of their survival, by the lasting effects of war on their psyche and well-being. I realized that there was a way to feel heartfelt respect and admiration for these veterans as individuals, without compromising my pacifist politics.”

Professor Summers Sandoval notes that after plenty of preparation, the students as a whole have been doing “very well.”

“It’s a very humbling thing to hear someone’s life story—I’m always very grateful that a stranger is willing to share that with another stranger,” says Summers Sandoval.

He has noticed a common thread among the veterans. “For a lot of them,” the professor says, “at times … it seems like they’ve found some kind of peace with the past.”

2012 – 1887 = 125

March 5, 2012 by David Oxtoby, President Comments Off

Founders Day 2012 will mark the 125th anniversary of Pomona College’s incorporation. Like all such milestones, this will be a moment for both celebration and reflection. The observance of Pomona College’s Quasquicentennial—the awkward but proper term I feel obliged to use just once before returning to the more agreeable 125th—will be focused around Founders Day in October. There will be a variety of events and activities on campus—performances, open houses, a campus-wide party—involving not only Pomona students, faculty, staff, alumni and parents, but also the College’s extended community in Claremont and beyond. But while the October event will be the focal point, other initiatives, beginning in coming months and extending into 2013, will commemorate our history, celebrate our present, and project our future. That the 125th falls during the College’s Campaign Pomona: Daring Minds is auspicious, allowing us to set our future goals in their proper context, as a continuation of the long trajectory of our history.

The celebration of anniversaries is a near-universal human activity, one that answers a deeply felt need to mark the rhythms of our collective lives. For institutions, as for families, anniversaries remind us of the commonality of past and future. This anniversary offers us an opportunity to rededicate ourselves to the principles upon which this institution was founded; to recognize the progress made over the past 125 years; and to think about our future—about how to build on the College’s extraordinary accomplishments in the most productive ways for the benefit of future generations of Pomona students and the wider communities they will serve.

You will hear more about this subject both from me and from others in the months to come as planning continues for celebrating this milestone in Pomona College history.

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