Articles Written By: emae2021@pomona.edu

Pomona in 47 Charts

November 14, 2012 by Elisabeth Fosslien '09 Comments Off

A mathematical economics major at Pomona and ad-agency analytics whiz in the real world, Elisabeth Fosslien ’09 spends her free time cooking up tart little pie charts on topics ranging from Chicago crime to getting a job to “14 ways an economist says I love you,” which drew praise from The Economist magazine, one of many nods she has earned for her minimalist musings. To no surprise, it was her online ode to her alma mater, “Pomona in 47 Charts,” that caught our eye. The facts, figures and feelings behind them are her own, derived from her perceptions of Pomona, but even if your data set is different, we think you’ll still find some laughs in her graphs.

D.B. and That Number

November 14, 2012 by Mark Kendall Comments Off

Don Bentley doesn’t want to talk about 47, the enduring numerical fixation the legendary math professor long ago placed in Pomona’s collective consciousness. It all started with a paradoxical proof Bentley put up on the chalk- board back in 1964, showing that all numbers are equal, which then morphed into all numbers equal 47—and spawned our endless, obsessive search for the magic number. But remember, Bentley doesn’t want to talk about that.

For my part, I don’t want to talk about math or statistics. So we’ve agreed to talk about people, and Bentley shows up for the interview with a banker’s box laden with old photo albums full of fresh-faced college kids burdened with ’70s sideburns. It was two of those kids in the box, Greg Johnson and John Irvine, both from the class of ’76, who piqued my curiosity about the noted statistician. In talking to them for another story, I noticed that after all these years, their beloved professor still seemed to hold a mystical, Sontag-like sway over them. So I set up an interview.

Bentley, who taught here from 1964 to 2001, turned out to be hard to pigeonhole. He started off at Stanford with plans to study religion but found firmer ground in math. In conversation, he references a slew of noted statisticians, but there also are plentiful mentions of beer and pizza. He waxes statistical at academic seminars and plays folk music on the guitar. He has fought his share of battles, calling himself a “thorn in the side” of the administration at times, and yet he also is an ordained minister.

The professor taught some of the Math Department’s toughest classes—such as linear algebra with differential equations—that weeded out some students and built confidence in those that passed. As he puts it, “The kids, if they could survive the curriculum, got out feeling wonderful about themselves.”

But Bentley hardly cut the figure of the hard-nosed mettle-tester. The emeritus professor recalls that he felt closer to the students than to his fellow faculty members. “It just is natural for me … because I’m immature maybe and I relate better to kids than I do to adults.”
He remembers how students came in and out of his family home at will, whipping up meals in the kitchen, washing their cars in the driveway. Once, he recalls, his bedroom door swung open at 5:30 a.m. as a crowd of students broke into singing “Happy Birthday.” “They had come in, they had decorated the living room, they had cooked breakfast and the dog didn’t even bark because they were just part of the family.”

That all-in-the-family attitude did create a dilemma for Bentley early on in his career. Bentley couldn’t figure out just what the students should call him. Mr. Bentley, Dr. Bentley, Professor Bentley—they all felt too stiff for a guy who considered his students to be his best friends on campus. Having them call him Don, on the other hand, didn’t feel quite right either. Somewhere along the way, “D.B.” caught on.

Me and D.B., we cover a lot of ground, a lot of memories and accomplishments. He points to his “close fellowship” with former students—and their accomplishments in fields as varied as teaching, law, medicine—as most significant to him as he looks back. “I really want to thank them for what they’ve done for me,” he says.

And then, well past an hour into our talk, Bentley lets loose a surprise. It turns out he’s not entirely done with 47. He’s says there’s more to the lore behind it, more details to clarify and lay out someday. He’d like to do a paper, with input from alumni who were there for the mathematic myth’s long-ago birth. But that’s sometime down the road, and, remember, we’re not going to talk about that now.

The Man with a Plan

November 14, 2012 by Paul Sterman '84 Comments Off

flat bronze plate. It reads: “Allen F. Hawley, 1893-1978.”

In 1949, when Allen Hawley, Class of 1916, was a fundraising administrator at Pomona College, he answered a local group’s request for biographical information on himself. In a letter, Hawley highlighted the pertinent details of his youth and his career.

“It’s not much of a life story,” he summarized, “but it’s a thrilling life to me.”

Not much of a life story? Consider: The man grew up on a turn-of-the-century California ranch, was expelled at least once from high school, graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Pomona, then attended the Harvard Graduate School of Business until dropping out to volunteer as an ambulance driver in France serving the wounded during World War I. After the war he worked in Hollywood as an assistant director at the Fox movie studio.

And we haven’t even covered the best part. Hawley returned to his alma mater in 1938, and his contributions over the next 24 years played a key role in the College’s rise. Launching what would later come to be known as the Pomona Plan, Hawley pioneered a game-changing vehicle in the world of educational fundraising. At the heart of what he hatched was this: a new kind of charitable-giving program in which the College, in essence, manages a donor’s money in return for a financial gift released to Pomona after the donor dies; the contributor earns a tax break and regular payments for the rest of his or her life.

So years later, when it came time to put Pomona’s new fundraising plan out into the world, Hawley knew from experience the best way to spread the message—especially to those outside the Pomona family. (He had been instructed by the College not to solicit alumni or parents for such financial gifts for fear of simply diverting away more traditional annual donations.)

How Hawley marketed the fundraising plan is another unique part of his legacy. He turned to newspaper advertising—something viewed at the time as almost sacrilegious in academia.

Consider Hawley’s life story in this context: When he toiled in Tinseltown, working on Western serials, he helped craft fictional vehicles—but the Pomona College story is a real one, and Hawley is a central figure in its telling.

Scholarly and Stylish

Those who knew Allen Hawley described him as a quiet and modest man. He had a distinguished manner and enjoyed col- lecting first-edition books. He also liked to look good. The fundraising whiz wore a natty suit and tie to work, and donned a hat—indeed, a Borsalino, the stylish Italian brand.

However, Hawley, who died in 1978 at the age of 85, didn’t fit a predictable profile. The dignified, scholarly man had a weakness for tobacco and a salty sense of humor. He was shy and intensely private (almost nothing is known of his personal relationships beyond the fact that he married a woman in 1922 and the union apparently ended in divorce), yet he thrived on cold calls to potential donors and reached out so attentively to members of the Pomona community that a good friend referred to him as the “Mother Hen” to students and alumni.

“As with many unusual men, different people could see different sides to him,” the late Pomona Philosophy Professor Fred Sontag once said of Hawley, whose last 10 years at Pomona (1952 to 1962) coincided with Sontag’s first 10.

A Pioneer’s Roots

The Pomona Plan pioneer grew up on a ranch in rural El Cajon near San Diego. He graduated from San Diego High School, but “not without an expulsion or two,” as he later recalled (though he never gave a reason for such disciplinary actions). After high school came an education of another kind: Hawley’s father required him to work on the family ranch, performing grueling tasks at the discretion of the ranch foreman. The experience provided great motivation, Hawley wrote nearly 40 years later:

“After a year of this fate I decided anything would be better than ranching, and certainly the offer of going away to college was inviting.”

So the young man enrolled at Pomona. (“Fortunately, the entrance requirements were not very high in those days.”) Though shy, Hawley was a leader, elected as Pomona’s student body president his senior year. After his war service and three-year stint in Hollywood, he went into the newspaper business, joining the advertising staff of William Randolph Hearst’s Los Angeles Examiner. The career move would prove critical to his later success at Pomona.

The Ad Man Flourishes

Hawley’s life story was chronicled by William B. Dunseth, who came to Pomona in 1959 to work for the fundraising maven. When Hawley retired in 1962, Dunseth became director of the Annuity and Life Income Program. For his 1994 book on his former boss, Dunseth interviewed many people who knew and worked with Hawley, including a former colleague at the Los Angeles Examiner. The man said Hawley had a real talent for the newspaper ad work, describing him as “a dynamic salesman” who wrote clever ads and had a knack for selling advertising space and nabbing new clients.

“I couldn’t resist using some of the [same] principles of advertising here as I did in the newspaper world,” Hawley said, according to Dunseth’s book.

It wouldn’t be easy, though. The idea of higher learning institutions advertising for financial contributions was viewed as unseemly. Thus, Hawley’s marketing method raised the hackles of the academic community, especially East Coast universities. (Dunseth wrote that a former fundraiser for just such a school told him, “It is uncouth for this little college out West to advertise for money.”)

Even Pomona’s “academicians resisted heartily” when Hawley initiated the newspaper concept, he recalled. Yet when the strategy proved lucrative, those objections suddenly didn’t seem so important.

“They melted when we started getting results,” Hawley said.

The Pomona Plan Emerges

Hawley came to Pomona in 1938 as the school’s new public relations director. In the mid-’40s, uncertain about student enrollment in the war’s aftermath, Pomona intensified fundraising efforts to cover potential deficits in the next few years. Hawley became its go-to guy.

For years, friends and neighbors had been asking Hawley investment questions. “Allen was well known in the little town of Claremont not only as a man of great financial acumen but of great financial integrity,” says Kent Warner ’66, former director of Pomona’s Annuity and Trust Office (now called Trusts and Estates). Warner worked for many years with Howard C. Metzler, who preceded Warner as director of Annuities and Trusts. Warner says Metzler passed on many affectionate stories about Hawley, including one recounting a time Hawley was walking down the streets of Claremont and two widows approached him. Turns out they wanted him to manage the inheritances their late husbands had left them.

With the new fundraising plan Hawley conceived in the mid-’40s, the College would in effect provide free money management for individuals in exchange for their philanthropic contribution. The beneficiaries received income for the rest of their lives, and then upon their deaths the financial gift was re- leased to the College. This kind of agreement provides donors with sizable tax deductions while allowing them to feel good about contributing money toward the future of young people.

These elements represented the core concept of the much-imitated Pomona Plan. (Dunseth points out that Hawley actually developed the program with three other men who worked at or with Pomona, including prominent Los Angeles attorney William B. Himrod, Class of 1908; however, Hawley was the day-to-day driving force behind the plan’s emergence.) In 1946, the College received approval of its financing concept from the Internal Revenue Service. The IRS ruled the plan was acceptable—and Hawley was off and running, free now to start offering the “Life Income Plan” to prospective donors.

Frank Minton, a national expert on charitable giving, says Pomona was the first college to develop this kind of plan, where the school acts as a trustee and the donor gains tax benefits and life income.

“They were the first out the door,” says Minton, who established the planned-giving program at the University of Washington and co-authored what is widely regarded as the bible in his field, Charitable Gift Annuities: The Complete Resource Manual.

Advertising in the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere, Hawley played up the tax benefits, knowing that would be a key appeal to the Journal’s financially-savvy readers. Drawing these people into the plan expanded the College’s donor base. As the Chronicle of Philanthropy put it in 1989: “Throughout its life, the so-called Pomona Plan has followed a highly unusual marketing strategy: trying, through newspaper advertisements, to turn wealthy strangers into friends of the college. The logic has been that Pomona can offer older people the chance to support a good cause and to get paid for doing so.”

The promotional campaign, as Professor Sontag noted, “reached people this little college in the orange belt of the California desert would otherwise never have touched.”

(By the early ’50s, Pomona was hearing from colleges requesting brochures and tips, and a 1953 Time Magazine article on the topic mentioned the College.)

Hawley felt very strongly about the writing of the ads. He wouldn’t let anyone else pen them and was meticulous about all manner of details, including grammar and punctuation, according to Dunseth’s book. His exacting standards could make him an intimidating colleague, added the author—apparently drawing on firsthand experience.

“A visit to his office to explain an action of which he didn’t approve or to be handed a letter for re-writing was not to be anticipated with enthusiasm. He was exceptionally polite and seldom displayed anger, but his ‘righteous coolness’ on those occasions didn’t make the experience a happy one.”

Pomona’s Prosperity

Ultimately, Hawley’s efforts led to many millions of dollars coming Pomona’s way over the years, money that helped erect campus buildings and pay for world-class teachers, among other benefits to the College.

The Pomona Plan became a model for deferred-giving programs, which are now the norm at most institutions of higher education. Not only colleges benefitted: Many different charitable organizations use a form of what Hawley started.

“In the 1980s, many other charities adopted Allen Hawley’s outline, and now every charity you hear advertising or soliciting is benefitting from his inspiration,” says Robin Trozpek, the current director of the Pomona Plan.

Adds Minton: “Pomona had a lot of influence beyond its campus.”

Just how much has the Pomona Plan meant to Pomona? Financial figures tell part of the story. Since the fundraising plan was kicked off in the ’40s, Pomona has amassed a whopping $216 million in life-income agreements, and more than $172 million of those deferred funds have been released to the College, according to statistics from the Trusts and Estates Office. There’s another factor in the equation as well: the amount Pomona currently manages on behalf of beneficiaries.It’s about $140 million, which is significantly higher than the sum of $216 million minus $172 million; the number reflects how the assets on hand have appreciated.

Of course, the Pomona Plan has grown more sophisticated and elaborate since Hawley’s time. A Forbes magazine article this summer touted Pomona’s offerings: “Its payouts are so generous that half of the annuities it sells are to non-alumni.” The plan now has a number of different variations, and Howard Metzler, longtime director who died in 2012, is credited with playing a big role in its progress.

Still, Hawley’s lessons and methods carried on with his successors. At the top of the list: “The personal visit was the heart and soul of Hawley’s marketing program,” according to Kent Warner.

Hawley, who was Pomona’s vice president of development his last eight years working at the school, knew the best way to reach a potential donor was through conversation, in person. One reason is that it played to his strong suit—Hawley was a very persuasive salesman, say those who knew him. But selling Pomona was never about pitching product for him. He genuinely loved the school. In fact, Hawley maintained the primary goal of his ads was getting readers to visit the Pomona campus because he knew the school would sell itself.

After his death—in a nursing home in Hemet, Calif.—Allen Hawley was buried in Oak Park Cemetery in Claremont. The only marker at the gravesite, according to Dunseth, is a simple, flat bronze plate. It reads: “Allen F. Hawley, 1893-1978.” The bare-bones wording is in stark contrast to the streams of praise uttered about Hawley over the years. His influence on the enduring success of Pomona is profound.

Leave it to Fred Sontag, the longest-serving faculty member in Pomona’s history, to put Hawley’s achievements in the proper philosophical perspective. After Hawley died, Sontag paid tribute to his former colleague at a meeting of the Pomona faculty.

“As a teacher, I am bound to affirm that good colleges are made of teachers and talented students,” said Sontag, who taught in Pomona’s Philosophy Department from 1952 to 2009. “As a human being, I know in fact that all great colleges are built on the quantities of money needed to support what is exceptional.

“In that sense, Allen Hawley had as much or more to do with what Pomona is today as any faculty member. It is hard to exaggerate what he did to secure the college we currently enjoy.”

How to Take Command of the ROTC

November 14, 2012 by emae2021@pomona.edu Comments Off

Torbjorg “Tori” Holtestaul ’13 is this year’s cadet battalion commander for the Army ROTC Battalion based at neighboring Claremont McKenna College. In this top student role, Holtestaul, a double major in Spanish and biology, helps oversee training for new cadets at three nearby schools. Though she now loves the program, Cadet Holtestaul wasn’t exactly set on ROTC from the start. Follow her path:

1) Grow up in Denver’s suburbia. Always dream of becoming a doctor. Work hard and get good grades. Fit in well at your 4,000-student high school. Seek out a small college with science strength to put you on the path to med school.

2) Go visit your aunt in Southern California to check out schools. Hunker down at Barnes & Noble with your mom and pour over college guides. Like what you read about Pomona. Come to campus, dig the tour and fall in love with the place.

3) Get in. Then get a financial reality check from your folks. Brush aside your Navy-veteran dad’s talk about looking into ROTC for the scholarships. Realize the deadline for making a final commitment to Pomona is drawing near. Finally pick up the phone and call the Claremont ROTC.

4) Struggle at first to get in step. Feel awkward wearing your uniform on campus. Start practicing missions and battle drills. Begin to hit your stride.

5) Get asked to attend the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. Find a sense of satisfaction working with Columbian cadets. Go on to airborne training school. Feel terrified about having to parachute from a plane. Do it anyway.

6) Spend junior year working closely with the cadets in your class group. Bond. Devote 30 hours per week to ROTC on top of your school work. Help to train the freshman and sophomore cadets. Get excellent marks at assessment camp held at the end of junior year.

7) Accept the battalion commander role for your senior year. Welcome the new cadets. Help lead training in everything from navigation to first aid. As graduation nears, set your sights on medical school, residency and then becoming an Army doctor.

Bulletin Board

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

Alumni Weekend May 2–5, 2013

What do you call 1,500 Sagehens flocking together for four days of revelry? Alumni Weekend! Please make your calendars for May 2–5, 2013—especially class years ending in ’3 or ’8. This is Pomona’s 125th anniversary year, so we will be celebrating our shared history while looking ahead to the future. Start on Thursday evening by dining with current students. Attend classes, “Daring Minds” lectures, and academic department open houses on Friday. Enjoy the Parade of Classes, Wash Party and your class reunion dinner on Saturday. Sip champagne in the beauty of the Richardson Garden on Sunday. For more details, visit www.pomona.edu/alumniweekend.

Travel Study:

Galapagos Cruise With Professor of Biology and Associate Dean Jonathan Wright August 3–12, 2013 Join Professor Jonathan Wright on his third trip to the Galapagos with Pomona travelers. You will visit a place where animals live without fear of humans and enjoy close en- counters with giant tortoises, sea lions, marine, land iguanas and Darwin’s finches. You will also be joined by a Lindblad-National Geographic certified photo instructor.

Coming in 2014:

Walking Tour of Sicily with History Professor Ken Wolf

Land of the Ice Bears/Arctic Svalbard with Biology Professor Nina Karnovsky

For more information about these or any of our other trips, please contact the Pomona College Alumni Office at (909) 621-8110 or alumni@pomona.edu.

Reflecting on Change

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

Susanne Garvey ’74 came to Pomona at the inspiration of her grandmother, Madeline Willard Garvey, Class of 1911, who spoke with awe of the atmosphere of cooperation and commitment to learning.

Susanne wanted those things, too. At Pomona, she embraced the life of the mind, engaging in those deep late-night conversations, and finding “just the right mix of serious study and social life.” She was an English major—Phi Beta Kappa and Mortar Board—who had many friends in the sciences. She served as arts and culture editor for The Student Life, and also took modern dance classes from Professor Jeannette Hypes, performing several times in her dance troupe. She soaked up everything she could from the small liberal arts college atmosphere.

Then came senior year. Her first semester, spent studying abroad in England, was amazing. Coming back to Pomona for the final semester, though, was a letdown, with the campus now seeming too cloistered at a time before Pomona of- fered the breadth of summer research, community service and internship

So, after a year back home in Menlo Park, Calif., working at an antiquarian bookstore, she was off to earn her master’s at the University of Virginia. Garvey was part of the small percentage of master’s students accepted to stay on and pursue a Ph.D.; but when it came to dissertation time, she realized she was going to have to focus on something very narrow. She decided against that path.

Garvey did remain in the realm of education, though. Her next stop was the U.K., where she spent a year organ- izing a college-level semester abroad program—the very program she had participated in as a Pomona student. Then, Garvey moved to Washington, D.C., where she worked for a semester-in-Washington program before becoming director of development for MATHCOUNTS and National Engineers Week, STEM programs serving elementary and secondary school students across the U.S.

For the last two decades, Garvey has been director of external affairs for the D.C.-based Carnegie Institution for Science. Part of her work takes her to the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, which have historic ties to the Mount Wilson Observatory—and that connection brought her back into contact with Pomona nearly a decade ago.

Carnegie astronomers from Pasadena were invited to give guest seminars at Pomona for advanced astrophysics classes. That led to Pomona and Harvey Mudd students doing internships working with Carnegie’s astronomers. And that, in turn, led Garvey to meet three Pomona student interns.

“They were everything that I remembered that was good about Pomona,” Garvey says. “They were smart … relaxed and interesting. I thought ‘what an amazing place Pomona still must be to produce students like these.’”

When Garvey was invited to serve on the alumni council a few years later, she readily accepted. She didn’t expect to become president. “I don’t have an agenda,” she says, though upon further thought, she adds, “I do have a theme— English majors have themes— ‘Reflecting on Change.’”

Garvey notes that before she joined the alumni council, she hadn’t been back to Pomona in decades, and she was impressed with all the changes in terms of opportunities for internships, research and travel, as well as the physical improve- ments to the campus. “I just felt that everything was better,” says Garvey, who, in a sense, is getting an extended re-do of that last semester of senior year.

The Fixer

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

Maintenance Shop Supervisor Orlando Gonzalez is a hands-on kind of guy, working alongside his five-person crew on everything from unclogging shower drains to replacing shingles. But it’s his mind and his memory that are key to keeping the campus in tip-top shape.

While work orders come in through an online ticketing system, Gonzalez’ head holds another crucial data center. Growing up with dyslexia, he wasn’t big on writing, so he learned to remember things. “When I stroll the campus,” says Gonzalez, “there’s always flashbacks of what things need to get done, things to go back and check on.”

He knows there’s old furniture stored in such-and-such room, where the plumbing shut-offs are and where not to dig. Everybody, it seems, has his cell phone number, and weekend calls are part of the routine. “I have a lot of information about this campus,” says Gonzalez. “I’ve been in areas where people never go.”

He and his team work from the Gibson Residence Hall’s basement, where the hallway walls of their fix-it lair are lined with the detailed floor plans of campus buildings, all the better for dealing with anywhere from 20 to 40 work orders daily: “We get one done and there’s another just right after.”

Friday afternoon, when other workers might be winding down, is when those get-it-off-the-list work orders flow in fastest. Even summer is no vacation: they bring in extra workers to sweep through every dorm room and make repairs that can’t be done during school. They do, however, get together for a bonding lunchtime barbecue every few weeks.

“Our thing we have here, I think, is special,” says Mike Binney, a generalist on the crew for five years. “We get along, we have an understanding of what each other does—and respect.”

Gonzalez is always looking for a better way. For a time, the College was paying $800 a pop (ouch) to replace damaged security card readers; he worked out a method to only spend $100 to replace just a part.

He has worked at the College since 1997, first as an em- ployee of the central consortium, and then hired by Pomona. The maintenance team includes a plumber, an electrician, a boiler technician and two generalists, but nobody sticks to a single field of work—including Gonzalez. As Binney puts it: “I could be working on a sewer line and if I need help, he’ll jump down there and work with me.”

Still, Gonzalez and crew can’t do it all, not on a campus with 63 buildings, and so he also oversees the work of various contractors, from painters to gutter cleaners. They’d better do it right. If a contractor is getting called in for a repair that’s been done before, he’s going to recall it and go back to check his paper stack of work orders he keeps for the last 10 years. “We need stuff fixed,” Gonzalez says.

My Pen Pal, John Cage

November 13, 2012 by Kevin J.H. Dettmar Comments Off

When I think back on it—or look back, since I’ve of course saved both sides of the correspondence—the sheer temerity of the thing surprises and embarrasses me. I was a Ph.D. student at UCLA, two months from finishing my degree; he was, at age 77, nothing less than the great granddaddy of the American avant-garde. And yet I wrote him; and stranger still, he answered.

“He,” of course, was John Cage. I first encountered his work while writing a dissertation about the Irish novelist James Joyce. Joyce studies, or so it seemed to me at the time, was stuck in a pretty boring rut—a situation I felt jejunely confident my dissertation would soon remedy. And as I read around looking for genuinely new and innovative thinking about Joyce, I was surprised to find it in the work of Cage. While not a “literary” writer (though the author of several important books, including Silence [1961]), Cage was an inveterate, and more importantly an irreverent, reader. He stood so far outside the system he seemed not to know its rules; his natural curiosity constantly bent and broke them. He mostly wrote not about Joyce (or Thoreau, Stein and other favorites), but through them: he treated their texts as found objects (“readymades,” his friend Marcel Duchamp would have called them), and subjected them to “chance operations”—throwing the dice, casting the I Ching (the Chinese Book of Changes), or in his later years, processing texts through randomizing computer programs. In so doing, he estranged these texts from their writers as from themselves, rendering them new and freshly revelatory in the process. (A group of Pomona students will be performing one of Cage’s Joyce-derived texts, Muoyce [1982], on campus this spring.)

I wrote Cage asking him to contribute to a collection of scholarly essays I was editing which sought to revisit the impact and reputation of the literary avant-garde of the early 20th century. He wrote back immediately. My letter was sent April 23, 1990; his reply was written four days later. Mine was word processed and printed out on the then-exotic laser printer, rather like pages of that dissertation; his, almost calligraphic, was inscribed in a scratchy hand, on a peculiar piece of (im)personal stationery called the Note-O-Gram®—a triplicate form using carbon paper, bearing his name and address in Gothic Copperplate across the top. John (as he signed himself after the first letter) followed the directions printed at the bottom of the form precisely—keeping the yellow copy, tearing out the carbons, and sending the white (original) and pink (second carbon) to me. I was meant to reply on the white & return it to John, keeping the pink; but since he’d flowed out of the “Message” column and over into my “Reply” column … I just mailed back another laser-printed letter.

Shockingly (!), John found himself with too many commitments to be able to contribute to my project: “I am busy with music and graphic work, prints, drawings, watercolors.” But he never made me feel foolish for having asked. What’s more, he asked for my help with his work—“a large work (music) connecting Zurich & Joyce” for the 1991 James Joyce/John Cage festival in Zurich.

His were short letters—short, and sometimes strikingly beautiful. Reading the opening sentences of that first letter still makes my heart stop: “I would very much enjoy talking with you. Conversa- tion is so rare.” Imagine writing to John Lennon and getting that in reply: Cage was my Lennon (who shared his fascination with Joyce—Lennon was an inaugural subscriber to the James Joyce Quarterly). In that first letter, John invited me to visit him in New York; too shy, I quietly demurred, while cherishing the hope that someday I’d screw up the courage. Two years later he was gone.

The leitmotif in the three letters I received from Cage was, quite simply, generosity. Thank you for your letter and articles which I enjoyed,” he wrote on May 16. (Looking back 22 years later, I’m more than a little horrified to be reminded I’d sent him my graduate school publications.) Anyone with even a passing acquaintance with Cage testifies to this quality: no American artist of the 20th century was more gracious toward those upon whom his work had made such a profound impression.

“Our intention,” Cage wrote in Silence, “is to affirm this life, not to bring order out of a chaos or to suggest improvements in creation, but simply to wake up to the very life we’re living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and one’s desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord.” Most of the photographs of Cage—and a greater percentage, the longer he was with us— capture him somewhere between an impish grin and a tremendous laugh. That’s not the picture you’d necessarily imagine when encountering his often-difficult art: but that’s the man I was privileged to get to know, just a little, through a flurry of Note-O-Grams® in the summer of 1990.

Kevin J.H. Dettmar is the W.M. Keck Professor of English at Pomona College.

John Cage Centenary:

Born in 1912, composer John Cage ’32 pushed the boundaries of music, experimenting with sound, environment and audience perception. The son of an inventor, his work also influ- enced painting, dance, performance art and poetry. In 1930, after two years at Pomona, Cage left for Europe. Throughout the year the College will join the centenary celebration of his birth.

The Politics of Hunger

November 13, 2012 by Mary Marvin Comments Off

In today’s class session of The Global Politics of Food and Agriculture, the discussion focuses on Joel Berg’s book, All You Can Eat, about hunger in America. The U.S. Department of Agriculture recently estimated that 48.8 million peo- ple, or about 14.5 percent of all house- holds, reported not having enough food on one or more days in the previous month. “Those numbers are sobering,” says Professor Heather Williams. “One in six households. That’s high enough for me to know someone who is hungry—someone at my church, someone who works with me, maybe someone in my neighborhood who puts on a good face but is really struggling.”

Williams: I want to talk about Berg’s policy arguments, which are controversial. He says we should consolidate all federal food programs into one efficient entity, have a universal school breakfast, reward states to reduce hunger; allow nonprofits to compete for federal funds; give recipients more choice, provide additional services such as job training. What do you think?

Allie: I’m convinced. I’ve read about these hunger statistics, and am now thinking anyone and everyone should have a breakfast program.

Williams: Berg wants breakfast available to all kids. You don’t have to apply for it or be marked as the kid who is so poor his parents can’t give him breakfast. No judgment. Breakfast food is pretty cheap. The bang for the buck is that any kid who hasn’t come to school with a meal in their belly isn’t going to be missing out on what is being taught in the morning because they’re hungry.

Maya: These policies seem like retroactive policies. If you were to pull back one more step and see why these people can’t access any types of food; why they don’t have jobs. What is the bigger picture? Every week we’ve talked about a vulnerable group of people who are abused or mistreated or lack nutrition or something else, and it all seems to come back to the general structure of capitalism.

Williams: To be fair to Berg, he’d be the first to say, “Amen, sister”— I totally agree with that. This is very much bound up with distributive politics. You need to have corporations called out on their big public Thanksgiving food drive when they’re paying their own employees below a living wage. He couldn’t agree more with you that food insecurity is bound up in complicated ways with inequality.

Monica: What I really liked about reading this book is that there is a solution, a concrete solution of what we can be doing to cut the food insecurity number to a thirtieth. Right now, when people are hungry, we’re talking about what government policies need to be fixed, because those are the mechanisms that are holding this society together. There are a lot of really plausible things that could be done.

Learning by Design

November 13, 2012 by Mary Marvin Comments Off

Sydney Dyson ’14 considered a math major until a drawing class during freshman year led her in a different direction. Now a studio art major and religious studies minor, Dyson helps run the College’s student art gallery in the Smith Campus Center and works in the theatre costume shop. Last summer she was awarded a Summer Experience in the Arts grant as part of the Mellon Foundation Elemental Arts Initiative.

FROM HOBBY TO COLLEGE MAJOR
“Both my mom and grandmother are artistic and had a big influence on me when I was growing up. In Chicago, I did some drawing and painting as a hobby, but I wasn’t that serious about it and didn’t consider art as a career until I
started taking drawing classes from Mercedes Teixedo in my freshman year. She’s great. I’m also interested in sewing and, at the end of last semester, Mercedes took me to the fashion district, which was really amazing.”

INSPIRATION ACROSS DISCIPLINES
“One class that really influenced my thinking about art was History of Africa. Sidney Lemelle gave a lecture about how for a long time, there weren’t words or concepts of art in many African languages, and it’s still the case today for some. Europeans would take sculptures and relics that had been used in ceremonies in Africa—and had no real purpose after that—and display them in museums as art objects. When I go to study abroad next semester in Cape Town, I want to learn more about how that idea has affected African schooling of fine art, which is essentially a Western construct.”

THRIFTY TRANSFORMATIONS

“My Summer Experience in the Arts project was called ‘Thrifty Transformations.’ I looked into the clothing industry and how clothing moves from point of manufacture to resale to being discarded, as well as issues of labor and sweatshops and the environment. I also inter- viewed owners of small thrift shops and consignment stores to get their perspective from the business and creative side. Finally I took items from four people’s wardrobes and repurposed them into something new and functional.”

IDEAS MADE REAL

“I was able to bring certain ideas to life this summer that have always and have only been ideas, and it felt amazing to see them materialize. Details and patterns are what draw me to art most, and I like to carry that into whatever medium I am using whether it is sewing, drawing, or experimenting with photography, which is where my interest in abstraction comes into play.”

NOT YOUR STEREOTYPICAL “STARVING ARTIST”

“My dad told me ‘you’re going to have to deal with the choices you make, and if you want to be in the arts, just do it.’ I don’t want to be the stereotype of a starving artist, so I’ve worked out a plan for the future. I want to combine my interests in art and business and someday have my own clothing line, café/store, and a gallery that provides space for other artists and musicians. I’d also like to open a youth center to give more young people a chance to experience the arts. I don’t know how all my plans will work out, but I do know that being at a liberal arts college has helped me think about ways to weave all my interests together.”

SIDEBAR:

SUPPORTED BY THE ELEMENTAL ARTS INITIATIVE

This four-year initiative, funded by a $600,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, is a multi-pronged effort to enliven Pomona’s arts programming and foster collaboration across disciplines. The initiative focuses on a different element each year; the first year’s theme was water, this year’s is earth. Programming last year included an environmental analysis symposium on local water issues, original music and theatre productions, and the Summer Arts Experience, which supported six student art projects.

«‹86 878889 90 ›»