Blog Articles

Bookmarks Spring 2017

The Adulterous MuseThe Adulterous Muse
Maud Gonne, Lucien Millevoye and W.B. Yeats
Noted biographer Adrian Frazier ’71 explores the life of one of Ireland’s most romanticized figures, Maud Gonne, the charismatic but unfaithful inspiration for W.B. Yeats’s love poetry, who was also a leading figure in the Irish republican movement.

 

 

 

 

 


Daubigny, Monet, Van GoghDaubigny, Monet, Van Gogh
Impressions of Landscape
Lynne Ambrosini ’75, chief curator at the Taft Museum of Art in Cincinnati, was a lead contributor to this beautifully printed book on the interrelationships between the works of these three major artists.

 

 

 

 

 


Candy GirlCandy Girl
How I Gave Up Sugar and Created a Sweeter Life Between Meals
In her part-memoir, part-how-to book, Jill Kelly ’68 relates how she overcame her longtime addiction to food, and in particular, to sugar.

 

 

 

 

 


The Absence of EvelynThe Absence of Evelyn
Jackie Townsend ’87, the award-winning author of Imperfect Pairings, returns with a haunting drama about love, loss and identity that ranges from a palazzo in Rome to northern Vietnam, as four people bound together by the various incarnations of love pursue the strands of an unraveling family secret.

 

 

 

 

 


Perils and Promises of TechnologyPerils and Promises of Technology
In this collection of essays, psychologist David Ruben ’69 examines his own relationship to technology and considers some of the key questions about the future of computer-age humanity.

 

 

 

 

 

 


American EnlightenmentsAmerican Enlightenments
Pursuing Happiness in the Age of Reason
In her groundbreaking new book, Caroline Winterer ’88, a professor of humanities at Stanford University, explores the national mythology surrounding the American Enlightenment, tracing the complex interconnections between America and Europe that gave it birth.

 

 

 

 

 


Southern California Mountain CountrySouthern California Mountain Country
Places John Muir Walked and Places He Would Have Loved to Know
Nature photographer Glenn Pascall ’64 combines his photos of California mountain landscapes with quotes from noted California naturalist John Muir.

 

 

 

 

 


Laryngeal Physiology for the Surgeon and Clinician Laryngeal Physiology for the Surgeon and Clinician
(Second Edition)
Surgeon Clarence Sasaki ’62 updates his classic text on the functioning of the larynx and the management of diseases that strike that complex organ.

 

 

 

Cecil 3.0

Cecil 2.0 and Cecil 3.0There’s a new Cecil in town. Since he’s at least the third in a direct line of Sagehen costume evolution, let’s call him Cecil 3.0.

The old mascot costume—Cecil 2.0—familiar to generations of Sagehens for its round head and dangling ribbon of tongue, has been chirping around campus since 1997 and, after a couple of decades of hard use and washings, was seriously starting to crack, tear and molt. (Not to mention the accumulated—ahem—aroma of years of sweaty occupants that wearers had to cope with when they put on the head.)

Senior Associate Dean of Campus Life Frank Bedoya, in whose closet Cecil 2.0 resided for many years, still has the head of what may have been the original Cecil—call him Cecil 1.0. We were unable to determine when or by whom that Cecil was designed and built, but Bedoya says by the 1990s it was falling apart. “Bill Almquist ’98 was instrumental in coming up with the new design, which we had made,” he says.

Over the years, Bedoya not only housed Cecil 2.0—quite often he was Cecil. He also worked with generations of Pomona students who also donned the costume to bring Cecil to life for some campus event.

Which brings us to 2017. Since the company that created Cecil 2.0 was no longer in business, there was no question of refurbishing the old costume, so the Pomona-Pitzer Athletic Program and Pomona’s Stewardship Office took the lead to create a new Cecil—or should I say Cecils? Due to growing demand, the order was placed not for one costume, but for two.

Cecil 3.0 and his twin (whom we might call Cecil 3.1)—designed and built by ProMo Costumes of Marion, Ohio, based on design concepts provided by the College—are taller, more athletic and a bit more modern-looking than their predecessor. They’re also a bit better dressed—able to choose between a basketball jersey, a football jersey and a snazzy button-up with blue and orange flowers.

They also come with a ventilating fan inside the head and an ice-vest to keep the wearer cool under all that heavy velour and padding, even while dancing inside a hot gymnasium. And for now, at least, inside the head, there’s that luxurious new-mascot smell.

Spaceships and Laundry

What do a 3D space game, an English-Morse code translation app and an app that monitors the machines in a dormitory laundry have in common? They were all among the award-winning entries created in a single night of furious work during the 10th Semi-annual 5C Hackathon, held at Pomona in November.

Billed as a collaborative night filled with “awesome swag, food and mentorship,” the fall 2016 Hackathon covered a span of 12 hours, from 8 p.m. to 8 a.m. the following day, during which student competitors worked in groups to come up with novel ideas and put them into action.

Ziqi Xiong ’17, a member of the seven-person team that created Laundry Master, which took second place in the advanced group, said the original idea for an app to let users know when laundry machines were available came from the group’s only first-year student, Sophia Richards ’20. “We found it very cool because it would involve both hardware and software,” says Xiong. Kent Shikama ’18, another member of the team, said he enjoyed the process of “thinking of ways to overcome constraints and executing them.” He cited three memorable hours in the laundry room of Walker Hall, experimenting with an empty dryer and a seismic sensor.

Unlike Xiong and Shikama, two good friends and fellow computer science majors who had partnered in several previous Hackathons, Sonia Grunwald ’18 and Peter Cowal ’19, who took top honors for best design, had never worked together before. “Two days or so before the event I was standing around in the CS lab complaining that I really wanted to do Hackathon and make some simple game with the 3D models I design for fun,” Grunwald said. “Peter happened to be working in the room and heard me. He said that sounded like a fun idea.” The two-person team was formed, and the result was their winning 3D space game, titled “Tiny Forever.”

The Full Fulbright

Pomona College is the No. 2 producer of Fulbright recipients in the nation among all four-year undergraduate institutions, tying for the position with neighboring Pitzer College. For 2016–17, there were 15 Pomona students who garnered Fulbrights. In the previous award year, 14 Pomona students received the coveted awards, and the College was ranked sixth. This year, Smith College was No. 1 on the list. Among this year’s Sagehen projects were a Silk Road journey to study the syncretism of Sino-Islamic identity in China; epidemiological research at the Pasteur Institute’s Enteric Bacterial Pathogens Unit in Paris, France; and teaching positions in Indonesia, Vietnam and Colombia.

 

Looking Back

50 YEARS AGO

Pomona’s Marine Laboratory, 1913–43

Pomona’s Marine Laboratory, 1913–43

Marine Zoology Program Ends

Pomona’s summer marine zoology program, which dated back, with a few interruptions, to the early part of the 1900s, ended in 1967. From 1913 until 1943, it took place in a College-owned marine biology laboratory in Laguna Beach. After the facility was sold, it continued as a six-week summer program at a rented facility, Caltech’s Kerckhoff Marine Lab in Corona del Mar, until 1967.

 

75 YEARS AGO

Escaping Internment

In April 1942, just days before all Japanese Americans in the Claremont area were due to be interned, President E. Wilson Lyon arranged with President Ernest Wilkins of Oberlin College in Ohio for Pomona junior Itsue “Sue” Hisanaga ‘43 to transfer there. The next day, President Lyon, Dean of Men William Nicholl and a crowd of Pomona students accompanied her and her brother, Kazuo “Casey” Hisanaga ‘42—who would be allowed to graduate in May despite his April departure—to the train station, where the College band played for them. “Everybody cried,” one student later told Dean of Women Jessie Gibson. After completing her work at Oberlin, Sue was awarded her degree from Pomona in absentia during Oberlin’s commencement. (See “Farewell to Pomona” on page 35.)

 

100 YEARS AGO

The Cosmopolitan Club

The year 1917 saw the first appearance of the Cosmopolitan Club, a college organization created to help grow the number of students from beyond Southern California. Membership in the club was restricted to students who were from Northern California or out of state. Club members were given literature about the College to distribute to friends, in an effort to “broaden the local atmosphere and bring in students with new ideas and new and different viewpoints.”

For more tidbits of Pomona College history, go to pomona.edu/timeline.

Slow Art

Slow art isn’t a collection of aesthetic objects, as you might suppose; rather, it names a dynamic interaction between observer and observed. Artists can create the conditions for slow looking—think of James Turrell ’65 Skyspaces like Pomona’s “Dividing the Light.” But what about viewers? How can we do our share?

In a given year, more Americans visit art museums than attend any one professional sporting event. They want and expect to take pleasure, learn and share positive experiences with each other and perhaps with their children. Too often the result is otherwise. Despite massive arts education programs, many visitors still arrive at a museum feeling confused or disadvantaged about how to navigate the place—where to go first, what to look at in any given gallery, how to connect with what they find. (There is a particular disconnect for people 40 and under, on whom museums will increasingly rely for support.) As a Jeffersonian populist, I believe that everyone who passes through a gallery ought to feel enfranchised. Everybody, I believe, can have meaningful, maybe even transforming experiences looking at artworks. Whether or not we possess any particular talent, training, art education or technical vocabulary, we all bring the sole necessary requirements: a set of eyes and lived experience. The playing field is level. But how to look is not self-evident.

How? My answer will come as no surprise: pacing can make a world of difference. Magic may happen when you give yourself over to the process and attune yourself to the artwork, listen to what it asks from you. “Notice how with two or three lines I’ve made this thatched roof,” says a Rembrandt drawing. “Look at how the shadows under the plane trees turn purple,” says a Van Gogh landscape. Give a painting time to reveal itself, I’ve said, and it turns into a moving picture—the experience can be that eye-opening. Over time, you will perceive more and more elements of the image, things that you literally never saw before. However closely you attend, you will never absorb an object’s every visual detail or nuance. There will always remain more to see. In fact, this inexhaustibility is the sign of art itself.

How, then, to slow down? There are many possibilities, old-fashioned (docent tours, audio guides) and newfangled (smartphone apps, iPads on gallery walls, online learning sources like the Khan Academy). The scores of museum-goers who use them testify to a widespread need for guidance. Each of these options may work. Here, I limit my suggestions to rugged individuals, unwired visitors who follow neither audio tour nor app. Or better, take advantage of any external aid—rent an audio tour because you know nothing about Mughal art—but take time also to shut off the devices and linger.

1 / Believe that you already come equipped with everything you need—those eyes and that life experience. Trust that something surprising can come of the encounter, or simply that the experience might be fun.

2 / Don’t go alone. In another’s company you’ll have more stamina and notice more. (More than three people looking together may prove too many.) Best is a viewing partner who is open-minded, prepared to be patient, receptive to being taken aback. Also, somebody you feel free to disagree with. “Opposition,” said William Blake, “is true friendship.” Some of my best experiences have come out of seeing things differently from my companion.

3 / Remember that museums are like libraries. Why do people assume that they need to look at everything on display in a gallery when they would never pull every book off a shelf? Be selective. Once I interviewed the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s longtime director, Philippe de Montebello. I asked him about navigating art spaces. “My wife loves going to museums with me because I tell her: ‘In this room, we will look at X and Z.’” “If we happen not to be your spouse?” I asked. “Head first to the museum shop. The postcards will tell you which works the place prizes most highly. Second, say you’re in a gallery with many objects clustered together and another given its own vitrine. Choose the latter. Finally, whatever the guards say, you have to get up close.” I would add: start by scanning the room to see if anything calls out to you. Don’t even think about pausing before every object. One or two items in a gallery will be enough or more than enough. Don’t worry if your pick is not among the postcards; trust your taste.

4 / Grant your chosen object time—how much is tricky, I acknow­ledge. If, after a spell, nothing clicks, move on. This is a no-fault game. You are nobody’s student; there are no should’s. Eventually you and your companion will find something that you agree is intriguing, striking, ravishing, perplexing, disturbingly unfamiliar—what that thing is hardly matters.

5 / Now let yourself go. Get close, back up, shift from side to side, squint. Notice the surround: does the installation lighting create hot or dark spots unrelated to the artwork? Let yourself wonder about what might seem trivial. Why do Cézanne’s tables tilt up? Why do mountains look stylized in medieval depictions of deserts? What is that strange detail on the curving side of a glass vase, in a still lifepainting of flowers? Might it be light reflected from a four-paned window in the imaginary room? And why is a caterpillar munching on that leaf? Why does one window in an Edward Hopper painting behave differently from its neighbors? There is no telling where seemingly naïve questions may carry you. Remember that frustration is part and parcel of engaged looking; an artwork that doesn’t offer resistance may not offer much at all.

6 / Let images “tell you” how they want to be seen. In my experience, they will do so if you “listen to them” with patience.

7 / Don’t be in a hurry to speak. Start by letting your eyes wander freely. Then zero in on what seems meaningful, or looks to be part of a pattern, or perhaps is an anomaly. Toggle between focused and unfocused looking. Test what you’ve registered by closing your eyes and asking yourself what you recollect. Then look again to compare.

8/ Don’t screw yourself to the spot. A surefire recipe for distraction is to insist that you concentrate on some work for X minutes. You are sure to chafe. Genuine viewing is always a mix of engagement and withdrawal, and as I’ve said, some degree of boredom is integral to the experience of slow art.

Dieric Bouts, Annunciation, J. Paul Getty Museum

Dieric Bouts, Annunciation, J. Paul Getty Museum

9 / Say you are looking at a Renaissance painting of a sallow-faced woman whose reading has been interrupted by a man with Technicolor wings. It’s enough to begin by attending to the physical details: the crisp folds of the red linen hanging behind the bed, or the mosaic pattern on the floor, which seems to repeat the design of a stained glass window in the recess at the left. Under the bedchamber’s barrel vault a half lunette appears to float above the bed canopy—like a moon, or the book’s open clasp. It’s good to begin in mystery, because not knowing rouses curiosity. Questions prompted by the act of looking motivate us to learn about the image’s content and about its social, aesthetic, political, historical contexts. By contrast, front-loading information—in a slide lecture sandwiched in with a hundred other images—is likely to generate little interest and leave but a fleeting impression. So studies of museum education repeatedly conclude.

Now—and not before—is when the wall label should come into play: what Dieric Bouts painted between 1450 and 1455 is the Annunciation. Wondering what that refers to—I am assuming no specialized knowledge—brings your smartphone app into the picture. You learn that the Angel Gabriel has just told the Virgin Mary—that is, he has announced—that she is to be the mother of God (Luke 1, 31). His message accounts for her expression, a mix of bashfulness (she refuses to return the angel’s gaze), shock, humility and fear that she will not satisfy the job requirements. Perhaps Gabriel’s words also explain the placement of her hands, which simultaneously express astonishment and are about to meet in prayer. Pursuing your inquiry will teach you that the cloth bundled up at the left-hand corner—a gorgeous, realistic, seemingly gratuituous detail—also symbolizes the great event yet to unfold but already being prepared. This bundle is a visible, external double of Mary’s womb. But what of the single pillow propped up on the bed, square between Gabriel and Mary? Another symbol? On the Getty’s website you can see Bouts’ underdrawing, detect traces of animal glue seeping through the linen, and spot vermillion pigment, thanks to X-ray and ultraviolet analysis. Speed and distraction aside, there has never been a better time to look.

10 / You will get better with practice. You and your interlocutor will become comfortable with each other’s rhythms and styles. You will build up categories to scan for: color, composition, mood, atmosphere, form, depth, quality of brushstrokes—fine or broad, insistent or invisible; awkwardnesses, conventional narratives; stylistic changes over time; political controversies. Over time you will amass episodes of close looking and build a mental library of images, a backlog of aesthetic experiences that will serve as points of reference or comparison.

11 / You will experience a range of pleasures: eye-candy, puzzle-solving, meditative or spiritual moments. You will have fun.

 

… she thought she’d somehow only now learned how to look.

—Don DeLillo, The Body Artist

Arden Reed is the Arthur M. Dole and Fanny M. Dole Professor of English at Pomona College and author of the forthcoming book, Slow Art: The Experience of Looking, Sacred Images to James Turrell.

Jason Alexander (On Life and Art)

Jason Alexander“There is no bad opportunity. There is no wasted effort. There is no wrong turn. Your worst day, when the boyfriend or the girlfriend leaves you, and your parents don’t believe in you, and the teachers flunk you out of a course, and you don’t have enough money to pay for the semester, and you have that sick, horrible feeling in your gut of disaster and failure and no self-worth—you’re gonna use the crap outta that one day. So sit with it, suck it in, enjoy it and go, ‘Yeah, this is gonna be so good 10 years from now.’”

—Actor Jason Alexander P’18, speaking on campus on Feb. 18 during Family Weekend 2017.

Matters of Honor

A Sister to HonorLucy Ferriss ’75 is the author of 10 books, most recently A Sister to Honor, a novel about Afia Satar, the daughter of a landholding family in northern Pakistan who attends an American college. Over and against Pashtun tradition and family dictates, Afia loves an American boy. Photos of the two of them together surface online, and her brother, entrusted by the family to be her guardian, is commanded to scrub the stain she left. In the book, Ferriss explores two contrasting worlds and entangled questions of love, power, tradition, family, honor and betrayal.

Ferriss talked to PCM’s Sneha Abraham about the conception of the book, cultural stereotypes and risk-taking in the writing life.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and space.

PCM: How did you get the idea for A Sister to Honor?

Ferries: Well, Trinity College, where I work, has the best squash team in the collegiate world. Nobody in the United States plays squash, so if you’re going to have the best squash team in the world you have to recruit internationally. So you have people from Catholic cultures and Hindu cultures and Muslim cultures, and they all come to this little college in New England.

Virginia Woolf explores the notion of: “What if Shakespeare had a sister?” So I sort of applied that to my big interests in the squash team. I thought: “What if one of these guys, particularly from one of these countries with fairly rigid social mores, had a sister who came here?” I Googled: “Where do the best squash players in the world come from?” And they came from the Pashtun area of Pakistan. Which is also where the Taliban comes from.

So people always ask me, “How did you get interested in Pakistan?” I wasn’t interested in Pakistan. I was interested in something much closer to home. But it occurred to me that that would be a really pretty interesting situation for a young woman to be coming into. And so I read everything that I could read about that culture. But I continued for a long time just to be kind of looking at it from the American point of view. Looking at it in terms of: How would you come to understand somebody who is coming from this other place, and so forth? So the coach in the novel was originally my only point of view, and it wasn’t going anywhere. I called my literary agent and I said, “You keep telling me that I should write it from the point of view of the young man and the young woman, but I can’t do that unless I go Pakistan.” And he said, “Well, you have to go to Pakistan then.” So I went to Pakistan. And then the story kind of came to life.

PCM: Sounds like it was a series of what-if questions that led you.

Ferriss: Yeah, very much so. What if she came here? She’s 19, 20 years old. What if she falls in love? What if she falls in love with a Jew? And then I also was trying to understand. As the mother of an athlete, I was interested in the question of honor. I spent a lot of time with coaches. And I noticed that they would talk always about being a good sport and behaving honorably and calling the line honestly and so forth. Only one thing that they wanted more than all that, and that was to win.

When I started looking into this in other cultures, honor basically lay between a woman’s legs. And that was sort of a two-sided question, too. So then I had to think—we hear in this country about honor violence, but what is that really? What is it masking? What else would be going on behind the scenes? So those questions kind of drove me.

PCM: It’s an interesting side-by-side when you look at honor and athletics and honor in Pashtun culture. Did you see any parallels or striking contrasts? They’re two very different kinds of honor, I would imagine.

Ferriss: Very different kinds of honor. But in both cases I felt as though somebody would say, “There’s nothing but good about being honorable.” But then, when you hold honor up as this thing, as your kind of lone star and the thing you’re aiming at, then all kinds of things go wrong. So that in the end, for the coach the honor is really winning. That’s really what’s behind a lot of that. And you compromise a lot of things for that. And obviously, when you have this kind of tribal honor, human affection and human emotion and human fallibility fall by the wayside. So they both have this veneer of something that we want. We want to live with honor. We want people to see us as honorable people. Think about that speech by Mark Antony: “Brutus is an honorable man.” But it’s always got a kind of dark side.

PCM: Do you see places where honor plays a role in Western culture besides athletics?

Ferriss: I absolutely do. In fact, the way I came to understand honor violence was—I looked at a lot of the court cases, and I spoke with a wonderful woman named Hina Jilani in Lahore, who is on the Supreme Court in Pakistan and is also on the U.N. Council of Elders. She and her sister are the two people in Pakistan who are really reaching out to help young women who are at risk of honor violence. So she talked about how, by calling a crime a crime of honor, then you can almost always get the perpetrator of that crime either off the hook entirely or with a lighter sentence. And so, I tried to think, “Well, what is the similar thing in the United States?” And of course, we have what we call crimes of passion. If a crime of honor is basically killing your daughter or your sister, a crime of passion is murdering your partner or your spouse. And really, crimes of passion are usually there because someone’s honor or sense of, usually, himself is threatened because someone has betrayed him—loved somebody else or whatever—and he can’t hold his head up. He’s been cuckolded. And so we call these things crimes of passion. And if somebody says it’s a crime of passion, it’s not so bad as a brutal murder. So yes, I think we do have other places. We don’t like to think that we do, but absolutely we do. Not to mention that it wasn’t that long ago, like 100 years ago, if a daughter in a family was pregnant out of wedlock, that was curtains for that family in terms of their honor in society.

PCM: You’ve received praise for talking about some tough situations in your book, but there have also been criticisms from others, saying it’s promoting stereotypes. How do you walk that fine line between working on compelling topics and cultural questions?

Ferriss: It’s a very good question. And believe me I held my breath. My husband first learned what I was writing about, and he said, “You can’t write that. You just can’t. There’s too much anti-Muslim feeling in this country. You just can’t go near that topic.”

There’s no publishing industry in Pakistan, but it’s come out in India, which has very strong honor cultures of its own. And I was really nervous at the thought of a Western woman daring to write from the point of view of a South Asian. And I was really afraid that it would just get torn to pieces. And thus far, the reception of it in South Asia has been very positive, which is a big relief. And I also was very concerned about my Pakistani friends, because I forged a lot of bonds when I was over there, and I’m trying to write about individuals—I’m trying to write about characters—but they’re going to be seen as representative. And I did not want my Pakistani friends and contacts to feel that I had exploited them or represented anything falsely, given how generous they had been with me.

I have no doubt that I got some things wrong. I’ve gotten interesting reactions from my Pakistani friends, but they did not accuse me of engaging in stereotypes. There was one guy in London who said what he couldn’t find credible about the book was that people in the United States would be so ignorant of the kind of family values and points of honor that would be important to Pakistanis. He said, “That’s just ridiculous. I’m here in London, and I know all about it.” And I thought, “Yeah, well, but you’re not in Western Massachusetts. You may know about it in London, but in Western Massachusetts they have much broader stereotypes already in place.” So it is a fine line. You have to expect that you’re going to get some things wrong, and all you can say is that you did your damnedest to get it right.

PCM: In regards to issues over immigration in general and attitudes toward Muslims from the Middle East or Pakistan, we’re in a particular cultural and historical moment in our country. What do you think is the significance of stories like A Sister to Honor at this time?

Ferriss: I can’t say for sure, but what I would hope is that first of all people would come to understand the meaning of family. w Because it seems to me that one of the troubles that we have is we think of family so differently in this country from the way it’s thought of in many other parts of the world—the absolute importance of belonging to a family, of being reunited with your family, of being true to your family. We are a very individualistic culture. And I’m brought up in that culture. I tend to think in terms of the rights of the individual. But there are a lot of cultures that don’t. They think in terms of how important it is that you belong to a family. And so, I feel like if I’ve gotten a little bit of that across, then I may have chipped away at some of the misunderstandings that we have about the people who come here. For instance, nobody could understand how it was that Pakistan hadn’t given up Osama Bin Laden. In Pakistan, one of the primary tenets of that culture is that if a stranger comes among you and needs your help, you must protect him. And probably, if we understood that, we would have gone about it a little bit differently from the way we went about it.

PCM: How long were you in Pakistan?

Ferriss: Not that long. Actually, long enough because the ISI, which is their version of the CIA, was on my trail…

PCM: Really?

Ferriss: I left, I mean not for any good reason, but because it was very weird that I was there. And I’m not sure that I would have been allowed to stay a minute longer. I was only there for three weeks.

I went to the Pashtun area, where the capital of that province is Peshawar, a city of two million people. And Peshawar was once the crossroads of the Silk Road. It was once this incredibly cosmopolitan city—everybody knew where it was and everybody went there. The level of culture was really high and so forth. Now, of course, it’s just fallen on its knees in the dirt. So even for Pakistanis in other parts of the country, they say, “Peshawar? You’re going to Peshawar? Why?” It’s considered sort of the edge of the frontier. If you go on from there you end up in the frontier provinces, which is where the Pakistani government doesn’t even have any control.

It’s a large city, and there was a moment where this guy came running up to me and my host in the middle of the market square. I thought he was going to set up a suicide bomb because he came at it so intently. But he told me that I was the first Westerner he has seen in that city in five years. And so, in a city of two million people, you can imagine how bizarre it was for me to be there.

PCM: No wonder ISI was on your trail.

Ferriss: They learned pretty quickly that I was there. And we also did go driving out to see into the villages in the country and stayed in the villages. Because I didn’t want the family I stayed with to be from Peshawar. I wanted them to be from somewhere a little more remote. And I would never have had the access that I had to all that if I had not had a host family.

PCM: How did you find your host family?

Ferriss: Well, I learned that Peshawar was a city of two million people. I thought a city that big has to have a university. So I Googled Peshawar University and I found the University of Peshawar. And since I have an academic address, I found—it was not a very good website, but I found a department of language and literature. And I wrote to them and said just that I was an American academic coming to do research in their area. Was there anybody that they could put me in touch with to help me? Shazia was teaching at the university. There are women who teach at the university, though many fewer than there used to be, and with not very good working conditions for them. But she was teaching there, and she happened to come into the office as the secretary was looking at this email, trying to figure out where she should send it. And Shazia looked at it and said, “Tell you what—why don’t you send that to me?” The next thing I knew she was telling me that I had to stay with her, that she wanted to learn about my book, that her family would take me all around, etc.

PCM: You open the book with the proverb, “Woman is the lamp of the family.” What does that mean to you?

Ferriss: Well, it ties in with another thing which I did not put in there, which—because it’s not as poetic—is that a woman carries the honor of her family. That’s what the lamp is, I think. It is the light of the family, the honor of the man; she carries that honor. Ironically, a woman cannot have honor. There’s no such thing as an honorable woman. What a woman has is shame. So you are the lamp of the family, but you don’t light it. You have in that sense the responsibility without too many of the privileges. That’s why I wouldn’t choose it. Because from a very early age you learn that it is on you. But there is nothing that you can do to have a position of honor. You just have to make sure that the family’s honor is carried by you. So that’s what it means to me. It’s a kind of utility.

PCM: Looking at your bibliography, your books run such a gamut of topics. You said with A Sister to Honor the genesis was a series of what-if questions. Is that your process for books in general? Or what’s a day in the life of your brain? How do you connect?

Ferriss: I would say what connects all my books is they’re all a little edgy. When I teach, I tell my students that writing that takes no risk is probably not worth writing. And you can take various kinds. Different writers take different kinds of risks. I tend to take risks with my subject matter.

So a day in the life of me is sort of like: How far can I push this envelope? For instance, in A Sister to Honor, one of the issues—and this is the kind of question that comes up for me in the writing process a lot in terms of how far do I push the envelope—was whether or not I was going to include any sex scenes. Because on the one hand, you had a young healthy woman, college age in the United States, with a boyfriend. And on the other hand, I had the sensibilities of Pakistanis to think about. I go ahead and push that envelope. It’s the one thing that upset my Pakistani friends—why I had to include that scene. But for me, it would not have been realistic without it.

So that’s the kind of question that I tend to have at the forefront as I’m writing—that there are all of these quiet signals that we give ourselves all the time, and so we don’t go there. That’s too tricky to write about; you don’t know if you could pull it off; somebody will be offended—that kind of thing. If you do go back, I think all my books have that tension in them.

PCM: Do you have any trepidation or a moment of fear before something goes public because you’re taking such risks? Or do you feel like that’s just ingrained in who you are by now?

Ferriss: No, I always have trepidation. I actually don’t believe any writers who say that they don’t.

The book before this was based on the news in the 1990s about young people of a good family who had been found to be leaving corpses of babies in dumpsters. I don’t know why that was making the news, but it was. Anyway, so I opened the book with an account of a teenage boy and girl basically still-birthing a child. It’s quite graphic. And I thought that, on the one hand, everybody is going to hate this, and on the other hand, this is where the story starts. And I guess if people get past it, then they’re the kind of readers who want to read the rest of the book. And if they don’t, I guess they just don’t like me. So I always feel some trepidation.

The Magical Bridge

The Magical Bridge: For Olenka Villarreal ’85, creating an accessible, socially inclusive playground for her own child and her own community was only the first step.
Olenka Villarreal ’85 with the Magical Bridge playground in Palo Alto, Calif.

Olenka Villarreal ’85 with the Magical Bridge playground in Palo Alto, Calif.

Photos By Robert Durell

Children crowd onto the wheelchair-accessible spinning dish at the Magical Bridge playground.

Children crowd onto the wheelchair-accessible spinning dish at the Magical Bridge playground.

ON A SUNNY WINTER morning, Olenka Villarreal ’85 is appointing kindness ambassadors, handing out smiley-face stickers to children taking a break from spinning on a giant dish at the sprawling Magical Bridge in Palo Alto, the accessible, socially inclusive playground that she founded.

Boys and girls reach out their hands, exclaiming “I want blue!” “I want red!”

“Will you be extra kind on the playground today?” asks Villarreal. They nod, promising yes, yes. After weeks of rain and chill, the playground is packed with visitors of all ages: a beaming Asian grandmother swings on a disc, and a father shouts “3-2-1, blast-off!” and sends his son in a cardboard box down a slide.

When Villarreal’s 14-year-old daughter Ava arrives, she skips and claps. Though non-verbal, her joy and excitement are clear. Villarreal hugs her daughter, who stands taller than her, and strokes her soft, fine blonde hair.

Magical Bridge, which opened in 2015 at a cost of $4 million, is the only local playground where Ava can run—elsewhere, she trips over the sand or is too big to get onto the equipment sized for younger children. She loves dashing across the bridges that connect the playhouse to the slide mound. “At any other park, she towers over everybody, but when you design for everybody, no one stands out,” Villarreal says.

Now, after hearing from people in Taipei, Greece, and from across the country, she has her sights set on creating Magical Bridges around the world through her new foundation. “I was ready to take a break, but then I received an avalanche of emails and calls. I can’t physically get to everyone who asks questions, so my goal is to create a model that is far less expensive and easily replicable.”

Villarreal’s project has now become her calling, one that began when her daughter was born in 2003. As a baby, Ava struggled to sit up and stand and did not start walking until she was three years old. Eventually, at the advice of doctors, Villarreal started taking her daughter to expensive indoor occupational therapy sessions at a center located 45 minutes away, where Ava could work on improving her balance and coordination. The center was so booked she could only schedule a session for her daughter once a week, and she wanted to go somewhere daily where they lived, in her hometown of Palo Alto.

Families take advantage of a beautiful day at the Magical Bridge in Palo Alto.

Families take advantage of a beautiful day at the Magical Bridge in Palo Alto.

At local playgrounds, she searched for swings, with their therapeutic vestibular w (back and forth) movement, but Ava lacked the strength to sit up in bucket seats or hold onto the swing chains. Frustrated, she met with the city’s director of parks and recreation, hoping he might be able to direct her to a playground that met the needs of Ava and children like her. She learned that the city’s playgrounds were all ADA compliant, but that the guidelines center around access for individuals in wheelchairs and other mobility issues, with ramps and paved walkways; they aren’t designed for children with impaired hearing and vision, developmental, sensory, cognitive or autism spectrum disorders.

Olenka Villarreal ’85 is joined at the playground by her two daughters, Ava (center) and Emma.

Olenka Villarreal ’85 is joined at the playground by her two daughters, Ava (center) and Emma.

One in five Americans has a disability, and one in 45 is on the autism spectrum, which has led to a growing push for playgrounds designed for people of all abilities. As Villarreal soon discovered, parents have often led the charge, motivated by their child: Tatum’s Garden in Gilroy, Matteo’s Dream in Concord, and Shane’s Inspiration in Los Angeles.

The city struck a deal with Villarreal. If she raised money for the playground’s design and construction, the city would donate almost an acre of land in Mitchell Park. “I was grateful for the land. Around here, land is gold,” she says. “Maybe I was naïve, but I thought, we’re in Silicon Valley, how hard can it be to raise money? I didn’t know how much it would cost, or what it would entail.”

She launched her grassroots campaign, recruiting co-founders Jill Asher, to work on public and media relations, and Kris Loew, who designed the logo, flyers and other marketing materials. She also drew upon the support of her family: her husband, Robert, donated wines from his collection for her volunteer meetings—“You have to keep the board happy!” she says—and their older daughter, Emma, came up with the playground’s name while sitting in the back seat of the car, scrawling down ideas in her notebook. Anytime someone crosses over the bridge leading into the playground, they would find themselves in a magical place where barriers to play no longer existed, thus bridging the gap between those living with and without disabilities.

Because Villarreal knew donors might hesitate to write checks to a brand-new group, she joined the board of the Friends of the Palo Alto Parks, a trusted local nonprofit that acted as a fiscal sponsor to collect the contributions. “When the board saw the magnitude of my project, they thought I was a cockeyed optimist,” Villarreal says with a laugh. “But they were willing to stick it out, to see how far I could get.”

After a career in sales and marketing in Silicon Valley, she was returning to an interest in civic engagement first kindled at Pomona, where she had studied public policy and economics. As she embarked on fundraising, she deepened her research into inclusive playgrounds to incorporate into the design.

Physical access allows children to get around the playground and get into close proximity to play activities, while social access emphasizes how children can play together. “From a very young age, so much of play is a social experience,” says Keith M. Christensen, a play and accessibility specialist who advised Villarreal. “When you are participating equally, you are able to use your abilities and your strengths without the need for assistance or adaptations that might draw attention to differences rather than to similarities.”

Within two years, Villarreal and her volunteers raised about $600,000, but they lacked a detailed set of plans to win over bigger donors. When she despaired, she pictured returning the hundreds of individual donations if she gave up. She also knew people were counting on her. “As my husband said, ‘If we don’t get this park, we’ll have to move out of Palo Alto!’”

She was also dealing with the challenges of caring for Ava, who sometimes had seizures at school while Villarreal was hosting volunteer meetings. “I’d have to rush her to the ER, and I’d tell them to just to continue,” she recalls. “You know that stage when your child is one year old, when they’re getting up once or twice a night, they’re in diapers, and you’re feeding them? I’m still in that.”

Palo Alto stepped up with money to pay for plans and assigned a landscape architect, Peter Jensen, to help shepherd and advocate for the project. “That was a huge leap forward,” she says. After that, they hit their fundraising goal within a year and a half.

Villarreal brought a personal, passionate touch to her pitches, according to Asher, a co-founder. She asked a mother of a child with special needs to make chocolate chip cookies that they brought to every donor meeting.

“We leave them munching on cookies,” she told Asher. “Every time they put a cookie in their mouth, they’ll think of us.”

Added Loew, the other co-founder: “She’s hard to say ‘no’ to—she finds a job for you, and it feels really good to help. She makes everyone feel special.”

At the Magical Bridge, Villarreal makes visitors feel special, too, chatting with the helpful, bustling air of an innkeeper. “You like it here? Do you know the story of this place?” she asks a curly-haired dad leaning against a wall as his toddler rattles metal bells shaped like flowers that stand as tall as him

“It’s my first time here,” he says. “I read a little bit about it online. My son loves the bells.”

The playground is divided into seven play zones: swing and sway, slides, spin, music, tots, a kindness corner picnic area, and playhouse/ stage. Grouping the activities together helps visitors of all abilities navigate the Magical Bridge, which also stands apart from other playgrounds because of how it showcases innovative artists.

Jen Lewin’s interactive laser harp sculptures have been featured at Burning Man, the desert arts festival popular with tech workers. The sculpture—which senses user movement, speed and tempo—is irresistible, inviting people to twirl and hurl their limbs and their bodies under the arch.

“If it’s approachable to everyone, then it’s successful,” Lewin says. “My mission has been to make public art that engages the community.”

George Zisadis’s motion sensors trigger audio recordings: the squishy suck of mud, the slosh of puddles, crunch of autumn leaves, and quacking ducks. You can’t help but run through it again and again, trying to figure out how it works. “It’s been great seeing the installation become part of the daily experience of the playground,” he says, “offering moments of delight.”

Barbara Butler—a custom builder of luxury play structures, whose clients include actor Robert Redford and singer Bobby McFerrin—designed the whimsical, wheelchair-accessible, two-story playhouse and lookout built around a stony pine.

As Villarreal makes her way through the Magical Bridge, she greets friends and newcomers alike. “Many years from now, when we’re no longer here, I hope that people will know Ava’s story, and will say hello to her,” she says. “She loves when people say hello.”

For many families like Villarreal’s, Magical Bridge has become a welcome routine. Every week, a van transports medically-fragile children to the playground. A mother takes her 35-year-old son; in the past, she had to wait until night fell to bring him to playgrounds so people wouldn’t stare and ask questions. A girl in a tiara and a wheelchair—dubbed by Villarreal as the “Princess of the Playground”—is another regular.

Because not every family can get to the Magical Bridge, Villarreal is trying to bring it to them. She and her co-founders formed a nonprofit foundation to replicate two Magical Playgrounds in neighboring cities. If the city makes a financial commitment, the foundation will help raise the rest. Redwood City was the first to join forces with the foundation, and if fundraising stays on track, the next Magical Bridge will break ground late this year or in early 2018.

A wall around part of the playground bears messages of kindness and encouragement.

A wall around part of the playground bears messages of kindness and encouragement.

In late February, the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors voted to set aside $10 million to go toward at least five inclusive, accessible playgrounds. Groups such as the Rotary Club and the Magical Bridge Foundation would raise matching funds. “It’s great not only for Santa Clara kids and families, but it also demonstrates to other parts of the nation that this is something people can do,” said Supervisor Joe Simitian, who co-sponsored the proposal.  “If we each take a little piece of responsibility, we can do something extraordinary. That fits very well with the Magical Bridge approach.”

With each playground, they gain expertise, Villarreal says, learning how to bring down costs, and exploring different equipment options. By the time the foundation finishes its third playground, she aims to sell packages of construction drawings and components that can be customized to work in a variety of terrains, spaces and budgets at parks and schools, spreading the magic of Magical Bridge. “This has been a transformative journey. Doing this type of work is so fulfilling,” she says. “We’re doing something for families. It makes me want to do more of it, to get out and leave our little mark on the planet.”

Excerpt From Episode 4: Catch Us If You Can

A Mufti burger from 1974–75

A Mufti burger from 1974–75

Tidmarsh:  “… Joshua Tremblay, the editor of TSL in fall 2003 actually did a ride-along with two Mufti members for a night, and they told him that most of the 20-odd members at the time had either been approached by an active member or caught them in the act. But good luck trying to catch them. A TSL columnist in 1981 wrote that, quote, ‘Mufti is to Pomona College what Bigfoot is to Northern California. Nobody’s really sure who or what it is, but the telltale evidence for its existence is everywhere.’ Conor O’Rourke, who graduated in 2003 … is one of the few people who can give some insight into how Mufti recruits students. He went through the majority of the induction process, but he couldn’t attend the final challenge.”

O’Rourke:  “My senior year, things had relatively calmed down, I guess, with Mufti, and they seemed to be somewhat inactive. But that spring semester of senior year … we had been looking closely, I guess, for whatever reason, and came across an unusual message in the Digester that on first glance seemed a little incoherent. It was complete sentences and actual words but didn’t mean anything either. If you were really reading into it, you might have been able to interpret that it was somehow in reference to a return of some kind. There was something that was trying to make a return to campus. So it was cryptic enough that our ‘spidey senses’ told us it might be Mufti-related. And the idea of a return certainly fit with where Mufti was at the time, which was that they were relatively dormant that particular year. So we tangled with this message for a while.

“Eventually, you know—one of us was a computer science major and started kind of taking a more technical approach to deciphering this and used some type of number-to-letter language—I’ve forgot what it was called. But what happened was that we found that these numbers corresponded to, essentially, a Dewey Decimal code, and the book that came up with those numbers was called The History of Secret Societies, or something thereabouts. And that was a light bulb going on. Wow! This has gotta be—this has gotta be it. And so we went to the library—we went to Honnold-Mudd—and we looked up that book. It was there, somewhere deep in the stacks—didn’t seem like it had been checked out for a very long time. It was an old book, from maybe the 1920s or 1930s. So we checked out the book, and we played with it a little bit. … One of us actually read the entire thing. Again, we were looking for answers. It was kind of hard. And one of us had the idea of kind of cracking open the book—literally cracking open the book. Took a pen knife and made a very small incision on the back cover, and lo and behold, hidden beneath that was a small note that basically said, ‘Congratulations. You’ve come this far. If you want to go further, you know, contact us.’ And there was an email address, some AOL address or something like that.

“And it took a day or two to hear back from them, but eventually we did. And their message back was written in a cryptic way, but it was another challenge—once we interpreted what the message meant, it was another challenge to us. The challenge was: they essentially wanted us to bring back the Mufti T-shirt to the Coop Store. You know, it was a very large challenge. So we thought long and hard as to how we were going to do that. I don’t know how it came about, but eventually we decided to take the scarecrow from the farm up at Pitzer, and we put a suit on this scarecrow, which fit, actually, quite well, and took him down to the Campus Center and propped him up against the door to the Coop Store, and then pinned to him a document that we called ‘Peter Stanley’s Last Will and Testament.’ And Peter Stanley was, of course, David Oxtoby’s predecessor, and this was his final year as president of Pomona College. So this last will and testament was written as a will in which he was requesting the Coop Store to bring back the Mufti T-shirt. I happened to be writing for TSL at the time and in charge of something called the Security Briefs—I don’t think this is a section they have any more, but it’s essentially a police blotter from CampSec [Campus Security], and I worked that into the police blotter for the week. … [Mufti] contacted us and said, ‘Congratulations—you’ve gotten this far. And if you want to keep going, you know, you need to meet us out on the Quad at midnight’ or something, of this particular night that was down the road. Now unfortunately for me, when we got this response from Mufti inviting us to learn more and meet them on the Quad with a blindfold on—they wanted us to blindfold ourselves—I was already down in San Diego for Senior Week, and I actually got the call about the email from one of my friends, who was a junior and obviously not in San Diego for Senior Week. It was at that time that I thought, ‘Darn!’ This was happening too late for me. …”

This entire episode is available for download at soundcloud.com, iTunes or Google Play.