Blog Articles

How to Put the Slam in Pomona Poetry

Since his first poetry slam a year ago, Frank Sanchez ’13 has been leading a crusade to bring the high-octane competitions to Pomona. Audience members judge the poet-performers, so connecting with the crowd is key, says Sanchez, who takes us on his path to becoming a poetry promoter.

 1)   DISCOVER spoken word poetry in eighth grade while listening to the radio. Connect to poet Beau Sia’s humor and conversational style. Put aside poetry (temporarily) for music. Play piano, drums, guitar, and write punk and pop songs. Leave Austin for Pomona and a major in gender and women’s studies. Perform on campus in band called Awarewolves.

 2)  CHECK OUT the performances at a café in L.A.’s Little Tokyo. Embrace poet Edren Sumagaysay’s challenge to the audience to write every day. Pound out your very first poem that night. Know you’ve found your voice.

 3)  TAKE CLASSES in creative writing and poetry. Focus on spoken word and slam poetry. Write about family, home and childhood. Attend first slam poetry contest in Austin during winter break. Get plucked from audience as a judge. Return the following week as a performer. Realize you’re hooked.

4)  LAUNCH a campaign to bring slam poetry to Claremont. Enlist novice poets from Pomona to compete in national college contest. Take some solace that you don’t finish dead last. Decide your senior thesis is going to be about slam poetry and the ways it engages people. Teach a poetry class to high school students over the summer.

5)   COME FULL CIRCLE. Attend a book signing by Beau Sia. Win your first poetry slam back home in Austin on break. Organize writing workshops, open mics and performances by slam poets. Bring together poets, dancers, and other artists from across campus for your big spring event. Recruit a team to compete at the 2013 nationals. Get ready to graduate. Plan to keep on slamming.

Quick Looks

 

The second floor of Millikan Laboratory is home to “Seeing Symmetry” an exhibition of mathematical art by Frank Farris ’77 that will be on display until summer. Farris, a math professor at Santa Clara University, says his interest in the intersection of art and mathematics began at Pomona. More recently Farris reconnected with Pomona people at a national conference, leading to the on-campus exhibition.

 Claudia Rankine, the Henry G. Lee Professor of English, has been elected a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, a distinguished position that in the past has been held by such poets as W.H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop and Adrienne Rich. At Pomona since 2006, Rankine is the author of four collections of poetry: Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, Plot, The End of the Alphabet and Nothing in Nature is Private.

 Bertil Lindblad ’78, leaving his role as director of the UNAIDS New York office, is the College’s new senior advisor for international initiatives, bringing more than 30 years of experience in large and complex organizations focused on international cooperation and development. In the newly created position, Lindblad will work to coordinate and expand Pomona’s global connections and international activities through collaborative relationships.

 The latest translation project by Professor of Chinese Allan Barr has brought him into the world of Chinese pop culture, political criticism and blogging. This Generation: Dispatches from China’s Most Popular Literary Star (and Race Car Driver) is a collection of blog posts by Han Han, a national celebrity in China who is both controversial and celebrated as a blogger, race-car driver and best-selling author.

 Erica Flapan, the Lingurn H. Burkhead Professor of Mathematics, has been selected as one of the inaugural fellows of the American Mathematical Society, which recognizes “members who have made outstanding contributions to the creation, exposition, advancement, communication and utilization of mathematics.” She has been at Pomona since 1986.

 

Summer Success

 Launched in 2011, Pomona College’s summer internship program has already funded 33 students in full-time domestic and international internships, including stints at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, a post-production studio in Los Angeles and an economic development group in New York.

 Summer internships are rooted in the Pomona College Internship Program (PCIP), which started in 1976 and continues today, with about 80 students working as part-time interns each semester in Claremont, Pomona and the Los Angeles area. With PCIP’s success came a push for intensive, full-time working experiences, where students could spend up to 10 weeks in the summer exploring possible career paths, reaffirming areas of interests or finding new ones.

 For Peter Pellitier ’14, an internship at Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden in Claremont last summer gave him a firsthand look at graduate level research, while Mitsuko Yabe ’14 says her experience as a veterinary assistant at an animal hospital in New York confirmed her passion for veterinary medicine.

 Along with summer research, internships have become an increasingly important part of a college education. ”It used to be a college degree was the mode of access to the employment market,” says Mary Raymond, director of the Career Development Office (CDO).

 Nowadays “a student can have a great transcript, but they have to have developed their resumes too.” Internships, adds Raymond, also can give students an edge when applying to graduate school and for competitive fellowships and scholarships. The CDO works closely with students to prepare them for the workplace, says internship coordinator Marcela Rojas, who helps them navigate the application process and interviews with prospective employers. It’s up to the student, however, to find an internship and to present a budget to the selection committee. “We want them to pursue their interests and understand what research is involved when finding an opportunity, very much like the job market,” says Raymond. “In a way, we see gaining those practical skills as part of the academic experience here.”

 For many Pomona students, work is a necessity, so taking advantage of unpaid or low-paying internships is not always possible.To level the playing field, the College pays hourly wages for PCIP programs and provides stipends of $4,000 to $5,000 to cover living expenses and travel in the summer, funded primarily by gifts from alumni, parents and foundations. In December, the Parents Fund announced a $100,000 challenge, with gifts directed to internships matched one to one by an anonymous donor.

 With more applicants for summer internships than available funding, Raymond hopes the program will continue to grow so that all interested students will have a chance to participate. “We want to encourage intellectual curiosity, and that can be satisfied in a number of ways,” she says. “Students understand the formula for getting into college and doing well academically. But they’re also looking for the formula for happy, successful and personally rewarding lives. Where do you go to find out what the script is for that? It can only come from your own experience.”

History on the Move

In a 12-hour-long overnight operation, Replica House this fall was safely relocated to a new site off campus. Lengthy as it was, the transport was brief compared to the two-year planning and permitting process that preceded it. “There were no hiccups or hitches at all,” says Bob Robinson, director of the Office of Facilities and Campus Services, of the move.

The house was built in the 1930s as a two-thirds-scale replica of the downtown Pomona cottage where the College held its first classes in 1887. Originally intended to hold Pomona memorabilia, the replica for a time housed the KSPC radio station and was relocated in the ’60s to land farther into the interior of campus, next to Brackett Observatory.

That land is now the construction site for the new Studio Art Center, and so the cottage in November was moved to private land near the Claremont Hills Wilderness Park. Though under private ownership, the house is easily visible from the park entrance, and Robinson says there will be a plaque to commemorate the building’s heritage.

The Idea of Money

In today’s session of Professor John Seery’s critical inquiry seminar on The Idea of Money, the class discussion focuses on the 1904 Max Weber book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. The first- year students cover a range of topics, including plans to attend a taping of the TV game show The Price Is Right and whether Benjamin Franklin’s aphorism “Time is money” applies to their lives.

 Seery: So what do you think of the argument that capitalism is not just accumulation? In fact, Weber says it involves restraint. This is his thesis: that capitalism in the West, under the direction of a particular form of Protestantism, brought two otherwise contradictory psychological impulses together—acquisitiveness and asceticism. You have to be self-abdicating in order to accumulate.

 Nico: I think it makes a lot of sense in terms of what we’ve seen so far in this class—especially when we looked at visual art as well as music, with people throwing money in the air and that being satisfying to them; having and showing off money as an end, rather than a means of acquiring goods. The most basic depiction was the toilet roll of dollar bills—“Look, I have all this money; who cares about spending it on toilet paper?”

 Sam: Kind of weird, because it seems to put more value on the potential purchasing money has, as opposed to actually purchasing items. You have this number associated with your name, which has more prestige than having all these other items that have 10 times more use.

 Seery: This religious idea—let’s follow his logic. Weber thinks that early Puritans worked hard, became capitalists for the sake of redemption. But then once you get that rational, intensive activity in place, we forget about the religious motivation and start to have people pursuing goods for their own sake, forgetting what it meant in a religious scheme of things.

 Noah: That’s where Ben Franklin comes in. He basically says be acquisitive in order to have good virtues.

 Seery: Do you think of your life in terms of “time is money”? If you started to think of your activity in this classroom as foregone billable hours, and you’re not billing anyone right now, don’t you realize you’re really wasting your time?

 Casey: I feel like it trivializes your time if your time is just about money.

 Seery: And you have something better to do?

 Casey: I probably don’t, but I like to think that I do (laughs).

 Seery: It’s the work ethic, and it’s not for the sake of redemption, worldly or otherworldly; it’s what Weber would call Faustian, striving for the sake of striving. You’re on a treadmill, and do we understand the ends to which we’re directed? Is it possible for you to go out and smell the roses? Or do you think in Ben Franklin terms—time is money, I have to produce?

 Erik: I can’t exactly agree that time is money; from my standpoint time is extremely valuable. I kind of think that I have this calling, that I’m obligated to spend my time productively, and if I’m not, I’m letting go of a duty I have. I can’t place that duty, and it makes me believe in how Weber ties that back to a religious sense.

 Seery: Erik, when you surf, are you thinking, I have two hours where I can really surf well and be the best surfer I can, or are you thinking this is time out?

 Erik: No, it’s time that I value; to me it’s time that is productive; it’s good exercise and it’s fun. That’s why I sort of disagree that time is money. Because time to me is valuable, so if I’m valuing my time, I’m being productive.

 Seery: It’s a valuable expenditure and you don’t see it as wasteful; it’s kind of a par with billable hours.

 Casey: It’s kind of a cost-benefit analysis. Would you give it up for a certain amount of money?

 Erik: Absolutely. Permanently? No. Not for any amount of money.

 Seery: For most of the book Weber is being analytical, and you don’t get the sense he’s being judgmental. But, by the end, there is a critique where he says material goods have gained an increasing and inexorable power over the lives of men. Ouch, the searing indictment. The Puritans wanted work to be a calling, but now we are forced to do so. In Weber’s view, the care for external goods should lie on the shoulders like a saint wearing a light cloak. But he says that the cloak has instead become an iron cage.

 The Course: The Idea of Money

The catalog course description for this critical inquiry seminar reads: “Students will examine the idea of money, drawing from political theory, philosophy, religion, economics, anthropology, history and literature. As a culminating project we will play the lottery and, if we win, we’ll be better positioned to test our ideas against reality.”

 The Professor: John Seery

 A member of Pomona’s faculty since 1990, John Seery is the George Irving Thompson Memorial Professor of Government and professor of politics. He earned his B.A. from Amherst College and an M.A. and Ph.D. from UC Berkeley. A two-time winner of Pomona’s Wig Award for Excellence in Teaching, Seery received the Phi Beta Kappa Society’s Sidney Hook Memorial Award in 2009 and served as the Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Professor for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton University in 2010-2011. His books have been on the topics of irony, death, liberal arts education, constitutional age requirements and Walt Whitman.

 Samples from the reading list:

 Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies

Michael Sandal, What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets

Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

David Wolman, The End of Money: Counterfeiters, Preachers, Techies, Dreamers—and the Coming Cashless Society

Selections from works by Adam Smith, John Locke, Karl Marx, Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, Andrew Carnegie, William Shakespeare and Sigmund Freud.

 

 

 

 

 

Ice Would Be Nice

On a 70-degree, late-November day, Ian Gallogly ’13 and Rob Ventura ’14 are sitting in the courtyard of the Smith Campus Center and talking hockey.

Scant prompting is needed to get them going: They both grew up in Massachusetts, in towns about 20 minutes apart, and they each were on the ice by age 2. Now, as Pomona students, they are working to drum up interest on campus for their Frostbelt fixation.

 “Once you meet someone who appreciates hockey,” explains Ventura, a 6-foot-tall forward who led the Claremont Centaurs this season in goals, assists and penalty minutes. “It’s kind of like that instant connection.”

 With California’s less-than-perfect hockey conditions, the New Englanders seem to have adopted a decidedly West Coast sense of verve. No ice, no problem. They play roller hockey, having found their way to as freshmen—and becoming key players for—the Centaurs, a Division III team that began in the mid-2000s at Harvey Mudd but now draws most players from neighboring Claremont Colleges.

 The Centaurs pay to play at a commercial rink in West Covina, while the guys try to convert old tennis courts at Claremont McKenna into a workable roller rink. The team competes in the Western Collegiate Roller Hockey League, where, this season, the Claremont crew won a single game and tied another in competition against larger schools such as Sonoma State and UC Davis.

 Last year, the Claremont crew’s numbers dwindled, but this fall, the Centaurs drew in a larger crop of freshmen to bring their roster up to about a dozen. Weekly team dinners are part of the push to tout hockey culture in Claremont.

 The challenge isn’t just promoting a northern obsession in a Sunbelt setting. As Ventura notes, they have to convince guys who grew up on the ice to try the roller version, which is four-on-four and offers less physical contact.

 “Some people can be tough to convert,” says Ventura, who, truth be told, would rather be on ice as well. “It’s frustrating because … you feel you should be able to do something, turn this way, turn that way.”

 Adds Gallogly, a defenseman: “On ice you can just … explode. It’s a quicker game.”

 Still, the Easterners know that promoting hockey in Claremont will be a slowly won game, and one they have to get out and play, whether on wheels or blades. “It’s close enough,” says Ventura of the roller version.

 “At the end of the day, it’s still hockey,” adds Gallogly. “Still wicked fun.”

Sports Report

Men’s Soccer: The Streak Hits11

The men’s soccer team earned the 2012 SCIAC Championship with a 13-2-1 record in conference, earning the first national ranking in its NCAA history. The Sagehens closed out the regular season with an 11-game winning streak, the longest for the program in nearly four decades. Co-captains Robbie Hull ’13 and Erik Munzer PI ’13 were named first-team All-SCIAC and Rollie Thayer ’13 was named to the second team, while Munzer was also honored as first-team All-West Region by the NSCAA.

 Women’s Soccer: Late Surge to the Finals

The women’s soccer team reached the finals of the SCIAC Tournament for the first time in school history with one of the biggest upsets of the fall season, knocking off top-seeded Cal Lutheran 2-1 in overtime in the semifinals, before losing to Chapman 4-1 in the finals. Julia Dohner ’16 had both goals for the Sagehens in the semifinals, after the team needed to rally late in the regular season to qualify. A 1-0 home win over Redlands on the first career goal from Natalie Barbaresi ’16 put the Sagehens in position to qualify, and a goal from Claire Mueller ’13 in a 1-0 win over La Verne in the season finale put Pomona-Pitzer in the postseason for the second year in a row. Jordan Bryant ’13 and Allie Tao ’14 were named first-team All-SCIAC and earned a spot on the NSCAA All-West Region team as well.

 Football: Peace Pipe Returns

One of the highlights of the fall season was a resounding 37-0 win for the football team in the regular season finale against Claremont- Mudd-Scripps, which returned the Peace Pipe to the south side of Sixth Street for the first time since 2006. Luke Sweeney ’13 capped off his career with 247 rushing yards in the game, giving him the Sagehens’ career record. He entered the game needing 10 yards to break the record (after an injury kept him out for four weeks, right on the cusp of the milestone). Sweeney ended his career with the single-game (265), single-season (1,419) and career (3,004) rushing records.

 Men’s Water Polo:  Perfection in the Pool

The men’s water polo team went undefeated in SCIAC during the regular season, sweeping all eight league opponents.The Sagehens ended up sharing the league championship with Claremont-Mudd-Scripps after the Stags won the tournament. Pomona-Pitzer capped its season with a strong performance at the WWPA Championships, taking a narrow 14-12 loss to second-seeded Loyola Marymount, and then defeating Claremont-Mudd-Scripps and No. 19 Santa Clara in a pair of one-goal games. Jason Cox PI ’13 was named second-team All-WWPA, while Mark Hudnall ’13 (first team) and Ryan Higgins ’14 (second team) joined him on the All-SCIAC teams. Head Coach Alex Rodriguez was also honored in January with the Distinguished Coaching Award from USA Water Polo.

 Men’s Basketball: Winter Dramatics

As the fall season winded to a close, the winter started with some major drama as the men’s basketball team pulled a big 81-79 upset over Westmont in its season opener on Nov. 16. The Sagehens trailed 79-76 with 20 seconds left, but Kyle McAndrews ’15 hit a three-pointer to tie it. Then, after Westmont called a timeout to try to set up the winning play, Michael Cohen ’15 poked the ball free in the paint, McAndrews scooped it up and dribbled coast-to-coast before shoveling a pass to Jake Klewer ’14, who scored as the buzzer sounded for a thrilling victory.

—Jeremy Kniffin

Lost Worlds

Lost Worlds: Sometimes the map itself is the treasure. Here, four cartographical curiosities unfold, revealing hidden realms and long-forgotten locales.
PHANTOM OF THE FOOTHILLS

Planned as the original building site for Pomona College, Piedmont  is the college town that never was.

 For a place that never really existed, Piedmont turned out to be surprisingly easy to find.

The would-be burg dreamed up long ago as the permanent site for Pomona College couldn’t even be called a ghost town: Little more than a cornerstone was ever put in place, and even that was eventually moved away. Still, all the historical hubbub surrounding the College’s 125th anniversary piqued my curiosity about the location the Pomona Progress all those years ago declared was just right for the future college: “No sightlier spot could have been selected. The tract is … the very perfection of Southern California.”

 Then came a real estate crash, and, soon after, an offer from the nearby struggling settlement of Claremont, which had an empty hotel to offer the College. After some tussling, the Piedmont plan was dropped for good, and the never-built town became just one of many SoCal settlements that didn’t make it past maps.

  There remained, however, a photo from the September day in 1888 when hundreds of people gathered at the base of the foothills north of Pomona for the cornerstone ceremony. That old black and white helped lead me back to the spot known as Piedmont Mesa and its faint traces of the College’s beginnings.

 Next I turned to the tomes. The histories of the College—particularly Frank Brackett’s Granite and Sagebrush—were quite clear in placing the Piedmont Mesa at the mouth of Live Oak Canyon, a locationI know well having driven through it at least a hundred times.

 So my editorial co-conspirator Mark Wood and I set off to do a little legwork and pinpoint Piedmont more precisely. Once there, we called up that old photo of the cornerstone ceremony on his iPhone.

 Even on the little screen, it was easy to line up the old view with the present one, since the hills had changed so little in 125 years. Comparing the two views, it looked to us like the site of the original cornerstone—later relocated—might just lie beneath the 210 Freeway, which today slices through the site.

 The street names bore witness to history as well. We were standing near the intersection of Piedmont Mesa Road and College Way. And then came the twist: Looking closely at the markings on those street signs, and later checking with the map, I couldn’t help but notice that even the original site dedicated to become a permanent home for Pomona College wound up within the city limits of … Claremont.

NEW TRACKS, OLD PATHS

When Dan Hickstein ’06 set out on an adventurous quest to chart the mountain-bike trails of Colorado, he ran smack dab into the state’s wild mining past.

Map by Mike Boruta / Fixed Pin Publishing

 Dan Hickstein ’06 recently took a year-long “sabbatical” from the chemical physics Ph.D. program at the University of Colorado at Boulder to ride the trails and write the definitive guidebook to mountain biking in the rustic realm he now calls home.

 Good maps were key to his quest. The outdoors adventurer, who earlier studied x-ray crystallography on a Churchill Scholarship to Cambridge, was unsatisfied with other Colorado biking guidebooks that contained hand-drawn maps that would leave him and his friends lost in the woods. Equipped with GPS, he set out to gather all the raw data that the book’s cartographer needed to get the maps just right.

Dan Hickstein ’06 in the Gold Hill, Colo., area. (Photo by Craig Hoffman.)

Naturally, he also had to ride every single trail, and that’s when he ran into something he didn’t expect. Many of those awesome, high-altitude rides led him smack dab into Colorado’s colorful past. You might think of mountain biking in the Rockies as a series of rugged trails, breathtaking views and run-ins with the weather—and it was all those things. But on the trails Hickstein also encountered closed-off mine shafts, “creepy, abandoned mining buildings” and once-bustling towns that had all but disappeared.

Over and over, he kept running across the remnants of the state’s mining rush in the late 1800s, later waves of mining, and the remains of various “crazy schemes,” including railroad tunnels blasted through 12,000-foot-high ridgelines and opulent summer resorts that are now long abandoned.

This convergence of mountain biking and history makes sense. Years ago, miners and engineers forged new paths through the mountains, and given the difficulty and danger involved in making them, those trails would remain of use long after. On the Switzerland Trail, pictured here, near what Hickstein calls the “quasi-ghost town” of Gold Hill, the mountain biking trail follows a path created over 150 years ago for a narrow-gauge railroad that once served mining towns. “So, when you ride the trail, you’re following the same path as the prospectors who rode the train up into the mountains with the hopes of striking it rich,” writes Hickstein.

Hickstein does concede that his brushes with history sometimes slowed the book project down. He’d ride past rustic ruins and later look them up to discover the settlement once had been filled with hotels, bars and brothels. He’d get lost in reading about some little town and how silver prices had shot up and then crashed after the Sherman Silver Purchase Act and … then he’d notice three hours had passed by and “Oh, man, I’ve got nothing done.”

Fortunately, he was able to include some of the historical tidbits—along with 118 maps—in his recently published book, The Mountain Biker’s Guide to Colorado (Fixed Pin Publishing). Hickstein is now a fourth-year grad student at University of Colorado, where he studies how ultrafast lasers can be used to make super-slow-motion movies of chemical reactions. But after a long day in the lab, Hickstein still finds time to ride the trails, sometimes even bringing along his own tome and its trusty maps.

THE COMMON-SENSE CARTOGRAPHER

At the dawn of the Jet Age, Hal Shelton ’38 shook up the crusty world of cartography by making maps in which the colors matched the landscape.

Hal Shelton’38 changed the way we see the world, at least on paper. He brought artistry, color and a dash of common sense to the crusty field of cartography at the dawn of the Jet Age. Today, his maps are considered cartographic masterpieces.

An art major at Pomona, Shelton was introduced to cartography just after graduating when he went to work for the U.S. Geological Survey creating topographical maps in the field. Perplexed by some of the conventions of mapmaking, he became interested in the idea of “natural color”—making the area mapped look like it does to the eye.

“Up until Shelton came onto the scene, when you made maps, the color would represent, say, political areas [or] elevation …,” notes Tom Patterson, a National Park Service cartographer who has written extensively on Shelton’s career. “He really revolted against that idea because he felt that when people see these colors, they don’t think of elevation, they think of land cover and vegetation.”

The U.S.G.S. wasn’t interested at first, but soon enough the military was, and Shelton did some work for the Air Force during World War II. According to Shelton’s son Stony, his father’s big break came after the war when he met Elrey Jeppesen, a pilot who had started an aeronautical mapping business. Jeppesen saw the potential in Shelton’s approach, and soon the artist was making airline maps for the traveling public. The idea was that air travelers could look at maps that matched the terrain they saw out the window. “This was at the beginning of the jet era,” says Patterson. “People would get dressed up to go on an airline.”

 If the natural color concept seems straightforward—forests are green, deserts are brown— the execution required patience, skill and considerable expense. Decades before satellite imagery was widely available, Jeppesen hired academic geographers to gather the data, which was etched into zinc plates about two to three feet in diameter. Working on an inch at a time, Shelton then painstakingly painted on the landscape features along with shaded relief to show elevation. His artistry yielded “realistic picture maps that astound the cartographic world,” as The New York Times gushed in 1954.

The series of maps Shelton painted for Jeppesen came to be used not only by airlines but also in classrooms and by NASA. Even today, the work of Shelton, who died in 2004, remains relevant for cartographers. Raw satellite images hold too much “noise” and distraction, says Patterson, while Shelton’s less-literal technique brings out the most important features of the landscape to create an image that a casual reader can make sense of.

“He painted the entire world, he liked to say sometimes,” recalls Stony, who notes his father went on to create a series of well-known maps of Colorado ski areas and then left the cartographic work behind for a prolific career painting landscape scenes. “He created these, beautiful, beautiful maps that were just the landforms as they looked from space.”

And what became of those maps? The originals—valued at the time at more than $1 million—were donated to the Library of Congress in 1985 and exhibited with fanfare in 1997, when Shelton was flown to D.C. to take part in a showing timed to the maps division’s 100th anniversary. Years later, though, when Patterson came to see them at the maps division’s vast storage facility, Shelton’s creations led a more down-to-earth existence, tucked away among the “cabinets that just go on and on in the basement of the place.”

JEST OF THE WEST

Pulling together his father’s long-forgotten cowboy comic strips, Richard Huemer ’54 delved into an imaginary western world — and his dad’s psyche.

Just as Richard Huemer ’54 was settling into his first semester on Pomona’s leafy and idyllic campus, his father was bringing to life a very different realm in the newspaper comics.

Mesa Trubil, a weedy Western outpost so vile that the government wouldn’t claim it as part of the U.S.A., had only one hope in the form of hero on horseback Buck O’Rue. The noble and naïve cowboy tangled with malevolent Mayor Trigger Mortis and his henchmen, all the while dazzling love interest Dorable Duncan with his bravery.

The satirical strip was born of a career setback for Richard’s dad. Dick Huemer had been laid off from his job as a Disney writer, and that allowed him to pursue the project he had talked about for years. “He desperately needed something to do,” recalls Richard.

With Disney colleague Paul Murry on board to do the drawing, Dick Huemer got a small syndicate in Cleveland to promote the strip. But perhaps due to the syndicate’s limited reach, the strip didn’t go over big. And just as Buck hit the papers, Dick was back in the saddle at Disney, where his career later included co-writing Dumbo. By late 1952, the strip was kaput.

Dick Huemer died in 1979, but it wasn’t until Richard’s mother passed on 20 years later that the old comic came back into view as Richard sorted through his mother’s possessions. “The Buck O’Rue proofs were among the things she had saved all these years,” he says.

Next, Richard was contacted by a Swedish graduate student, Germund von Wowern, who was interested in the work of illustrator Murry (later one of the best-known illustrators of Mickey Mouse). The Swede wanted to know if Richard had any proofs of a strip called Buck O’Rue. Did he? Richard had nearly all of them.

Out of that came a 10-year collaboration through which Richard and von Wowern unearthed and filled in the missing pieces of the story of Buck O’Rue. Their efforts culminated with the publication last year of a 300-page book of old O’Rue strips accompanied by commentary.

Along the way, Richard gained insight into the era—and his own father. The strapping cowboy hero, in Richard’s eyes, epitomizes the America of the time. “There was a great deal of optimism,” he says. “And a feeling that we could do anything.”

Still, Richard’s adult eyes couldn’t ignore some things he missed in his youth. As Richard notes in the tome, Buck confronted a relentlessly foul cast of characters in Mesa Trubil, where political corruption was rife. Some of the strips featured a crazy old miner who carelessly tosses around his “schmatum bomb” that could destroy the world. All in all, the comic strip was rather bleak in its worldview, which Richard says seemed to reflect his father’s own outlook.

“He covered it with his jocularity. He liked humor and wordplay,” recalls Richard. “Inevitably, when you delve into the work of someone you know, you understand more about them.” So from those long-forgotten funnies, Richard wound up with a more rounded and complex picture of his dad. “That was a voyage of discovery for me, too,” he says.

The Football Wars

The Football Wars: The football wars raged on until the strange Christmas Day game in which the Sagehens helped put rugby to rest.

In those bleaker moments, with a player writhing on the field—again—it seems as if there’s no fixing football. The sheer force of the sport’s intrinsic and inextricable violence overwhelms one well-meaning new rule after another. There is some wringing of hands by authority figures—even the President, an ardent sports fan, expresses some grave concerns about the game and its costs—and a sense that Something Must Be Done, if notably less sense of what that might be. That was the state of football in 1906.

It’s the state of football in 2013, too. The same managed, choreographed violence that drives the game’s popularity can’t be managed or choreographed into un-violence. That reality, football’s defining conflict and central contradiction, would be recognizable to a fan from 1906. The game itself, though, would not be. Contemporary football’s intricate passing-driven offenses, as well as the speed, strength, skill and sheer tonnage of the players involved, make today’s game seem even more than a century removed from the version played around the turn of the 20th Century.

Take, for instance, the game played between Pomona and Stanford on Oct. 27, 1906, at Fiesta Park in Los Angeles. The players on those two teams averaged a little under 160 pounds. (If you were wondering: There is no player on this year’s Stanford roster who weighs less than 170 pounds, and a dozen listed at 298 pounds or more.) This wasn’t just a time in which Pomona College had a football rivalry with the 2012 Rose Bowl Champions, it was a time in which those two football teams were roughly equivalent in size and skill. But the strangest thing about that 1906 game was that these two teams of football players were squaring off in a game of rugby. How and why they were doing that is something of a long story, but it comes back to football’s old—and still contemporary—crisis of violence.

COLLEGE FOOTBALL IN THE EARLY part of the 20th century was, by and large, an East Coast pursuit. While Pomona and Occidental had rivalries with present-day Pac-12 powerhouses such as USC, Cal Berkeley and Stanford, those games and the teams playing them weren’t held in especially high regard nationally. But if California football was considered, in the words of a 1905 article in Outing Magazine, “slow and second class,” the game was no less violent west of the Rockies.

The game’s roughness was then, as it is now, both a part of the game’s appeal and its distinctive mythos. No less a fan than Theodore Roosevelt wrote, in an 1893 response to concerns about football violence in Harper’s, that, “the sports especially dear to a vigorous and manly nation are always those in which there is a certain slight element of risk. Every effort should be made to minimize this risk, but it is mere unmanly folly to do away with the sport because the risk exists.” But injuries and even deaths continued to occur on the field, and the sporting press of the period happily hyped the violence. The presence of bought-and-paid-for players on bigger and more ethically flexible teams—a problem big-time college football is still working on, actually—added to the appearance of chaos. A round of rule changes in 1905 legalized the forward pass, opening up the game and diminishing the importance of the dull, grunt-y, straight-ahead brutality that the football writer Caspar Whitney dubbed “the beef trust.” The changes also led to the creation of the Intercollegiate Athletic Association, the predecessor of the NCAA. On the East Coast, university presidents further responded to the rising tide of injuries and on-field deaths with a series of “debrutalization” measures designed to make the game safer.

Unsurprisingly, they didn’t quite work. “The season of ‘debrutalized’ football ended … with a record of eleven deaths and ninety-eight players more or less seriously injured,” The New York Times reported in November of 1907. This was only a slight reduction in casualties and no reduction at all in the number of fatalities, although the Times did note, hopefully, that “not a single serious injury has been sustained by Yale, Harvard or Princeton.” On the West Coast, at Cal and Stanford, university presidents were notably more proactive. They dumped football entirely for the 1906 season, and replaced it with rugby.

This was not necessarily a popular decision at the time. In June of 1907, Berkeley high school students (naturally) staged demonstrations against the imposition of what the newspapers of the time called “the English game.” But the shift to rugby was one that Pomona reluctantly made as well. They had to play against someone, after all.

 THE GREAT RUGBY EXPERIMENT didn’t last long at Pomona. Pomona was shut out by Cal, and while the Sagehens did win a tune-up game against Pomona High School in early October—“The game was not a particularly brilliant one,” the Los Angeles Times sniffed—they didn’t fare nearly as well against collegiate competition. Pomona was shut out again, 26-0, by Stanford shortly after that win against the local high school. “Pomona made a game fight to the end, and came very close to being enti-tled to a score,” the Los Angeles Times reported, quite possibly sarcastically. The headline in the Times, three days after that game, read “Pomona Drops Rugby Games.”

This was not the end of California’s football war. It was the end of intercollegiate rugby’s attempt at supplanting football at Pomona; the football team was back at practice by Halloween. It took Occidental and Whittier several years to follow suit, but within a few years a schism had emerged: Cal, Stanford and other Northern California schools played rugby, while by 1910, Pomona, Whittier and Occidental were playing football again, albeit against each other and teams from Colorado and Oregon instead of their larger and more geographically proximate rivals. “The two northern universities have adopted rugby for all time,” the Los Angeles Times columnist Owen Bird wrote in 1912. “The University of Southern California saw the way the tide was setting last year and took up the new game. Now it looks to be only a matter of time until the [Occidental] Tigers and the Sage Hens are forced to take up the game or lose standing with the athletic students of Southern California.

“This was not necessarily sportswriterly hyperbole on Bird’s part. “Rugby and American football are about on a par here,” Bird wrote, later in 1912. “This season will tell the tale as to which will survive.”

The answer, for a while, was both. Stanford, Cal and USC stuck with rugby, playing each other and teams from Canada and Australia for (very-far-) away games; the New Zealand All-Blacks, then as now one of the premier rugby sides in the world, swung through for an exhibition in 1913. But if rugby was an improvement on the brutal, dull, two-yards-and-a-cloud-of-ugh version of football that existed prior to the “debrutalization” rules and later reforms, the game that had emerged in the intervening years was a different thing—something slightly less bruising, a good deal more open, and notably more like the sport that’s currently the most popular in the United States by a wide margin. With the more pass-friendly and marginally less vicious game catching on in the rest of the nation—and booming in Southern California—the rugby schools were increasingly isolated. And then, in 1913, Pat Higgins initiated USC’s proud tradition of high-confidence, high-volume football coaches by injecting some trash-talk into the dispute.

“It will be remembered that Pat Higgins stated recently that he could get up a football team of rugby players, who could show the American players a few tricks at their own trade,” Bird wrote in the Times on Dec. 12, 1913. “Said speech caused a river of wild argument to be loosed upon our devoted heads.” Less metaphorically, it also led to a heavily-hyped exhibition American-style football game on Christmas Day, at Washington Park in Los Angeles. Higgins put together a team of elite rugby players from Cal, Stanford, Santa Clara and USC; coach Jack d’Aule built a team of his own, with Pomona (four players) and Whittier (five) represented heavily. “This squad of local intercollegiate men are fast, in condition, veterans of the game, and, best of all, are fired by a mighty impulse to defend the game they love,” Bird wrote. The opposing side, Bird noted, “[ran] to beef”—they outweighed the football players by 23 pounds per player, on average. They were, for the most part, the best rugby players in the United States.

It is, admittedly, something of a stretch to say that the resounding and lopsided 24-2 win that the team of smaller players from smaller schools rolled up that day saved college football in California. The game was not necessarily going anywhere; there is, for better or worse, something in the American psyche and populace that loves football. It was still several years before the rugby schools—Stanford was the last—dropped the sport in favor of football, although it’s safe to say that their programs have recovered from the blow. But while football still has a great many problems of its own to sort out, that Pomona-powered win a little over a century ago did at least ensure that rugby isn’t one of them.

 

Hologram or Bust

Hologram or Bust: Visiting (the papers of) David Foster Wallace at the Harry Ransom Center

I.
I Fly to Austin to Visit an Archive of the Entire Works and Life Papers of My Writing Mentor and Once Professor

The great thing about being a writer is that you send out vague emails like the one I sent asking the editor of this magazine if he had any work for me, and sometimes something wonderful, and completely beyond the value of money comes back. That was what happened when the editor of this magazine asked me if I might want to go to Austin to spend some time with the papers of David Foster Wallace who, despite my complicated feelings around his death, remains the most influential writer and perhaps more importantly, teacher, in my life.

A few weeks later, I was flying to Austin on-schedule through sheets of unbroken blue spotted with perfect clouds reminiscent of the original cover of Infinite Jest.

II.
The First Time I Encountered David Foster Wallace, the Writer

I found that blue-sky book in my father’s office in our house in 1996, opened it and didn’t leave my bed for five days. I was 15. I can’t remember whether I was actually sick or just decided to stay home “sick” from school for a week so I could do nothing but read Infinite Jest from morning until night.

All I know is that absorbing those words for the first time, for me, was a kind of transport as real as the flight I took from JFK to Austin. It was more than half my life ago, but I still have a very visceral memory of the days I shared with that book in my bed in my sophomore year of high school. I remember those days reading Infinite Jest in flashes, as if they were sections of a scary and wonderful trip I took by myself away from the teenage high school place I was stuck in at that time and so longed to escape, and into a terrain far more sophisticated and complicated. It was the kind of journey that, even though it had to end, when I got back I was permanently changed, and I knew it. Another way to say this would be that in adolescence, before I stumbled upon Infinite Jest, I was sad, but I thought the sadness I felt was unique to me, and that made me sadder. After reading Infinite Jest, I realized that there was a vast, great, adult sadness in the world that I was only likely experiencing the very tip of at that particular adolescent moment, and that made me feel significantly less sad.

I know now that many people feel that sense of both change and of having their specific sadness understood and put to words for the first time when they first read the work of David Foster Wallace. I didn’t know it then. I just knew that despite being an insatiable reader since I could put letters together, I finally had a favorite author.

III.
The First Time I Encountered David Wallace, the Professor

By the time I arrived at Pomona in 1999, I had read all of David Foster Wallace’s books that he had published up to that time except one and loved and was likely changed by them all. (The one book I hadn’t read was Signifying Rappers: Rap and Race in the Urban Present, because it was harder to get, and still is. I should probably still get it.)

I met David Wallace the person and professor in 2002, in the fall semester of my senior year. I had just returned from taking the previous semester off. During my semester off, I hiked the Appalachian Trail. I walked from Georgia to Maine, over 2,000 miles. I was struggling with a lot of things that now, as a professor, I understand are not uncommon for college students to struggle with. At the time, however, I thought my struggles meant I might not come back to Pomona in the fall when and if I finished my epic hike. I felt like maybe I wasn’t in the right place to be in college, or that college maybe wasn’t the right place for me to be.

I met with my advisor at the time, a professor in the English Department whom I also still admire. I told him that even though I was leaving college to live in the wilderness for six months to walk until I (I hoped) became unrecognizable to myself, I needed all the information he had available so that I could apply to the workshop I’d heard rumors that David Foster Wallace was coming to teach at Pomona in the fall. My advisor then said what many writers I respect have said to me about the writing of David Foster Wallace since. He said he didn’t know what everyone was so excited about, because he thought David Foster Wallace was sophomoric. I told my advisor that I was only a junior, and that when I had fallen in love with the writing of David Foster Wallace I had actually been a sophomore in high school, so that made perfect sense.

A few months later, I mailed in my story to apply to be in Professor Wallace’s Advanced Fiction Writing Workshop from a small outpost in rural Tennessee on the Appalachian Trail. It was the first story I had ever written from beginning to end, and it was about opening my father’s stacks of forbidden journals to find that they were not full of racy life experiences but instead of lists and lists of the books he had read when he was younger. I don’t know if I got into the workshop because the story was any good or if Wallace was just impressed with how battered the envelope was from being lugged around in my pack in the woods. I just know that I wasn’t a writer when I went into his workshop, and I was when I came out.

IV.
I Find Enough Wallace Files to Build a Fort Out of File Folders, No Make That A Whole Empire of Forts, So I Make Some Ground Rules and Start Sifting

There are five “collections” of papers at the Harry Ransom Center that come up if you do a search for David Foster Wallace. Each collection has an average of one to 10 “series,” which are groups of containers. From there, the numbers get complicated. The number of containers in each series varies greatly. The number of boxes in each container also varies greatly. The number of folders in each box—you get the idea.

One way to think of the categorical branching off of the material remnants of Wallace’s life would be like being surrounded by the folds and memory files of a giant, sterile, academic brain. I’m not a neuroscientist, so forgive me for the crudeness of this metaphor when it comes to its scientific roots. But at certain moments, going through those carefully ordered compartments of paper—being in the reading room at the Ransom Center did feel like being inside a brain in the best kind of way. A brain where everything had finally been sorted and smoothed and was organized once and for all to be shared, something I guessed Wallace might have appreciated, at least based on the lamentations about how hard it was to communicate the chaos in one’s head in an orderly way on paper that I was reading over and over as I sifted through those concrete-colored cardboard boxes of correspondence.

Confronted with so much paper, I had to determine what not to write about. After significant deliberation, I decided:

1. I would not write about manuscripts, various versions of manuscripts, or Wallace’s marginalia on manuscripts. I knew this was the kind of undertaking that would require far more time than I had at the University of Texas at Austin. Also, after having Wallace as a professor, I really respect him as a reviser, so I was not that interested in mining earlier drafts.

2. I would not write about Wallace’s correspondence that had to do with pitching his books and other writing. It seemed to me to be the most business part of the files, and I was interested in the opposite.

3. I would not write about his personal correspondence. It was just too sad. Exposing it without permission would feel like a violation. I will say that there were some fun postcards. I left the archive with the resolution to send more postcards, especially when not traveling. Favorites included pulp book covers such as A Woman Must Love: She Thought She Could Live Without Men, a photo of Truman Capote luxuriating at home in a bathrobe and Stetson, and a photo of an old geezer that Wallace had drawn a voice bubble for with the words, “Kein kluger Streiter hält den Feind gering.” I put the line into Google and learned it was a quote by Goethe. Translated, it reads, “No prudent antagonist thinks light of his adversary.”

4. I would not present the reader with just lists—lists of the words Wallace looked up and wrote his own definitions of, lists of the readings he assigned his students. I couldn’t fit those amazing lists into this brief article even if I wanted to. There were too many and they were too long! One folder I scanned of words Wallace wrote the definitions of is 100 pages long. Most of the pages are filled with lists of words in small print and they are on both sides. I hope someone someday publishes a book of his lists: lists of words, lists of recommended readings … I have a feeling someone will … In the meantime, here are a few gems that Wallace looked up the definitions of: vituperations, littoral, oneiric copralalia, tenesmus, gomphosis, coruscate, felo de se, votary, sapropel, nonceword, polyandry, logorrhea, facula, stellify, comether, rimple, hypolimnion and adumbrate. I leave it to you to take to the dictionary to unearth their meanings. One thing is certain about the David Wallace I knew as a student at Pomona, he would want you to work for it.

V.
The Single Most Joyful Thing I Found While Sifting Through the Papers of My Dead Professor

As I returned various boxes to the reference librarian, I slowly realized that what I was most interested in, and what fellow Sagehens were likely to be most interested in, was David Wallace the professor and David Wallace the person. That was how we knew him best after all. I decided to leave David Foster Wallace, fascinating and heartbreaking as he was in the pages I sifted through, to the people who knew him as a writer, in that way while he was still alive—to leave it up to them to decide when and what to
share from that aspect of the archive.

My favorite folder was the folder of the photocopies of the American Heritage Dictionary ballots. Wallace was a member of the company’s board that governed decisions on usage, spelling and pronunciation. The ballots show the feedback he gave to the American Heritage Dictionary over the years on items they sent him to review.

I think I was especially delighted to find Wallace’s dictionary ballots after reading his personal letters to the writer Don DeLillo, many of which seemed tortured or fraught with insecurity and self-doubt, because when Wallace is commenting on the dictionary ballots there is not a shred of that self-consciousness in his obvious joy in interacting so directly with pure language in its most naked state. Whether he is appalled at the way most people don’t understand the meaning of “to beg the question,” or enthusiastically approving the many acceptable different ethnic pronunciations of the words “bayou” or “calzone,” it is clear that there is no terror or stress for him on these pages, only an incredibly exuberant love of the words, stripped down to their barest selves.

Though Wallace may have wrestled with his role as a writer, his role as a grammarian and expert on words was clearly pleasing to him, and carried with it none of the burden of assemblage that creating novels and other texts did. I like looking at these dictionary ballots because, even in this quiet room that I can’t help feeling is a tomb of some kind, his joy and the thrill he got from his expert manipulation of the English language shines through.

When I reach the end of the folder of dictionary usage ballots dated 11-04-05, I get a pang seeing that he has listed a permanent change of address to Claremont, California, after he had already lived there three years. The address snaps me out of the paper and back to thinking about how difficult it is to reflect, on the one hand, about your friend whom you admired, who died, and on the other, about the intersection of your somewhat normal life with the life of someone whose papers end up in an archive … it’s difficult and disorienting to try to reconcile the two.

I only knew one very specific and cordoned-off part of David Wallace. Being confronted so closely with the other parts, having access to so many of them, felt reckless and unnatural, almost as if I was traveling through time. At points, I had to remind myself that Don DeLillo is still alive—that the dictionary ballots I was looking through were filled out by Wallace two years after I graduated from Pomona, only eight years ago. Retrieving them from those files in the archive where the papers of other great thinkers, long dead, were kept changed them somehow. It made him feel less like a person or friend, and more like a dead great writer.

VI.
There are More Than 40 Bronze Busts of (Predominantly White Male) Authors in the Harry Ransom Center, and a Bust of David Foster Wallace is Not Yet Among Them

There is an epigraph printed on the wall as you enter the reading room where you go to request the files. It is cited only as coming from the Hebrew Union Prayer Book. It reads, “So long as we live, they too shall live, for they are now a part of us, as we remember them.”

There are also the busts of great dead authors everywhere, immortalized in bronze inside the reading room, on the halls leading up to it and on the floor below where you enter the building that is designed to protect the delicate remembrances of great men from excesses of heat or light. Unfortunately, the busts are mostly old white men, which makes me start to wonder about the obvious question.

Who decides who gets a bust?

I walk around photographing all the bronze busts, metal, immortal monuments to other “great” authors (photographing is a way of looking when you are in an archive trying to absorb as much as possible). It is only when I get to the last one that I realize I had been hoping to find a bust of Wallace. There isn’t one. At least not yet.

Some of the authors get more than one bust inside the Ransom Center. There are three James Joyces, two Hemingways, two George Bernard Shaws. Steinbeck’s mustache is sculpted in a way that makes him look like a bullfighter, Tom Stoppard’s bust looks an awful lot like Mick Jagger, the two women who have been chosen above all the rest seem to be somewhat randomly Edith Sitwell and Edna St. Vincent Millay. Sitwell’s bust is also the only one that isn’t at least somewhat realistic. The rendering of her head as a giant, balloon-ish, moonlike white marble sphere with enlarged, alien eyes is eerily out of place, as if, in the afterlife, only her soul out of them all is not shaped like a person.

Perhaps someday there will be many busts to represent the many David Wallaces. The wacky young Wallace, eternally bandana-ed. The junior tennis pro. The fat, sweaty Wallace I saw read as a sort of audition for the post he came to fill the following year, significantly more svelte. The drug-addicted atheist and the sober Christian. It’s possible bronze is too ancient a material to capture a personality with so many genuine permutations. The future is long. Maybe someone will commission a hologram. Then, perhaps, the next time I come to visit these papers (I suspect there will be a next time), between the busts of Whitman and Frost, there will be a simulacrum of my old professor, made of light, chewing tobacco and spitting it into an old, dirty peanut butter jar, just as he used to do in class.