Blog Articles

Bookmarks Winter 2020

The 9 Pitfalls of Data ScienceThe 9 Pitfalls of Data Science

Fletcher Jones Professor of Economics Gary Smith and co-author Jay Cordes ’93 tell cautionary tales of data science successes and failures, showing readers how to distinguish between good data science and nonsense.


Living the California Dream: African American Leisure Sites During the Jim Crow EraLiving the California Dream: African American Leisure Sites During the Jim Crow Era

Alison Rose Jefferson ’80 explores how during the Jim Crow era in Southern California, a growing population of African Americans pioneered America’s “frontier of leisure” and worked to make recreational sites and public spaces open and inclusive.


Heartthrob del Balboa Café al Apartheid and BackHeartthrob
del Balboa Café al Apartheid and Back

Professor of Romance Languages and Literature Susana Chávez-Silverman has penned a memoir that is a love story woven together in both English and Spanish, traversing from San Francisco to South Africa and asking us to consider how things could have been.


Donuts Are Meant to be EatenDonuts Are Meant to be Eaten

Alex Cook ’82 introduces the Barton clan in this first of a family dramedy series that covers a range of experiences: from what it feels like to be an adolescent male in the late ’70s in the South to offering insight into the life of a disillusioned wife and mother in a post tech revolution world.


Dreaming of Arches National ParkDreaming of Arches National Park

This children’s book co-written and photographed by Grant Collier ’96 and set in Arches National Park, is a story of the adventures of Cayenne, a coyote that doesn’t like to sleep.


A Knowledge Representation Practionary: Guidelines Based on Charles Sanders PeirceA Knowledge Representation Practionary: Guidelines Based on Charles Sanders Peirce

Mike Bergman ’74, web scientist and entrepreneur for a series of internet companies, writes of his experience in installing semantic technology and artificial intelligence projects for enterprise customers over many years.


Chasing GodsChasing Gods

This novel by Willard Berry ’61 is a chronicle of the calamitous life of his third great-grandfather, who lived from 1788-1852. Berry came across this ancestor’s strange life while doing genealogical research.


US Democracy Promotion in the Arab World: Beyond Interests vs. IdealsUS Democracy Promotion in the Arab World: Beyond Interests vs. Ideals

Mieczysław (Mietek) Boduszyński, professor of politics and international relations and former U.S. diplomat goes beyond the question of whether the U.S. should promote democracy in the Arab world and pushes further to examine the why, where and how.


BOOK SUBMISSIONS

If you’ve had a book published and would like to submit it for inclusion in Bookmarks, please send a review copy to Sneha Abraham, PCM Book Editor, 550 North College Ave., Claremont, CA 91711

Theatre Reimagined

No two productions of a play are ever quite the same—that’s one of the things that makes theatre a living art. Variations in direction, performance and design can give an old play a facelift, but now and then, there are reinterpretations so extreme that they give a play a whole new relevance and meaning. That was the case last fall for both of the major productions undertaken by Pomona’s Theatre Department—the musical Pippin and Lolita Chakrabarti’s Victorian play within a play, Red Velvet.

A scene from Pomona’s production of Red Velvet

A scene from Pomona’s production of Red Velvet

Red Velvet is the true story of the American black actor Ira Aldridge who came to London in the 1800s and was cast to play the great Shakespearean role of Othello at a time when there were public riots in the streets over the abolition of slavery. Chakrabarti chose to portray Aldridge as a tragic figure in his own right, driven mad by rejection as the play comes to a close.

But director Kenshaka Ali and his students thought the playwright had it all wrong. So they turned the play on its head—subverting the text to transform the main character, in Ali’s words, “from one who was victimized and who died a maddened or demented, enraged old man to one who indeed was a victor instead.”

A scene from Pomona’s production of Pippin

A scene from Pomona’s production of Pippin

In the case of Pippin, which debuted on Broadway in the 1970s, the work of Stephen Schwartz, Roger O. Hirson and choreographer Bob Fosse, the transformation was mostly visual and musical, using hip-hop and the Japanese animation style known as anime to give the play a more contemporary look and sound—and, according to guest director Tim Dang, one that is far more familiar to the students of Generation Z.

“I don’t even know if hip-hop and anime have ever been integrated,” says Dang. “There might be a couple of anime stories that do incorporate a hip-hop kind of culture. But it’s a very interesting mix because anime originally started in Japan and hip-hop originated in Brooklyn. We’re in this together and creating something that I think is very unique for Pomona College.”

All In on Voter Turnout

At a ceremony in Washington, D.C., in November, Lucas Carmel ’19 was honored as one of 10 students from across the country on the “All In” Campus Democracy Challenge Student Honor Role. The award is in recognition of his leadership last year in a nonpartisan voter participation drive on Pomona College’s campus.

Carmel, along with Michaela Shelton ’21, led efforts to get out the vote at Pomona. Their work paid off with voter turnout among Pomona College students almost tripling from the 2014 to 2018 midterm elections, according to a report released Sept. 20 by the National Study of Learning, Voting and Engagement (NSLVE). In 2018, 50.4% of Pomona College students voted compared to 17.4% in 2014.

A group of students at Pomona College led by Carmel and Shelton began to organize a nonpartisan effort to get out the vote in the summer of 2018. That’s when the group joined the “All In” Campus Democracy Challenge, a national awards program that encourages colleges and universities to increase student voting rates.

“So many people worked to promote voting on campus last fall, and today we get to see proof of just how successful that effort was,” Carmel said in September when the results were announced. “I think Pomona’s status as a leader in college voting has been cemented. The challenge now becomes: How do we maintain and continue to promote voter engagement on campus?”

Carmel, who graduated last May, recently launched Vote for Astra, his organization dedicated to making it easier for college students to vote.

Art on the Move

fragile art objects from the museum’s old storage Sometime this fall, the Pomona College Museum of Art will cease to exist, and the Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College will be born in its beautiful new quarters on the opposite corner of the intersection of College and Second. To prepare for that change, for the past few months, the museum’s associate director and registrar, Steve Comba, has been overseeing the effort to inventory, pack and safely move approximately 15,000 valuable and often fragile art objects from the museum’s old storage into the new. Already in their new home are the artifacts of the museum’s Native American collection, previously stored in the basement of Bridges Auditorium and brought out mainly for visiting schoolchildren.

Papers, Politics, Policy

Prof. Amanda Hollis-Brusky’s paper on the promotion of a theory of executive power and its consequences is making its way to the other two branches of government

How Prof. Amanda Hollis-Brusky’s paper on the promotion of a theory of executive power and its consequences is making its way to the other two branches of government

In 2011, during her first year at Pomona College, Politics Professor Amanda Hollis-Brusky wrote a paper on the rise of the “unitary executive theory,” used in recent decades to promote the notion of the primacy of presidential power and limit the autonomy of federal agencies. The paper was part of Hollis-Brusky’s larger work on the conservative legal movement.

In January, U.S. Senators Sheldon Whitehouse, Richard Blumenthal and Mazie Hirono cited and relied heavily on Professor Hollis-Brusky’s in their amicus curiae brief filed in a big U.S. Supreme Court case Seila Law v. CFPB, which may decide the fate of the Obama-era Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Arguments are set for March 3.

100 Years Ago

It’s 1920, and Pomona College is entering the Roaring Twenties—facing, among other things, the challenges of dancing and Hollywood.

Everybody Dance

With the close of World War I came a push to overturn the strict college rules against dancing on campus. As recently as 1918, an editorial in The Student Life had lamented that “The principle of non-dancing has become ingrained into the very fiber of the institution for reasons which the executives can best express, and it is worse than futile for us to oppose it.” The post-war culture shift, however, soon carried away that prohibition, and, as informal campus dances became common, the efforts of the administration turned to managing them. A floor committee of four men and four women supervisors were authorized “to reprimand any undesirable form of dancing or to request any person to leave the floor.” By 1922–23, four all-college formal dances were being conducted annually in the “Big Gym”—the Senior-Freshman Dance, the Christian Dance, the Military Ball and the Junior Prom.

Silence is Golden

As Hollywood became the movie capital of the world, the Pomona campus soon came into demand as a collegiate set. The Charm School, a silent feature starring Wallace Reid, was the first known movie to be shot on campus, with much of it filmed around Pomona’s Sumner Hall in 1920.

1,000 Strong

The 1921 Metate (published in 1920) notes that for the first time the number of Pomona alumni has topped 1,000.

For more tidbits of Pomona history, go to Pomona College Timeline.

In Brief

Marshall Scholar

Isaac Cui ’20 has won a prestigious Marshall Scholarship to fund his graduate studies in the United Kingdom next year. During his two years in the U.K., Cui hopes to study at the London School of Economics as well as study political science at the University of Manchester.

Churchill Scholar

Elise Koskelo ’20 has been named one of only 16 American students to win this year’s Winston Churchill Foundation Scholarship to study and conduct research at the University of Cambridge. She plans to study quantum magnetism and superconductivity.

Sustainable Thesis

The senior thesis of Sara Sherburne ’19, titled “Let’s Get Sorted: The Path to Zero Waste,” was recognized last fall by the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education as one of six winners of the national Campus Sustainability Research Award.

Solar Cell Grant

Pomona and Harvey Mudd were recently awarded a National Science Foundation Major Research Instrumentation Grant of $442,960 for new lab equipment to support research and development of next generation solar cells.

Paralympic App

While attending the 2015 Paralympic National Games in his home country of India, Arhan Bagati ’21 saw athletes literally crawling up stairs. So he created an app to guide Paralympians to locations that are accessible, including bathrooms, restaurants, theatres and more. The result was InRio and its successor, the IndTokyo app for the 2020 Tokyo Paralympic Games, available on iTunes and Google Play.

Post/Truth

The theme of the Humanities Studio’s 2019–20 speaker series is “post/truth,” exploring the various facets of today’s post-truth (un)reality through a series of speakers and seminars, including a “Fake News” Colloquium.

How to Become Dean of Pomona College

Robert Gaines

1Growing up in Alabama, the son of two history scholars, develop an abiding interest in ancient civilizations. Fall in love with things even older at age 5 when your mom brings you a fossil trilobite half a billion years old from a vacation in Utah.


2Discover in grade school that you can find fossils of sea creatures 80 million years old right behind your school. Carry that fascination with the geological record through high school to the College of William and Mary.


3In college, go on a road trip organized by a faculty mentor to the Grand Canyon and the White Mountains of California, including an unexpected detour to Utah where you encounter the source of your very first trilobite, the House Range.


4Go to the University of Cincinnati for your master’s in geology. Take a course with your future Ph.D. advisor, then on sabbatical from UC Riverside, and find her interest in studying ancient ecosystems through their fossils contagious.


5Following your mentor to California for doctoral studies, take your fascination with that first trilobite full circle when you decide to focus your Ph.D. thesis on the Cambrian ecosystems recorded in Utah’s House Range.


6As a teaching assistant at UC Riverside, find that you love teaching and get your first administrative experience when you’re hired as director of a program to train new science teaching assistants.


7Get hired for a one-year position as visiting assistant professor of geology at Pomona and fall in love with the place and its students. Apply for a tenure track position, and to your surprise, get your dream job.


8As an expert on the ecosystems and geology of the Cambrian explosion of life forms, travel the world and take part in some of the biggest paleontological discoveries of our time, from Canada to China.


9Serve as chair of the Geology Department and take leadership roles in college governance. Among other things, help create the position of chair of the faculty and co-chair the Strategic Planning Steering Committee.


10Though you’re shocked to be asked, agree to lead the College’s academic program as interim dean for one year; then, persuaded by the pleasure of working with the faculty, agree to serve for three years.

Pomona’s Kabuki Heritage

wig from a kabuki-related productionIn the early 1960s, the late Professor Leonard Pronko discovered the Japanese art of kabuki while studying theatre in Asia on a Guggenheim Fellowship. He then made history in 1970 as the first non-Japanese person ever accepted to study kabuki at the National Theatre of Japan. Bringing his fascination back to Pomona College, he directed more than 40 kabuki-related productions over the years, ranging from classic plays to original creations. The wig pictured here is one of several that remain from those productions. Below are a few facts about that intriguing Pomona artifact. (For more about Professor Pronko’s life, see In Memoriam.)

Fact 1: One of about 20 wigs kept by Pomona’s Department of Theatre and Dance in its restricted costume storage area, this geisha-style wig is part of a collection of props and costumes obtained by Pronko from Japan for his classic kabuki and kabuki-inspired theatre productions.

Fact 2: Like all wigs for female characters, it was intended to be worn by an onnagata, a male kabuki actor who performed in women’s roles.

Fact 3: Other kabuki-related items in theatre storage include swords, wigs, costumes and costume accessories.

Fact 4: Today, the costume storage area holds more than 200 period garments and 300 pieces of jewelry.

Fact 5: Most such wigs are made of either human or horse hair and styled with lacquer.

Fact 6: The origins of the Japanese word “kabuki” are simple and elegant: “Ka” means song; “bu” means dance; and “ki” means skill.

Fact 7: Pronko wrote extensively about the art of kabuki, which he said attracted him because it was so “wildly theatrical.”

Fact 8: Pronko also taught the stylized movement and vocal techniques of kabuki to generations of Pomona College students.

Fact 9: He directed a number of classic kabuki plays, including Narukami Thundergod, Ibaraki and Gohiki Kanjincho.

Fact 10: He also staged kabuki versions of such Western classics as Macbeth.

Fact 11: One of his most original productions was a “kabuki western” titled Revenge at Spider Mountain, based on his love of Native American folklore and inspired by two classic plays: Yoshitsune and the Thousand Cherry Trees and The Monster Spider.

The Poetry of Grief

Grief Sequence By Prageeta Sharma

Grief Sequence
By Prageeta Sharma
Wave Books
104 pages
Paperback $20

PROFESSOR PRAGEETA SHARMA’S recently released collection of poems, Grief Sequence, has garnered acclaim from corners with cachet. In this, her fifth book, Sharma chronicles the loss of her husband to cancer and, as The New York Times put it, she “complicates her narrative away from sentimentality and into reality-fracturing emotionality.” PCM’s Sneha Abraham sat down with Sharma to talk about death, life and the poetry she made in the midst of it all. This interview has been edited and condensed for space and clarity.

PCM: What was the inspiration? It’s loss but can you explain a little bit about it?

Sharma: This one is very different from my other books. My last book had a lot to do with race and thinking through the ideas of belonging and institutions and race and community and who gets to be a part of a community and who is outside of that community by the nature of racial differences and gender. But this one just happened because in 2014 my late husband Dale was diagnosed with esophageal cancer and he died two months after diagnosis.

And so, I was in shock and I had no sense of what had happened and, often they say with shock you lose your memory. So, for several months I couldn’t remember our long marriage. I could only remember those two months of his progressing sickness. When I told my father, who’s a mathematician who specializes in math education, that I was having trouble with sequencing (because it was something I was starting to notice), he said, “Oh well, you’ve always had trouble with sequencing. I tested you when you were five or six.” So it was sort of this joke we had about the concept of sequencing. It led me to research theories of sequential thinking; I started to think about the process of sequencing events and what to do for your recall, and what you do to process trauma, deep feelings and difficulty; I started to write in a prose poem format as much as I could: to place on a page what I could recall. And I was also doing that because I felt truly abandoned by Dale’s illness and death, which were very sudden. He died of a secondary tumor that they discovered after he inexplicably lost consciousness. So, I never had any closure.  I didn’t get to say goodbye. We thought we had several months left and didn’t prepare for his death. We had no plans of action.

He was such a complicated person that, to not have had any last conversations just put me into a state of despair. It was an unsettling place, so I had to write myself through it and speak to him and document the days through my poems. And what I didn’t realize was that with such grief comes a fierce sense of loving—believing in the concept of love. Many people say this especially when they lose a spouse—they lost someone they loved, and they didn’t plan on losing them, so they’re still open to the world and to love. They’re still open to feeling feelings. So I started to learn more about my own resilience and my strength, and I was really receptive to the process of becoming my own person. It was painful, but I wanted to document the fact that I knew that when I was at a better place of healing I would feel very differently, and the poems might look different, which they did.

PCM: People talk about the stages of grief. Did you find yourself going through that as you wrote the poems?

Sharma: The joke is that you’re always going through different stages so they’re never linear.

PCM: No, no. They’re not linear.

Sharma: So, I think I went through them all in a jumbled way. I think they hold you in them. Dale was a really complicated person, so I had to really think about who he was, who he is.  I learned you love two people at once — you stay in the living world but you still love the person you lost. Grief Sequence has many kinds of love poems. Towards the end of the book are love poems to my current partner Mike, a widower, who helped me through the grieving process.

PCM: You both have that understanding, what that’s like.

Sharma: Yeah. The poems are about grief, love, and they’re about really trying to learn to trust the journey. These poems have taught me so much about my emotions, sequencing and my community.

PCM: Is there a particular poem in “Grief Sequence” that really gets to you or pierces through all of it for you? Is there a pivotal poem in there?

Sharma: I think that there are a variety of poems here. Some poems are processing Dale getting sick. Some are processing experiences with others that are sort of surprising—people can alienate you when they witness you in deep grieving, because some gestures or reactions aren’t pleasant. I began processing what gets in the way of your grief. We can sometimes get hijacked by other people’s treatment, and you forget that you’re really spending this time trying to just protect your feelings. Speaking to widows really helped me. Reading all the books I could find helped; my biggest joke is that the book that helped me the most, which—I mean, it’s sort of embarrassing, but it’s hilarious—is Dr. Joyce Brothers’ Widowed.

PCM: No shame.

Sharma: It was so practical: You have to learn how to shovel the driveway, relearn the basics. It was all of these lists. These basics are the ones that people don’t talk about: the shared labor you have with your partner and what you then have to figure out after their death. For example, my cat brought in mice, and I didn’t realize how often Dale would handle that. Things like that. So, the book was so practical that I just remember reading it cover to cover. I laughed so much when I recognized myself in there.

PCM: Those day-to-day gaps that you don’t realize you’re missing.

Sharma: Make sure to eat breakfast. Try to get enough sleep. So many basics.

PCM: When you’re in grief, I’m sure all those … you need it.

Sharma: All those things, yeah.

PCM: What did you find people’s responses are to the poems? Did you find that people expected you’ve gotten over it now that you’ve written this book?

Sharma: It may be the book; it may be also including a new relationship in the book. I never understood how somebody could move forward, but you really understand it when you have no choice. I think the book helped me document the experiences in real time. Readers have been very generous. I think they didn’t expect the book to be so explicit. One thing that I was also trying to negotiate in the book was poetic forms. Because I’ve taught creative writing for a long time and we teach form, and particularly the elegy, I was reacting to the beauty of the elegiac poem; it can be so crafted that often you’re not feeling like it’s an honest form to hold tragic grief. You can write a beautiful elegy in a certain way, but the tragic losses some of us can experience—or lots of us—may not produce a beautiful poem, and that beauty can be something that almost feels false to access. And so, I started to question the role of how the poem works or what people expect to read as an elegy.

PCM: Talk about some of your early influences in terms of poetry.

Sharma: I think I started writing poetry in high school like lots of people, and so I was really fascinated with what contemporary poetry looked like, reading it from The Norton Anthology of Poetry. And I think about it now and I was often interested in women writers of color, though they were very few. And then I think some women who were writing “poetry of witness” and kind of trying to figure out what their narratives in the poems were about.

PCM: Can you explain “poetry of witness”?

Sharma: According to many poets, it is poetry that feels it is morally and ethically obligated to bear witness to events and injustices like war, genocide, racism and tyranny. Many poets I read during my high school years who wrote about these events bore witness to it in other countries and often about cultures outside of their own. It led me to wonder and examine the distance between their testimony and the culture itself. It also forged the desire in me to read more internationally and in translation rather than through this particular style and method of writing.

PCM: When did it crystallize for you that you wanted to be a poet?

Sharma: I felt like it was a calling back in college but I think it was really applying to graduate school right from undergraduate and getting into a top creative writing program (also getting a fully funded scholarship). I was 21 years old and I just thought, well, this must mean something. And then when I got to grad school, I found a community of poets and that felt right to me. I am so grateful to those people—many are still very close friends today.