Of all the words buzzing around my still-embryonic and, thus, still-optimistic thesis research - which, now, can be best characterized as a heap of mistreated books, fingertip-oiled keytops, and looseleaf essays-that-I-should-have-read-electronically-but-printed-so-I-could-scribble-academic-nonsense-on-them - there are a few that linger a bit longer, that resonate in a higher r...
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Author: Pryor Stroud
Discarding Convention: Embodying the Liberal Arts
We, earnest advocates and defenders of the artes liberales, are destined for a crossroads; whether it is acknowledged or avoided or completely suppressed, it is there before us - a critical intersection, where all undergraduates invariably converge, where the "real world" becomes visible on the L.A. horizon.
Some Pomona students - those of optimistic tendencies - imagine thi...
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Unsettled Spectatorship
Over my last few posts, a still-developing preoccupation of mine has, without my go-ahead, disclosed itself: how can one characterize and illustrate the statistically-anonymized Pomona student? Without tripping into generalities and abstractions, is it even possible to depict the real flesh, blood, and bones of a student body instead of mechanically regurgitating the brochure-f...
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When Thought Becomes Spectacle
In the practice of creative instruction - a practice, I might add, that glaringly evinces its own oxymoronic futility - there is common injunction: do not write/film/illustrate/compose/create anything about the "creative process" itself. In most cases, this is because such a "creation" would avow, without ambiguity, the frailty or non-existence of your imagination; writing abou...
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Articulate Experience
Despite what some hyper-literate humanities majors may claim – those, specifically, who use books-within-books to keep their pages marked – we all have limited vocabularies. Severely limited, I may even venture to say. Instead of the bottomless reservoirs we think we have, there is but a trickle of language available to us or, maybe, if one is peculiarly lettered, a puddle. Som...
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Dialogue and Adventurousness
For Pomona students, summer demands adventure. The specificity of this claim - namely, that this addresses not all students, but Pomona-esque students alone - is deliberate. For your pleasure, the deliberation: Despite the earnestness of our wide-eyed, edge-of-our-seats classroom etiquette, we are, above all, autodidacts. We strive to learn, to improve ourselves through learnin...
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On the Emptiness of Campus in Summer
Observations from a research-drained observer: the lawn of Walker beach lacks sunbathers; the residence hall windows, usually framing hard-at-work or hard-at-play students, stare back vacantly; and the streets and sidewalks and hallways all sit in a campus-wide barrenness. This is the effect summer has on Pomona - emptiness; an emptiness that reaches from the corners of Wig to ...
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