By Robert Daseler '67
(Editor's Note: This is an expanded version of the article that appeared in the print version of Pomona College Magazine.)
Poor Jake!
Here the sophomore sits at a table in Frank Hall, trying to eat a hurried breakfast while a photographer adjusts light umbrellas and peers up at him through his gleaming single-reflex lens. Other students watch in amusement and make facetious remarks. Jake banters with them good-naturedly, but it's obvious already that this is going to be trying. His entire day is to be recorded in word and image so that posterity will have an accounting of what it was like to be Jake Oken-Berg on 8 November 1999.
Inevitably, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle comes into play here: in taking the measure of anything, we alter it. Jake Oken-Berg, a social creature if ever there was one, would not ordinarily be dining alone, even for such a humble meal as breakfast.
In fact, Jake is one of the busiest human beings on a planet of busy human beings. He rarely sleeps more than five and a half hours, except on weekends. His day is scheduled tighter than Bill Clinton's. He plays piano and sings with a band. He composes music. He runs cross-country and track. He is tall and good looking and has an easy manner with elders and coevals alike. He looks a little like Adam Sandler. And, oh!, by the way, he is running for mayor of Portland. (But more on that later.)
A hasty breakfast consumed, Jake trots off to his first class of the day, Leo Flynn's constitutional law course, which convenes at 9. It has begun to rain, and Jake is late, so he lopes along Marston Quad and dashes up the front steps of Carnegie two at a time.
Leo Flynn is a bluff, ursine man who would be chosen by Central Casting to play a Tammany Hall boss. He lectures in a light-dimmed classroom, augmenting his rhetorical rampage with snappy computer graphics projected onto a screen. This morning his subject is the separation of powers. Flynn weaves a narrative about two 19th-century California jurists whose mutual antipathy resulted in a fatal shooting and--what is more germane to this lecture--a legal precedent delineating the separation of powers. It is a very colorful story, involving a duel, a secret marriage, a disputed fortune, and a railroad train. Flynn, the consummate raconteur, enlivens the tale with numerous digressions and artful applications of the pregnant pause, then segues neatly to another constitutional moment, the Steel Seizure Case, precipitated by President Harry S Truman's taking control of steel manufacturers during the Korean War. Turning suddenly to Jake, who looks a little dazed, Flynn asks: "Why didn't Truman invoke the Taft-Hartley 80-day cooling-off period?"
Jake lowers his head and murmurs: "Ask someone else." As it turns out, nobody else can answer the question, either, except of course Flynn, who will withhold the answer until the next class.
Between periods, standing on the steps of Carnegie and surveying the Quad, Jake shakes his head ruefully. "That question wasn't in the stuff we were supposed to read," he complains. On this day of all days, he does not want to be embarrassed by a question he cannot handle.
Jake returns to his room in Oldenborg to prepare for his next class, Martha Andresen's Shakespeare course, which meets in Crookshank at 11. This will be his only private hour during the day, and we should allow him to do his reading.
While Jake is alone with his books, we may examine the shape of his young life.
What you have to understand about Jake, if you understand nothing else, is that he is a young man of pulsing energy, and this energy, if undirected, would soon build up to unbearable levels. For him, running, playing piano, singing, participating in student government, and engaging the U.S. Constitution are not "activities" in the usual sense of that word. They are survival techniques.
At Lincoln High School in Portland, Jake played varsity sports and distinguished himself as a debater of constitutional law issues. In a national competition in which students argue fine points of constitutional law, Jake was a member of a team that came in second. When he cuts his finger, drops of the Framers' ink fall to the floor. Small wonder, then, that he was chagrined by the question about the Steel Seizure Case.
"Sports was the main thing that got me through high school," he says. "The one thing that centered me was basketball, all the time, three times a day." His commitment to constitutional law can be measured by the fact that he gave up varsity basketball in order to have more time to prepare his legal arguments.
When he was considering colleges, he looked at Williams, Whitman, Pomona, Oberlin, Claremont McKenna, and Carleton. His visit to Claremont decided the issue. "People here were the least pretentious and most 'real' of anywhere I went," he says. "I knew after visiting Pomona that this was where I wanted to go."
He sings with a band, Bennington Drive, named for the street on which his family lives. He explains that drive is a musical term, a jazz expression, but in another sense drive is what makes Jake the frenetic person he is. He is driven from one necessity to the next.
Now it is time for Jake's next class. He takes a seat in the midst of other students in the lecture hall in Crookshank's basement, possibly hoping to evade the scrutiny he received in his previous class. Martha Andresen, like Leo Flynn, is a deft lecturer, a past national Professor of the Year who knows better than most how to inflict literature on restless undergraduates. Today she wants them to think about Prince Hal and Falstaff in Henry IV, Part I. What a strange friendship it is between these two! Andresen reads aloud a scene in which Hal and Falstaff engage in edgy badinage, then she asks the class to tell her what is going on beneath the surface of the raillery.
One student suggests bluff male camaraderie, and Andresen seizes this as a starting point. "This is guy talk, isn't it?" she prompts. "They're talking about their exploits, their sexual conquests.
The class nods its collective head. The students know that this award-winning professor wants something more from them, but they are a little vague on what it is. Nobody ventures too far. Andresen advances toward them, then backs away. Her body language entreats them: "Come on, give me something. Work with me here, people."
"Why is stealing fun?" she inquires a few minutes later. "Why is it a game for Falstaff?"
"It takes him back to his youth?" another student offers.
"Yes!" agrees the professor, moving backward like a fisherman who feels a tug on his line. "It's a world of anarchy, which is the world of childhood." She balances on her slender legs, reeling the class in slowly. "Why in late medieval England was theft a capital crime?"
"Because it was a class society, and class is based on possessions?"
Bingo! Andresen nods her blonde head emphatically. "Yes! To steal a person's property was to steal that person's place in society. It would be a robbery of self."
Having considered Falstaff's motives for engaging in crime and risking the gallows, she turns to a consideration of Prince Hal's motives.
"It's a game for him," another student suggests. "He wants to see what he can get away with."
"Prince Hal is testing boundaries," Andresen agrees, evidently pleased with the way in which the class has engaged in the dialectic of literary analysis.
Another student chimes in: "Hal says later that he does bad so when he does good later it will make a better comparison."
A lively discussion ensues. For today, Jake is content, for the most part, to follow the conversation.
"What makes Professor Andresen's discussions so stimulating is that she won't let your mind take a break," Jake explains later. "She's always asking, 'Do you agree with what I just said?' By asking that question, and making you answer yes or no or maybe, it forces you to internalize what you've learned."
After class, Jake rushes off to Alexander Hall to attend a lunch meeting of a committee that is to select a new director for the office of career development.
When the meeting adjourns, Jake bolts from the conference room and hastens to the new Smith Student Center to check his mail, stopping at an ATM machine along the way to collect some cash. He walks with long strides. He does not have time to amble. He crosses the Quad hurriedly and enters Thatcher Hall, where he descends to the basement for his voice lesson.
His voice coach is Don Brinegar, a cheerful middle-aged man who soon has the young singer seated at the piano and singing a song of his own composition:
I want to fall from this place.
I want just a little taste.
I want to sail through the air.
I want you to look up and stare.
As Jake sings, Brinegar repeatedly interrupts him. "Where is the focal point of your energy?" he asks.
Jake looks confused. Brinegar leans over and presses his fist into the back of the youth's neck, showing him where the focal point should be. He tells Jake to sing his song again. Jake begins to sing, but Brinegar stops him. "What happened to your focus?" he asks.
"It went into the piano," the lad confesses.
"It went into the piano. That's right." Brinegar tells him. Don't sing above the piano sound. Don't sing below it, either. Sing into the piano sound. One of the wonderful things about sound is that it wants to join other sounds, not to compete with them but to combine and mix."
Afterward, Jake returns to his room in Oldenborg and plays a blues riff on his keyboard, demonstrating how, using his computer, he can layer sound on sound, much as Brinegar has been advising him to do, bringing in a variety of virtual instruments: strings, drum, organ. He is having fun with the music, doing a musician's doodling, and he appears to be more at ease than at any previous time of the day.
The room is dominated by a poster for Brokedown Palace, a movie starring Claire Danes. Over Jake's bed is a panorama of Portland. Near his keyboard is a bumper sticker: "Friends don't let friends vote Republican."
After a time Jake leaves the keyboard and walks the short distance to the Greek theater, where he and a few other students from Andresen's class are to rehearse a scene from Much Ado about Nothing. As a teaching device, these rehearsals bring the students into a closer working relationship with the characters in Shakespeare's comedy. Like other actors, they have to figure out what their characters want and are thinking at each moment in the play. Is my character saying this in jest? Or is he in earnest?
Jake's group is to perform the first act, in which Beatrice and Benedick engage in verbal sparring. Jake is to play Benedick, natch. The role of Beatrice is to be carried off by Elise Nussbaum, a French major from Jersey City, New Jersey. Jake and Elise show a certain panache as actors, and their duel of wits (or Benedick and Beatrice's, rather) is amusingly done.
"Having to perform an entire act of Shakespeare is what makes this class special," Jake says. "When you have to interpret and act out a character, you discover so many things that just reading could never do. The characters Shakespeare creates through his works really do emulate what can be the best and worst in humanity."
Back in his room again, Jake talks about the mayoral race he is about to enter.
The present mayor of Portland is Vera Katz, who is running for re-election in May. Jake says that she is capable but lacks a vision of Portland to guide it into the future. While acknowledging that his chances, as a college sophomore, of unseating the popular Katz are slight, he insists that his candidacy is not a joke.
"Anything I do, I do seriously," he says, noting that he stays abreast of Oregon politics by reading The Oregonian on-line each day. "I have thought about the issues facing the city, and I have positions and programs to offer." (Anybody interested in reading Jake's vision for Portland should go to www.jakeformayor.com..)
Late in the afternoon Jake trains with the cross-country team. They have an easy run today, and by 5 p.m. Jake is in the training room, standing in the whirlpool, a large metal tub filled with cold water. The cold water helps to get the lactic acid out of his system, he says. He injured his right knee last summer by over-training, and for five weeks he was barely able to walk. Those were weeks he could have been training on Portland's wooded paths and trails, and he is still not in peak condition.
Having showered and dressed in street clothes again, Jake goes to dinner with four friends and returns to his room before his 7 o'clock class to read the science section from last Tuesday's New York Times. There is an article about a black hole that is just what he needs.
Now he goes to his last class of the day, Life in the Universe, an astronomy course taught by Thomas Jarrett. The class begins with a discussion of astronomy in the news. Jake, looking a little haggard, brings up an article he has gleaned from The New York Times about a black hole with a strange jet emerging from its accretion disk, a phenomenon all agree is pretty mysterious.
"Look deeper at any phenomenon, and you'll just about always find new mysteries," Jarrett tells the class. "That's what makes science interesting."
Although it runs for three hours on Monday evening, Jake enjoys the give and take of the astronomy class. "It's one of my favorite classes," he says. "It's really a lot of fun."
The class breaks up at 10, and everybody is weary. Jake returns to his room, calls his parents, and pins down plans for an upcoming visit to Portland. He has a chance to do a little reading for Introduction to World Music, another of his classes, before heading off to Frary Hall, where there is to be a meeting of students serving on the college's curriculum committee. Snacks are provided by the dining hall, and the students sit at one of the long tables and go through a brief agenda.
Jake was elected to the student Senate at the end of his freshman year, and as a consequence of this he serves on the curriculum committee and seven other committees that meet regularly and help to govern the college. He is designated a commissioner of academic affairs at Pomona College, and his committee assignments, he says, take up more of his time than anything else, but he would not give them up for anything.
At 11:15, the meeting adjourned, Jake heads back to Oldenborg, where he rounds up his band's bass player, Trevor Plum, and the two young men jam and work on a new song in Jake's room until midnight. At this point Kwig Jordan, a singer in the band, turns up. He has been playing late-night soccer. For another half hour all three musicians work on a song Kwig has been writing. It is the first song he has ever tried to write, and Jake has been helping him with the lyrics and chords.
Eventually his friends depart and Jake gets into bed to do a little more reading for Introduction to World Music.
In any age it is exhausting to be young and ambitious.
Life, with its load of varied promises, seems to be passing at a furious rate, and it is simply not possible to live all the lives that seem to open before one. Older people tend to assume that the world is your oyster, but in fact it appears to be many different varieties of mollusk, some more nutritious than others. At some point in the future, Jake Oken-Berg will probably have to set one or two of his vocations aside. Perhaps he can be mayor of Portland and the lead singer in a popular band, but then he will have to attend fewer track meets.
For the present, though, Jake is a dervish of activity, literally running from event to event and seeming to enjoy himself. He occasionally has thoughts, though, of taking a year off. He says one of the things he likes about Pomona is the institution's openness and flexibility. Everybody he talks to wants him to do what is best for Jake Oken-Berg, even if that means taking some time off to do something else, something like interning at a law firm or--who knows?--like running the city of Portland.
(Editor's Note: After this story was completed, Jake decided to take the spring 2000 semester off to campaign actively for mayor of Portland.)
Robert Daseler '67 is director of communication at the Office of the State Librarian.
