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Connecticut College Digital Commons @ Connecticut College Linda Lear Center for Special Collections & Alumni News Archives Fall 1976 Connecticut College Alumni Magazine, Fall 1976 Connecticut College Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.conncoll.edu/alumnews Recommended Citation Connecticut College, "Connecticut College Alumni Magazine, Fall 1976" (1976). Alumni News. Paper 196. http://digitalcommons.conncoll.edu/alumnews/196 This Magazine is brought to you for free and open access by the Linda Lear Center for Special Collections & Archives at Digital Commons @ Connecticut College. It has been accepted for inclusion in Alumni News by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ Connecticut College. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The views expressed in this paper are solely those of the author. The Connecticut College Alumni Magazine Kurt Vonnegut dedicates the new library EDITORIAL BOARD: Allen T. Carroll '73 Editor (R.F.D. 3, EXECUTIVE BOARD OF THE ALUMNI ASSOCIATION Colchester, Ct. 06415), Marion Vilbert Clark '24 Cassandra GOBS Simonds '55, President / Mariana Parcells Class Notes Editor, Elizabeth Damerel Gongaware '26 Wagoner '44, First Vice-President / Mary Lee Min~er Assistant Editor, Cassandra Goss Simonds '55, Louise Goode '46 Second Vice-President / Britts Jo Schem Stevenson Andersen' 41 ex officio McNemar' '67, Secretary / Ann Roche Dickson '53, Treasurer CREDITS: llIustration at top of page 6 from photograph by Directors-at-Large, Ann Crocker Wheeler '34, Sara Rowe Larry Albee '74. Heckscher '69, Michael J. Farrar '73/ Alumni Trustees, . Elizabeth J. Dutton"47 Virginia Golden Kent '35, Jane Smith Official publication of the Connecticut College Association. Moody '49/ Chairman ~f the Alumni Annual Givi~ Pr?gram. All publication rights reserved. Contents reprinted only by Lois Keating Learned '54 / Chairman of the 1'!oTTU.natmg permission of the editor. Published by the Connecticut Committee, Joann Walton Leavenworth '56 I Chairman of College Alumni Association at Sykes Alumni Center, the Finance Committee, Peter M. Paris '74 / Chairman of Connecticut College, New London, Conn., four times a year the Scholarship Committee, Virginia Golden Kent '35 I in Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall. Second-class postage paid Personnel Consultant, Sarah S. Buchstane '33/ Co-Ch~irm:; at New London, Conn. 06320. Application to mail at of Young Alumni Committee, Victoria Leonhart '75, Richa additional entry Post Office pending. Send form 3579 to F. Cohn '75 / Executive Director, Louise Stevenson Sykes Alumni Center, Connecticut College, New London, Andersen '41, ex officio Conn. 06320. AAC member Communications to any of the above may be addressed in care of the Alumni Office, Connecticut College, New London, Conn. 06320 The Connecticut College AlumnI MagJ:ZIne VOLUME 54 NUMBER 1, FALL 1976 Meredith on Vonnegut 2 William Meredith The Noodle Factory 3 Kurt Vonnegut A Tour of the Noodle Factory 6 Meanwhile, Back at Palmer. .. 13 How to Win the Bronze 14 Patricia Baldwin Bemblum '74 ITAL Y: The Traveler and the Past 19 The Philosopher in the Garden 20 Susan M. Woody Brunelleschi's Great Dome 24 Richard G. Arms, Jr. Music of Renaissance Florence 28 Thomas Stoner Two Pilgrimages of Mystical Love 30 Patricia I ngala Scalzi '62 The College Keeping the Classroom Full 34 Jeanette B. Hersey Alumni Council 1976 36 In Memoriam Jeanne C. Prokesch 36 Letters 37 Class Notes 38 COVER by A. Carroll '73 from a photograph by Rabert Powell '78 The first review appeared in The New Republic, and I quote a para- graph from it because it does most of my work for me, tells you something about Vonnegut's work that an intel- ligent scholar of it has put deftly: His novels have always included healthy doses of the familiar .... world. Vonnegut gathered details and events from his own life .... such as hisIndiana childhood,his wartime experiences, his work as a pub- licist for General Electric, until they formed a mythology through all hisbooks. Long before Slaughterhouse Five made him famous, it was clear that Kurt Vonne- gut was making a work of art out of his own life. While others said the novel might be dying, Vonnegut lived the lifeof fiction, keeping both himself and his novels alive and intact. And Jerome Klinkowitz concludes: Against the insipid madness of life, that's how Vonnegut chooses to be-unalienated, self-effacing, funny and comforting. ("These poems are not meant to be understood, you understand," Berry- man says in one of the Dream Songs, "they are only meant to terrify and comfort.") "Vell the other review, which will contaminate many of your breakfast tables in the Sunday New York Times, William Meredith and Kurt Vonnegut enormously expensive, and we have might be taken to show that Mr. Von- became acquainted through the Na- hope to marry her to a nice rich per- negut is a protean figure. I tried to tional Institute of Arts and Letters, of son-libraries are androgynous, so the find a sentence which is a com- which both are officers. Mr. Meredith, sex need not be specified. This brings pendium of its foolishness, but that a poet and professor of English at Con- me to my second job, to introduce the proved not to be the problem. The necticut College, delivered the follow- little-known writer who is here to problem was to choose only one. ing remarks at the dedication of the dedicate the building. I must tell you Unable to forgive Vonnegut's popu- new library as an introduction to Mr. that when I found out I had borrowed larity, the reviewer lays into his au~i- Vonnegut, the principal speaker at six million dollars to liberate my ence in a sentence which I think Will the ceremonies. bound colleagues, and that there are do the reviewer no good here or in his still a couple of millions owed, my own classroom. He says: My job this afternoon falls in two original choice for this job was not a His appeal so far as I can see, is to the parts. I am to speak first about what novelist, and heaven knows not a poet, slightly laid-back, rather dropped-out, this good occasion means to me as a but a famous memoirist of our time, minimally-intelligent young. member of the faculty of Connecticut Howard Hughes. It was only when And so on, as the situational poet has College, one who has taught here since communications with this very gifted said. Even jf I cater to the young, as all but the most leisurely present un- man broke down that President Ames my stepmother says when she's sore dergraduates were born. It means to saw Mr. Vonnegut addressing himself about my haircut, I can't (as we old me and my colleagues, I think - there to the job differently and with differ- people are fond of saying) identify are about 150 of us, patching together ent gifts. with that. part-time and full-time-s-that our To introduce him I want to quote Why he came here. He did ~ot.' I 300,000 wise and patient colleagues briefly from two reviews of the novel assured myself, bring the rmssmg between covers, who have known [Slapstick] he has published this money. Nor did he come to make some lean years, have been made first- month. I don't read a lot of reviews money. I think he came simply to stay class citizens again, and made avail- and for a long time have written them in character. Informed that we ran able in surroundings worthy of their only of books that I admire very much. here on an experimental basis, a discourse. The students here outnum- Unfavorable reviews seem to me per- humble and purposeful gr~nfalloo!, ber us ten to one. We are wily enough fectly futile exercises, since, as Auden (a granfalloon is defined Ill. Cats to live with that. But these printed said, there's nothing surer than that a Cradle as a proud and meaningless others, the books on the handsome bad book will be forgotten. And the association of human beings), and shelves of the unnamed library be- bad reviewer, the bad-mouthing re- were about to unveil a new wampeter hind me, are 2,000 to one; and in their viewer, like one I will quote here, who (a wampeter is an object around gentler way remind us that if we are intends to correct an error of taste-I which the lives of otherwise unrelated not asking the right questions, they have great scorn for him. I do not be- people may revolve), he ad~red. ~ur will be constrained to go over our lieve there is such a thing as an error pig-headed optimism, he ldenttfted heads, directly to the students. I think of taste, but if there is, a person does with it. It is in character that he we are pleased at this. not move on from it for reasons of should be here this afternoon. He has The library is not only nameless but exhortation. a generous mind. 2 ,( - . ,..-. ~ \ II II I _~_L...Ii II 1I 1 ·~C~~ Kurt -, . This is a terrible speech, but the library is the mean to insult the building or architecture at all. main thing, not the speech. There will be very All right. little eye contact through this speech because The name of this speech is "The Noodle this is a closely reasoned argument, and if I skip Factory." a step, all is lost. This speech will be over before you know it. You may wonder what the shape of this speech It is short, and my life is short. is. Think of a snail shell, a helix.