Guest Column | Remembering the glory years

It's no coincidence that my 2009 yearbook arrived in the mail the day Jay Leno's new show premiered. Both exemplify the mediocrity that passes for artistic endeavor in those cultural quadrants - that is, mainstream, infotainment-supplied America - which sonically, visually and spatially predominate today. As I'm no TV exec, I'll leave Leno's problem to others, though his utter fear of spontaneity and the scripted material it obliges him to accept should be noted.

But as for the yearbook I received ­- which cost $90, a sum that must've gone toward color printing and glossy paper as I can't find a quality commensurate to so high a figure in either the writing, design or photography (though I must add, had the yearbook cost even one-tenth that, its resultant ineptitude would still be disproportionate) - I must speak loudly and clearly.

First a disclaimer: I very much respect the hard work which all journalists - regardless of age or station, whether documentation be their job or hobby ­- put into their craft. I know how frustrating tracking down loose ends can be, and how even the smallest details - identifying pictured students in a caption, for instance - can be niggling and elusive. I therefore warn that the following statements pertain not to the students who were responsible for my class' yearbook but to the culture which, not educating those collegians as to what a book should be, allowed such an error to occur - nay, even fostered it.

Yes, this is very much a larger issue of culture - of the things we emphasize to posterity and those we neglect even to mention. College, in fact, is the perfect place to gauge society's trends and development as each new grade, containing kids slightly younger, brings impressionable minds into contact with those slightly more formed. Last year, for instance, when I was a senior, my brother, a freshman, belonged to the first class by and large born in the '90s.

That this idea often goes unmentioned reflects its seeming insignificance. But when we pause to consider what the cumulative effect of such gathering becomes - when those born in the '80s meet those in the '90s and so on and so forth - we begin to grasp the great potential inherent in school.

In the instance of yearbooks, this potential was squandered. Penn has a grand tradition of self-reflection. Its yearbooks from the 1800s - available to be read on the fourth floor of Van Pelt - and even those published through most of the 20th century were profoundly well-written and equally well-illustrated. If you look through them, you'll see the kinds of essays which do more than merely refer to an event experienced; the kinds of words which, being vivid and beautiful in themselves, crystallize that experience for all time, embed it in the very text, so that nostalgic alumni may always relive it, so that its vicarious reenactment can be affected by reading.

I feel I've been denied that future re-immersion. The yearbook I received is neither written to grant it (featuring as it does small pieces mired in similarly small - and therefore tedious - details, dates and numbers) nor capable, physically, of suspending the disbelief which, all too quickly, can retract the alumnus from his timeless reverie. Its design forbids all imaginative wandering: The spacing between letters is at times so tight (and at others so loose) as to render whole pages illegible, the pictures are pixilated and grainy - and worst, not a single element evokes the spirit which each one of us, involuntarily, has felt, leaves underfoot, walking down Locust.

Should current students wonder whether such romance is even possible, I refer you not to my rhetoric - which is of itself unconvincing - but to the old yearbooks I earlier mentioned. Seriously, look at how wonderful each and every page is - how the passion our school inspired in its students bubbled over onto the layouts. Often it wasn't even in words; it was at once an expression more primitive and sophisticated.

To wit, a black-and-white photo essay in the '79 yearbook consisted of four campus vagrants - their faces lined and grimy - and a single word: "Regulars."

It's that kind of poetry - one which evokes our campus realities, be they conventionally pretty like Locust, or unpleasantly so, like ghetto destitution - that was somehow lost in the transmission of journalistic knowledge from one generation to the next.

For some reason, as software has significantly reduced the amount of time needed to produce books, we have, far from using new time to think, spent it instead producing more books.

Gabe Oppenheim is a 2009 College graduate and a former DP columnist. His e-mail address is grosolo@aol..com.

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