Squawk: Shameless Plug of New Publication

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Writers Workshop in a Book: the Squaw Valley Community of Writers on the Art of Writing

edited by Alan Cheuse and Lisa Alvarez with an introduction by Richard Ford

Chronicle Books (June 7, 2007)

"Since 1969, the prestigious Squaw Valley Community of Writers has helped develop the art and craft of many who are now household names. Instructors such as Michael Chabon, Mark Childress, Diane Johnson, Anne Lamott, Robert Stone, and Amy Tan have distilled their advice and wisdom from seminars and lectures, and the result is a book that captures the workshop experience of complete submersion in the writing process. With an introduction by novelist and short story master Richard Ford, himself a conference attendee in the 1970s, this volume gives the writer and dedicated reader a jolt of inspiration, sharp insight into matters of technique, and a feeling of camaraderie with a writing community."

So they say.

The big bang

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BOTCHED AND BUNGLED:

If we survey a ship, what an exalted idea must we form of the ingenuity of the carpenter who framed so complicated, useful, and beautiful a machine? And what surprise must we feel, when we find him a stupid mechanic, who imitated others, and copied an art, which, through a long succession of ages, after multiplied trials, mistakes, corrections, deliberations, and controversies, had been gradually improving? Many worlds might have been botched and bungled, throughout an eternity, ere this system was struck out; much labour lost, many fruitless trials made; and a slow, but continued improvement carried on during infinite ages in the art of world-making.

— DAVID HUME

BANG!

DID YOU KNOW that many of our district’s troubles trace back to a BIG BANG? I'm talking about the outcome of the 1996 SOCCCD board election. It was the proud creation of a corrupt & scruffy crew of creators, namely, a group of faculty misfits who, by 1996, controlled the union's war chest.

One of the leaders of that group was Raghu Mathur.

Nowadays, most members of that group have no power at all. They hide in dark corners. They snipe from bushes. One of ‘em has come to see the error of his former ways, or so he says.

Mathur’s the big exception, of course. Why, he’s the Chancellor of the district, and he's here to stay!

CORRUPTION:

Speaking of corruption, from today’s Inside Higher Ed:

The new chancellor of Alabama’s community college system is ordering all presidents and senior administrators to attend ethics training, and plans to eventually require all of the system’s 9,000 employees to participate, The Birmingham News reported. The system is the subject of several corruption investigations, so much so that the Birmingham newspaper noted that the state’s ethics commissioner — who will be leading the initial sessions — was quoted as saying of the system: “You almost have to turn the culture upside down and start over. It’s so ingrained ... it’s almost like a Mafia family.”

Meanwhile…

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is today releasing a report, “Corrupt Schools, Corrupt Universities: What Can Be Done?” The report says that educational institutions worldwide are losing billions of dollars because of various corrupt practices.

SCIENCE, TOO, HAS A BIG BANG:

From yesterday’s New York Times: The Universe, Expanding Beyond All Understanding

When Albert Einstein was starting out on his cosmological quest 100 years ago, the universe was apparently a pretty simple and static place. Common wisdom had it that all creation consisted of an island of stars and nebulae known as the Milky Way surrounded by infinite darkness.

We like to think we’re smarter than that now. We know space is sprinkled from now to forever with galaxies rushing away from one another under the impetus of the Big Bang.

Bask in your knowledge while you can. Our successors, whoever and wherever they are, may have no way of finding out about the Big Bang and the expanding universe, according to one of the more depressing scientific papers I have ever read.

If things keep going the way they are, Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve University and Robert J. Scherrer of Vanderbilt University calculate, in 100 billion years the only galaxies left visible in the sky will be the half-dozen or so bound together gravitationally into what is known as the Local Group, which is not expanding and in fact will probably merge into one starry ball.

Unable to see any galaxies flying away, those astronomers will not know the universe is expanding and will think instead that they are back in the static island universe of Einstein. As the authors, who are physicists, write in a paper to be published in The Journal of Relativity and Gravitation, “observers in our ‘island universe’ will be fundamentally incapable of determining the true nature of the universe.”

It is hard to count all the ways in which this is sad...[W]e have the prospect of a million separate Sisyphean efforts with one species after another pushing the rock up the hill only to have it roll back down and be forgotten.

Worse, it makes you wonder just how smug we should feel about our own knowledge.

“There may be fundamentally important things that determine the universe that we can’t see,” Dr. Krauss said in an interview. “You can have right physics, but the evidence at hand could lead to the wrong conclusion. The same thing could be happening today.”….