Simi 3/21: Alice Bag Speaks + Performs
For Women’s History Month, meet a woman who makes history: Alice Bag, singer of the Bags and member of many other important LA punk bands in the 70s; she’s the author of a recent memoir, Violence Girl: East LA Rage to Hollywood Stage. Read more…
While I’ve been busy organizing various elements for Ventura College’s Earth Day (go here to learn more) and preparing to meet with Ventura College Associated students Tuesday March 18, my students have been organizing their own presentations and preparing their own blogs about their “book club books” which have included Alice Bag‘s Violence Girl and Tony Fletcher‘s A Boy About Town (they also had the option of reading Cheryl Strayed’s Wild or Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried.) Both Tony and Alice are interested in coming to Ventura College and speaking on Earth Day and hopefully sharing the music that has inspired them and their autobiographies! As they were both active in the punk and DIY scene around the same time frame but on different continents, I’d love to hear them in conversation as well. I’m hopeful that my students’ blogs will help me convince them!
Ventura College To Host Environmental Lectures
Check out these great guest lectures at Ventura College on important environmental topics!
You are invited to attend guest lectures for ESRM1/BIO 10.
Guest lecture on fracking: RL Miller
Wed. 3/12 at 1:30-2:45pm in rm: ECT-8
Guest lecture on SOAR: Steve Bennett
Wed 3/19 at 1:30-2:45pm in rm: ECT-8
Guest lecture on Climate Change: Don Price
Wed 3/26 at 1:30-2:45pm in rm: ECT-8
RL Miller
RL Miller is a climate blogger at outlets including DailyKos, Climate Progress, Grist, Calitics, and Takepart.com on climate, environment, and clean energy policy. And you can Follow @RL_Miller on Twitter. He has recently founded Climate Hawks Vote, a superPAC devoted to electing climate-centric candidates. He has spoken at Netroots Nation (coal exports and climate), Netroots California (led environmental panel, 2010) and locally on issues such as Proposition 23, nuclear power, & fracking, and has appeared on radio shows including Lila Garrett’s KPFK. Miller’s work has been written up in the New York Times, Washington Post, Time, and…
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Please join us on Wednesday in toasting the women winemakers of the world! And please share–Who are your favorite women winemakers?
As March is Women’s History Month, and
Saturday March 8 is International Women’s Day
, what better time to focus on women winemakers than now?
That’s the idea of the tweet-up on the first Wednesday evening of March–to taste and tweet about wines made by women March 5, 2014. We’re going to get started at 5pm Pacific Standard Time.
All you need to to do
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Since I don’t get out to see films that much (although last night I did get to the $3 theater to see Hunger Games: Catching Fire which I loved and we saw the Lego movie opening weekend which we also loved), I’m always grateful that Ron Wells does AND that he takes the time to write about them so I can share his reviews here.See if you agree with Ron’s ranked list of the Top 30 films of 2013–plus his worst films and why. Let us know in the comments–which film did you think was best and worst and why?
For me though, nothing matched 12 Years a Slave. Brutally honest and hard to watch (as reported by the LA Times here), but necessary for people in this country to see.
Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing
If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.
so claims Elmore Leonard in the book Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing which I read about today on the blog Brain Pickings.
Leonard was a novelist but most of his rules still apply to writing in general. If you want to read the why and the wherefore and his stories that generated these rules, you’ll need to go to Brain Pickings, or even better, buy the book Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing (public library) illustrated by Joe Ciardiello.
If you just want the basic rules, a taste of what he has to say, and some ideas of how they apply to academic writing, read on! Read more…
Muir: The sun shines not on us but in us.
As we’re heading into some stormy weather here in southern California, it’s important to remember that, as John Muir put it, “The sun shines not on us but in us.” Image by Sheila Piala who made this lovely shareable jpg and found the source too: “Mountain Thoughts”, written by Muir during the 1870s, were collected by Linnie Marsh Wolfe and published in John of the Mountains (1938).
We’re making progress on Earth Day with more meetings this week and some important announcements on the horizon!
What will YOU be doing at Earth Day 2014?
Join VC Earth Day 2014 On Facebook
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.
– Margaret Mead
What will you do for Earth Day 2014? Read more…
What Are YOU Doing On Earth Day 2014?
Every year on April 22, over a billion people in 190 countries take action for Earth Day. Why not you?
Because LIFE is NOT a spectator sport. And if we want to maintain life on earth as we know it today, we ALL must participate. Read more…
On Being A Watcher of Vowels and a Master Procrastinator of Words
“For me and most of the writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts.” Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird (page 22)
“The writing we most admire, the writing that takes us into other worlds, the writing that allows us to live the experience of others, the writing that influences our thoughts and emotions has evolved through a process of exploration dna discovery. That process is both frightening and thrilling for the writer since progress is made, as it is in science and sports, by instructive failure.” Donald Murray, Craft of Revision (page 3)
“Most writers manage to get by because, as the deadline creeps closer, their fear of turning in nothing eventually surpasses their fear of turning in something terrible,” writes business blogger “Why Writers Are the Worst Procrastinators” which is based on her brand new book The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success
(2014 Viking). “Failure,” McArdle states simply on her website, “is what makes success possible.”
“Work finally begins,” says Alain de Botton, “when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly.”
In “Why Writers Are the Worst Procrastinators”, McArdle argues that fear of failure or even just the fear of writing something bad paralyzes writers. Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck, one of the best-known experts in the psychology of motivation and who has studied how people react to failure, agrees. However, Read more…
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