Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,
Often I take a week of vacation from my administrative duties during the tenth week of the academic quarter so that I can keep up with my teaching duties, all the grading of my students’ final papers. I take a “vacation” so that I have enough time to do my work. As one of my colleagues said recently, “I don’t think you understand this concept of a vacation.” Welcome to week ten.
In my advanced writing classes, I teach juniors and seniors, students who are thinking about the future rather than about the present, about writing for the job and for graduate school, rather than thinking only about writing to impress their current UC Davis professors. While I might encounter my freshman seminar students for years after our class, opportunities for professional mentorship with my advanced writers are necessarily compacted. Many visit office hours.
Some of those advanced writers will march across the commencement stage in a couple weeks, accompanied by my admiration and, in some ways, my envy. Despite what I see as the political darkness emanating from at least two buildings in Washington DC these days, students have reasons to be optimistic, to be buffeted by the hope and sanguinity that I hear in the ways they describe their next professional and vocational steps. UC Davis has prepared them well, with regards to the content, modes, and depth of their thinking; and Californians live in a land of opportunities, with important work being done in our state in computer networks, the internet of things, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and all the industries needed to support technological innovation and discovery. While the locus of all this industry is Silicon Valley, Southern California, Seattle, and other locations are also vying for opportunities to fashion the future.
I envy my students because of their opportunities to participate in such practical and (as yet) impractical innovations while they are still so young, to enter a new industry, say, cognitive computing and machine learning, on the “ground floor,” as it were. While I recognize the value of what I have built here in Davis, a couple of intellectually challenging careers, and a family whose company I treasure most of all, I also wonder what it would be like for to start a life, a career, in our current era, even though there are so few local newspapers left to write stories about the outrageous costs of housing our new workers. I will be enjoying my bike commute along Putah Creek greenbelts, grateful for Kate and the kids and the colleagues with whom I get to work, but I will also watch my students wistfully, eager to hear their eventual stories of innovation, meaning-making, and discovery.
If you are among this group, or if you could pass a message to a graduating college student in your life, I would say this: “Make us proud.” I would also say this: “Build our economy and protect our planet. Give the rest of us an innovative, sustainable, and kinder world to grow old in.” Also, “Keep writing, including an update email to me – will we still use email? – at least once a decade.”
Tonight’s Pub Quiz will feature questions on topics raised above, as well as the following: Pride month, bamboo, the irrelevance of the Sacramento Kings in early June, optometry (hello Dr. Helmus!), villainous blowhards not named Trump, small rivers in faraway places, fashion, authors with revealed names, people who reveal themselves in unwelcome ways, coffee, Latin terms, big purchases, Drew Barrymore, that new movie Solo: A Star Wars Story, Bay Area waterways, government acronyms, summer choices, revelations in Rolling Stone, polymers, delicious ingredients, Hollywood voice work, the nicest people ever, not counting cameos, cotton clothing, tears, juice in industrious countries, candidates, cruel cuts, tropicality on multiple continents, wishes, American literature, predictive statements about villainy, fruits and vegetables, and Shakespeare.
Poetry Night on Thursday will feature Susie Meserve, a talented Berkeley poet who has recently published her first full-length book, Little Prayers. Opening for Susie will be uber-talented actor and Davis Shakespeare Festival monologist Ian Hopps. Join us Thursday at 8 at the John Natsoulas Gallery.
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Here are three questions from last week’s quiz:
- Current Events –Dance Crazes that Start with F. Started by a 15 year old wearing a backpack, name the latest dance craze that requires significant coordination to execute.
- Sports. What center-fielder named after a fish had a career-high five hits against the Yankees Saturday, three of them doubles?
- Shakespeare. Which Shakespeare history features the infant Princess Elizabeth in a non-speaking role?