Dave Badtke’s Blog

There’s only one class left in the semester, my 370 students have taken their Composition Mastery Exam — which the entire faculty will grade on Thursday — and the Spring 2007 semester marathon is almost over. And while I submitted my text requests for the fall semester, I’m still looking for new texts and stories for my English 1 & 4 students. But the problem in doing this is always the same: the vast majority of my students do not read for pleasure. And they also struggle to read their assignments, which for them are decidedly not pleasurable.

The cause for this non-reading state would seem to be that they have too much else they can do. More than that, there seems to be so little silence in their lives, required to have a conversation with an author, which seems like a good topic for this week’s column: Reading and silence.

As reported by NPR, there are more than 10,000 mothers in the U.S. military who are celebrating this day in Iraq. Not that long ago, Liz Vazquez, about whom I wrote today in The Benicia Herald and who is pictured here when she was in Iraq, was one of them. (See also my earlier blog post.) On this special day, all the best to those who have served, who are serving as I write this, and who are preparing to serve in the U.S. military.

This is the title of a book by Jonathan Lear that I began reading again after I wrote about Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of  Cultural Devastation. I first read Happiness, which evolved from The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, an award Lear received in 1999, when it was published, but I remember little from that time perhaps because Lear’s style isn’t transparent — but well worth the effort — and also because I’m getting older and older.

The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
never even heard of

From Billy Collins’ “Forgetfulness”

While I’ve only just begun to reread Happiness, my sense is that it’s a dialectical investigation in which Lear examines Aristotle’s thesis that what we do for “the good” brings us happiness and Freud’s antithesis that we’re subconsciously influenced by “the death drive.” Finally, Lear arrives at a synthesis, I think, that relates to including what Lear feels has been a previously excluded middle, which is what we do with the “remainder of life.”

The idea certainly seems interesting, but I may have this all wrong, so more with updates and corrections as I read.

One of the joys of writing for a local newspaper like the Benicia Herald is that I get to sit down with people for an hour or more to listen to their stories.

Well, you might say, you’re not living in New York or Los Angeles or Tokyo or London or Paris or even, for that matter, in San Francisco, where there’s a chance that around the next corner you might meet a celebrity or mover and shaker. And you’d be right that the people I meet aren’t the famous and fabulously rich and influential — they’re people who don’t feel comfortable in the spotlight and usually cringe when I pull out my camera — but they’re interesting and always surprising because like all those people you know so much about from watching too much TV or from guiltily reading tabloids while you wait in the grocery story checkout line, these people have spent their lives getting an education, developing skills, creating careers, supporting their families, having interesting experiences and serving others.

Such is the case with Elizabeth Vazquez who, along with her partner Chuck Bowen, owns Galley Cafe, a fantastic, inviting, comfortable little restaurant with a beautiful water view at Glen Cove Marina. Elizabeth was in the Army in the 70s and then recently served in Iraq. She has worked as a social worker advocate for the homeless and recently earned her paralegal degree at St. Mary’s College in Moraga. And she and Chuck, who live in a houseboat in the marina, make wonderful breakfasts, lunches, dinners and snacks at Galley Cafe in addition to catering special events. But for more about this you’ll need to read my Sunday Column on May 13 in the Benicia Herald.

We previously owned a Gemini 105M catamaran, renamed Fishcake, and were used to taking the better part of day to sail from Benicia to San Francisco. The boat was always under control and on a broad reach we’d get to 9 or 10 knots in twenty knots or more of wind. But when the winds died away, as they always did near Pinole Point or Point Richmond, Fishcake’s velocity made good would vanish and we’d motor.

But last year near the end of the season, yacht broker Gary Helms made it possible for us to trade Fishcake for Dulcinea, a new Corsair Sprint 750, which is a 24-foot foldable trimaran that flies across the water — five knots now seems as though we’re not moving — even in light winds.

So now we’re in the habit of going to San Francisco and back or up the Napa River and back when in the past we’d end up sleeping over at our destination and sailing back the next day. And this last weekend we went again to Angel Island, taking about three hours to get there and two and a half to get back. Dulcinea may have little space to overnight, but she’s a blast, and when it’s rough, which it always seems to get, we get soaked. This never happened in Fishcake, for the ride was always high and dry, but somehow we seem to be adjusting to salt spray flying everywhere and 15 knots on a beam reach, 20 knots if we dare deploy our spinnaker in a sock, but we’re not there yet.

In corresponding with Les Mahler, editor of The Benicia Herald, I was reminded of The Ashland Dailing Tidings, which in turn reminded me of the threat that all Jackson County Libraries were closing down in April for lack of funds. We’ve been going to Ashland each year since our older son was young — his school class was the reason we went —  for Shakespearean and other theatre, so the thought of a city of Ashland’s qualities without a library was certainly tragic even though we didn’t go to the library more than a few times. But then we don’t live there: we just visit.

I checked a few library links, but none of them worked any longer.

I then checked jcls.org. How awful for a city like Ashland with a beautiful library building that was renovated not that long ago to now have no library at all.

U. S. leads in gun deaths among the world’s 36 richest nations. See statistics reported by AP reporter Chelsea Carter.

Governor Rick Perry of Texas signed a law on Monday that makes it easier to conceal guns and advocated allowing gun owners to carry guns anywhere they want – schools, churches, could he possibly mean courts as well? — so that the kind of tragedy at Virginia Tech could be avoided. (Yep, he means courthouses as well. Read the link above to the Dallas News.)

I thought at first that this must be a prank when I heard it on NPR. Can any sane individual actually believe that giving everyone a gun — sane, momentarily insane, insane, frequently insane, unpredictable, occasionally nuts — would make such a tragedy less likely or prevent it from happening? Here, it would seem, that birthday probability algorithm might help us see more clearly.

You know this one. In any given room, the number of people who have a birthday on the same day is much higher than we would expect since there are 365 days in the year. So intuitively we’d expect that the probability that someone has the same birthday we do is 1/365 if we ignore leap years, which is a very small probability. So if there are say 23 people in the room, you might expect intuitively that the probability that there are two people with the same birthday to be 23 * (1/365) or about 6%. This, at any rate, is what we feel in our gut. But in fact, the probability that in a room of 23 at least two people will have the same birthday is about 50%.

To get to this correct, non-intuitive answer, you need to consider first the probability that you have the birthday you do. That’s 1. The probability that the next person has a different birthday from you is then 364/365. And the probability that the third person has a different birthday from you and the second person is 363/365. Continuing this on and multiplying out the numbers, the probability that two people in a room of 23 don’t have the same birthday is:

(365/365)*(364/365)* . . . *(342/365) = 0.4927 or ~50%

Since this is the probability that no two people in a room of 23 have the same birthday, the probability that two do have the same birthday is just 1 – .5 or also 50%.

Might we not use the same logic to determine the probability that someone in a room will shoot someone else if everyone is armed? Instead of a birthday, we would need to figure out the probability that a person with a gun, which would now be everyone in the room, would be in a mental state sufficiently angry such that if he came into contact with another sufficiently angry person that a heated exchange would lead to gunfire. Might we not use the same number as the number of days in the year to make the calculation easy?

In other words, let’s assume that there are 365 discreet mental states, one of which is an insane state that would lead to someone feeling as though he wants to kill someone else. If we then ask what the probability is that at least two people are in the same mental state, which would probably precipitate a confrontation, then we have the birthday problem again, where S in the number of mental states and n is the number of people in the room:

1-P(S) = (S!/S**n/(S-n)!)*(1/S)

= S!/S**(n+1)/(S-n)!

We multiply by 1/S since this is the probability that the mental state these two or more people are in is the evil, angry state, capable of leading to a shooting. For the case that there are 365 mental states and 60 people in the same space, for example, close enough to one another to have contact, then the probability that two will be in the same mental state is 99%, virtually certain.

This means that there is then a 1/365 or ~0.27% probability that shots will be fired. While this is a small probability, would you get into a car if this were the probabiliy that you’d be injured or into an airplane if this were the probability the plane would crash? When it’s life threatening, a 1/365 probability is damn high.

In addition, I’ve used 365 mental states when in fact my guess is that there are many fewer mental states, which means that even in a small group, say 20 or 30, the probability that two are in the same mental state is virtually certain. And then if you factor in the kind of mental focusing that takes place when alcohol or drugs are involved at a sporting event or concert, the probability would quickly become large that at least two would be in the same nasty mental state. And if everyone had a gun, the probability would be high that someone would get shot.

Even in the wild wild west, if we’re to believe our Westerns, the sheriff knew better than to let cowboys pack guns when they were in town.

What better day to start a blog than on May 1, 2007, the day on which Congress sent to Bush deadlines as well as a whole lot of money. He rushed to veto the bill, only the second time he’s done that, to satisfy his told-us-so claim that he’s the man supporting the troops as the killing continues. When will it end?

Granta’s list of the best young author’s as reported by NPR.org.

This year, the best young American novelists cited by British literary magazine Granta are all 35 or under.

Granta’s list of young authors:

Daniel Alarcon
Kevin Brockmeier
Judy Budnitz
Christopher Coake
Anthony Doerr
Jonathan Safran Foer
Nell Freudenberger
Olga Grushin
Dara Horn
Gabe Hudson
Uzodinma Iweala
Nicole Krauss
Rattawut Lapcharoensap
Yiyun Li
Maile Meloy
ZZ Packer
Jess Row
Karen Russell
Akhil Sharma
Gary Shteyngart
John Wray