BCC Center for Liberal Arts

BCC Reads!

BCC Reads Scholarship Winners Announced

The Center for Liberal Arts is pleased to announce the following 3 student winners in the 2008 BCC Reads! scholarship contest:

Sopheary Chiv
Essay: "The Struggle to Survive"
English 093 with Instructor: Liz Dills

Mikeya Harper
Essay: "Our Greed Will Lead To the Demise of Mother Earth"
English 072 with Instructor: Scott Bessho

Connor Olsen
Essay: "Misleading or Merely, Modified"
English 101 with Instructor: Geeta Sadashivan

There will be a reception for Timothy Egan, author, The Worst Hard Time and BCC Reads! Scholarship Winners on Wednesday, April 23, 2008, 5:30 pm to 6:30 pm, BCC Art Gallery D271

BCC Reads! Scholarships funded by the generosity of the Bellevue Community College Faculty Association (BCCAHE) Community Fund and BCC Foundation. The Center for Liberal Arts at BCC offers individual scholarships in conjunction with the annual BCC Reads! common book program. Scholarships will pay one quarter's tuition costs, up to a maximum of $1,000.

BCC Announces 2008-2009 BCC Reads! Selection!

The BCC Reads! selection committee is pleased to announce its common book selection for 2008-2009: The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury, which celebrates its 50th anniversary next year. The committee and Center for Liberal Arts invite the BCC community to read the book and join a college-wide conversation about its themes and ideas. Instructors wishing to adopt it in courses should contact the Center for Liberal Arts. If you’re interested in participating in planning and development for BCC Reads! The Martian Chronicles, please contact any of the committee members.

A few days ago on the NASA web site there was a photograph of a landslide on Mars. It was incorporated in the update to reports on the time table for the United States to send a spacecraft with humans-not cute robots on wheels-to Mars. We do not have to wait for technology, the rotation of the planets, the politics, the astronomical budget or for scientists to solve the challenging problem of how to maintain our bone density without gravity! We are going by way of Ray Bradbury’s classic The Martian Chronicles.

Published in 1950, The Martian Chronicles is a loosely connected series of short stories-many are written to stand alone. As a common book choice Martian Chronicles effortlessly bridges 50 years. “There was always a minority afraid of something, and a great majority afraid of the dark, afraid of the future, afraid of the past, afraid of themselves and the shadows of themselves,” says Ray Bradbury.

“Written during the height of the Cold War anti-Communist hysteria, they criticize imperialism, racism, environmental pollution, censorship, and the nuclear arms race. Bradbury was not alone. But that such a volume could become the single most widely-read SF book during the fifties is a tribute to the power of Bradbury's style, a compound of sentimental nostalgia, idealism, and above all delight in the pleasures of the senses.” (Paul Brian, Department of English, Washington State University)

The Martian Chronicles is a very good read and never loses the essential question of what does it mean to be human-or not. As Geeta Sadashivan, BCC English Instructor, says: “From Atomic Bombs, Chicken pox and Dreams, to Juju houses, Killer Locusts, and Million-year picnics (not to speak of Yellow-eyed extra-terrestrials and Zealous earth-men)—this book has it all, from A to Z! It would be fun to teach in any course with issues that challenge binaries--courses about hybrid identities, liminal places, border art, trangressive actions, and transformative practices.”

The Martian Chronicles offers the opportunity to use all of the book or bits and pieces. As Liz Dill, BCC Instructor, says: “As an instructor I'm excited to see how Bradbury's creative vision of the future will inspire student discourse. With dire predictions of global warming from scientific experts, the idea of colonizing another planet is not so far-fetched. From Egan's Thirties' past to Bradbury's Martian future, we've stumbled across a coincidental bridge between two imposing planetary landscapes and the challenges they present.”

The red planet has fascinated us for centuries, and The Martian Chronicles will make real the old saying that life is not measured by the breaths you take but by the moments that take your breath away…it will make you long to hold an ancient manuscript that sings the words as you pass your hand over the surface- and those words will forever be lodged in your mind and heart.

BCC Reads! Selection Committee:
Wilma Dougherty/ Librarian (chair), Star Rush/Center for the Liberal Arts, Lee Buxton/Speech Communication, Francis Hatstat/Business, Barbara Wright/Humanities & Science, Doug Brown/Science, Geeta Sadashivan/English, Nancy Eichner/English, Scott Bessho/English, Elizabeth Dills/English.

2007-2008 BCC Reads! Selection

The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl by Timothy Egan.

From Publishers Weekly: Egan tells an extraordinary tale in this visceral account of how America's great, grassy plains turned to dust, and how the ferocious plains winds stirred up an endless series of "black blizzards" that were like a biblical plague: "Dust clouds boiled up, ten thousand feet or more in the sky, and rolled like moving mountains" in what became known as the Dust Bowl. But the plague was man-made, as Egan shows: the plains weren't suited to farming, and plowing up the grass to plant wheat, along with a confluence of economic disaster-the Depression-and natural disaster-eight years of drought-resulted in an ecological and human catastrophe that Egan details with stunning specificity. He grounds his tale in portraits of the people who settled the plains: hardy Americans and immigrants desperate for a piece of land to call their own and lured by the lies of promoters who said the ground was arable. Egan's interviews with survivors produce tales of courage and suffering: Hazel Lucas, for instance, dared to give birth in the midst of the blight only to see her baby die of "dust pneumonia" when her lungs clogged with the airborne dirt. With characters who seem to have sprung from a novel by Sinclair Lewis or Steinbeck, and Egan's powerful writing, this account will long remain in readers' minds.

Timothy Egan lives in Seattle. He is a journalist for The New York Times, and the author of four books. He has been the recipient of several awards, including the Pulitzer Prize.

The BCC Reads! program has been funded in part under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act, from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, administered by the Office of the Secretary of State, Washington State Library division.

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BCC Reads Film Events

The Center for Liberal Arts and BCC Reads! invite you to participate in a film screening and post-screening discussion of two landmark American documentary films by Pare Lorentz. Both short films are characterized by lyrical narration, grand, heroic cinematography, and famous epic, symphonic scores by Virgil Thomson, which are among the most famous every composed for the movies. Aaron Copland praised the music for The Plow for its "frankness and openness of feeling," and the music for The River "a lesson in how to treat Americana."

The Plow that Broke the Plains (27 min) 1936/bw
Selected to the National Film Registry, Library of Congress in 1998.
Overview: The film connects the booming World War I economy to the subsequent environmental crisis. Lorentz details the Great Plains during the Depression and the over-farming that transformed an ecological fragile landscape into the Dust Bowl. The cinematography and score capture the beauty and desolation of the prairie landscape and the tragedy of people overwhelmed by the forces of nature, human-caused environmental disaster, and the marketplace. Made by the U.S. Resettlement Administration-charged with assisting farmers affected by the drought--the film stirred considerable controversy during its original release.
Screening Times

The River (31 min) 1938/bw
Selected to the National Film Registry, Library of Congress, in 1990.
Overview: The Department of Agriculture made the film to describe the importance of the Mississippi River to the U.S. Lorentz depicts the impact of farming and timber practices on massive erosion that washed vast amounts of top soil down the river into the Gulf of Mexico, severely impacting impoverished farmers of the area. The film was made by the Resettlement Administration to raise awareness about the New Deal.
Screening Times

BCC Reads! program funders and partners include the National Endowment for the Humanities, Seattle Public Library, King County Library.

For More Information:
Please contact Star Rush, Director, The Center for Liberal Arts: 425-564-2550 or email srush@bcc.ctc.edu.