Vol. 1 No. 1
Fall 1996
publication of the SAN FRANCISCO GREAT BOOKS COUNCIL
The Great Books Foundation has announced that it will publish a new adult series in 1997, terrific news for thousands of discussion participants who have been reading the existing series over and over again for more than twenty years. The new books will appear as nine single-volume anthologies that include additional contemporary selections, more women and minority authors, poetry, and a list of recommended novels.
An added volume, How to Discuss a Book, will be sold in bookstores as well as through GBF. It will explain “shared inquiry” and the Great Books mission and programs, and will provide contact information, a list of Great Books publications, and recommendations for training.
The nine volumes are scheduled for release throughout the year as part of an overall plan to expand and revitalize the adult program. “They will help us attract new and younger people,” according to GBF, and “properly serve the estimated 20,000 active group members, take advantage of the recent proliferation of [non-GB] book discussion groups, SFGB will have its own page, tied and combat the wrong – but prevalent – image that Great Books is a stuffy and elite program.” GBF assures us the new readings will be selected at no sacrifice of excellence or discussibility.
Allen Temple Baptist Church, one of the country’s great religious bodies and a leading Oakland institution will co-sponsor with GBSF a Great Books discussion this January 11 to celebrate the birthday of Martin Luther King Junior. Five thousand members strong, this predominantly black church has a Hispanic ministry as well and a distinguished history of working for interracial harmony. The church is led by Dr. J. Alfred Smith, Pastor, assisted by his son, J. Alfred Smith, Jr., Co-Pastor.
Called "A Gathering of Equals," the event is a continuation of GBSF’s contribution to the National Endowment of the Humanities "national conversation program." Its purpose is to bring citizens of all backgrounds together in a discussion about American pluralism and identity. The Oakland program will feature a discussion of Martin Luther King Junior’s essay, "A Letter from Birmingham Jail" employing the Great Books "method of shared inquiry." GBSF will furnish experienced leaders for an anticipated ten discussion groups and will train an equal number of co-leaders to be recruited by the church. A luncheon will follow.
The church will manage the overall event, including invitations and publicity. It will accommodate about 180 participants and be held at the church’s facilities, 8500 A Street in East Oakland.
by Mark Scardina
As this newsletter goes to press, GBF and SFGB are going on the internet. GBF's web address is www.greatbooks.org and SFGB can be reached either there or at www.greatbooks-sf.com. Pay us a visit using an online service, such as CompuServe or America Online, or an internet service provider.
Reading Matters is on the page. Information is also posted or may be requested on any of these topics:
In offering information about our groups and activities 24 hours a day, GB web pages not only should be useful to existing members but should help to attract new ones. The internet is used extensively in education and the sciences, areas from which we have drawn members in the past.
Suggestions and contributions of material are invited. Please e-mail to webmaster@greatbooks-sf.com.
Readers of this newsletter may be wondering what happened to the final big event in the SFGB Council's program, “A Gathering of Equals.” We postponed it until we can get a better mix of participants. The planned celebration of Martin Luther King Junior's birthday with Allen Temple Baptist Church, reported above, is aimed at remedying this deficiency.
The purpose of the National Endowment for the Humanities in calling for “a national conversation,” was to bring together Americans of diverse backgrounds to talk about what we have in common. SFGB's project was to do this through discussing great documents in the country's history using the Great Books “method of shared inquiry.”. At the first session, held at the Commonwealth Club of California and at Chevron's headquarters, in San Francisco, in July 1995, the 153 participants included 20 individuals of identifiable racial or ethnic minorities. The second session, at the World Affairs Council of Northern California, also in San Francisco, in August, included only one such individual among a total of 68. Ten had registered and paid the fee by mail but did not attend. In advance of both sessions, extensive media efforts and individual contacts had been directed at achieving diverse participation.
The two other Great Books cities in the NEH grant achieved a better variety. Chicago did this through an arrangement with a major downtown library and intensive one-to-one recruitment. Philadelphia structured their program around a set of minority celebrity intellectuals – most notably, Cornel West – who at least guaranteed the interest of their own fans. Reportedly, the Chicago meetings were conducted in the Great Books spirit of shared inquiry and met GB standards for a good discussion. On the other hand, the Philadelphia program was panned in a Wall Street Journal op-ed as a soapbox for the views of these celebrities rather than a gathering of equals.
The San Francisco discussions were of high quality: The Declaration of Independence, the Preamble to the United States Constitution, the Bill of Rights, Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Letter from Birmingham Jail, Maya Angelou's story, “High School Graduation,” from I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, and The Federalist No. 10 were explored with the assistance of SFGB-trained leaders.
SFGB's Wallis Leslie attacked poetry lovers with a water cannon July 20 at Westminster Retreat House, Alamo, California. Fire, if you can call it that, was returned quickly by a dozen water pistols ranging from the highly technical, multi-colored, top reservoir type, to the simplest of hollow plastic day-glo pistols. Laura Rubin had left a pile nearby just in case something like this happened. It was she, after all, who had suggested the theme of the afternoon session, “Poems of War and Conflict.” Leslie, however, was not deterred.
The battle began just after an afternoon discussion as readers headed for the swimming pool or study sites under the trees. Leslie had taken up station next to a water tap out front and stood with a bucket full and the tip of a large green wand immersed in it. The look in her eyes was unmistakable. Obviously, someone had argued too long for an incorrect interpretation of some war poem she liked. “The Shield of Achilles,” by W. H. Auden? Henry Reed's “Naming of Parts”? Perhaps it was “Fury of Bombardment,” by Richard Eberhart -- that would make sense. Or, maybe she was still upset from a misreading of John Keats's “The Eve of St. Agnes” during the morning session. Anyway, someone was going to pay.
And pay they did, as the battle surged from the front yard over to the swimming pool and well into it.
In mid-battle, the evening's guest speaker, the poet Susan Woolridge, arrived at the edge of the pool in full summer dress and took a blast. Nothing would do but for her to jump into the pool and start after the offending Leslie.
Susan's presentation that evening was a departure from past speakers at Poetry Weekend. Instead of reading and discussing her poetry, she read from her new how-to-do-it book, “poemcrazy.” She took the forty-odd participants through exercises designed to help them start writing.
Proof of Susan's effectiveness was this haiku by your editor:
I am a ball
Rolling Slowly Up the Stairs
Seeking Gravity.
For special effect, by the way, this work was read aloud by the author through the moving blades of an electric fan that happened to be nearby. (It was hot that evening in Alamo).
Should you need more proof, study this piece by Council member and Asilomar committee chairman, Brent Browning:
My real name is Escape from Boredom,
No price too high.
Yesterday my name was Iron Man
with an Agenda.
Today my name is Spitwad – well,
boys will be boys.
Tomorrow my name will be Gadfly
or perhaps Old-and-part-of-the-problem.
Secretly I know my name is Opinion
with an attitude.
My name once was Worm. (I don't
do worm anymore.)
by Vince Scardina
Trying to reach more adults with busy careers and young families, SFBG is testing the idea of “mini-retreats,” one-day book discussion events that will take place in each county three or four times a year. The idea, according to organizer Vince Scardina, is “to tie interesting venues with the discussion.”
The first event is scheduled for Saturday, January 27, at Pacific Telesis in Yerba Buena Center. Two Nineteenth Century short novels will be discussed, Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome and Kate Chopin's The Awakening. Following the discussions, participants will tour the new San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, in particular the exhibit “From Matisse to Diebenkorn.”
A flier will be ready in October, says event chair Fiona Humphrey, and GBers are encouraged to help spread the word to new participants.
For further information, Fiona can be reached evenings at (415)928-2028 and Vince days at (415)585-5475.
GBF has called upon the metropolitan Chicago council to work with the foundation on ideas for starting new Great Books discussion groups. The Chicago council will assist GBF with five initiatives: recruiting Junior Great Books leaders to start adult groups; persuading libraries to host Great Books groups; assisting corporations to build Great Books discussions into staff development programs; holding GBF-sponsored training events; and developing strategic alliances with such organizations as elder hostels, book group associations, humanities councils, and cultural networks.
Kemper Insurance recently installed a Great Books program inside the company with the help of GBF. The Kemper program will serve as a model for further GBF-Chicago work with corporations.
The GBF-Chicago collaboration is one element of a new three-year marketing plan to reinvigorate and expand the adult Great Books program nationally. Other elements include the new book series and the internet site discussed above, improved support to metropolitan Great Books councils, and a program to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Great Books Foundation. Copies of the three-year plan are available at cost from Laura Holt Rubin (see below).
In the first of a series of visits to local Bay Area discussion groups, your editor took his mother to sit in on Roy Harvey's monthly meeting at the lovely old Falkirk Mansion in San Rafael. The selection was “What is War,” from On War, by Karl von Clausewitz (GBF Third Series, Volume 2). Present were six individuals, normal for this group, and Roy began by turning to the text and working with the group to achieve clarification of several difficult passages. After an hour of this, he led the group in examining some of the questions about the selection in the separate study guide. Sure enough, by then it was possible to get a handle on those questions, which would have been daunting at the outset.
I left the meeting with a much better understanding of the passage, and I enjoyed the time. There were two surprises: first, they stopped after an hour-and-a-half, just when I thought things were really rolling, and causing me an acute case of discussus interruptus (seasoned Great Bookers will know how that feels); and second, and more significant, they permitted outside references, both textual and personal. Asked later about this, Roy told me that it is his policy to allow such references but to keep them “short, and to the point,” that is, directly related to the text. He believes this is within the approved Great Books method, and showed me evidence of this in the questions provided by the Great Books Foundation that accompanied the Clausewitz selection: one question refers to the Geneva Convention, and another to the atom bomb. Neither could have been familiar to Clausewitz.
Roy told me that he also permits digressions from time to time just not to discourage someone from participation. He keeps these brief.
My mom and I enjoyed the discussion and the setting, and – as usual – I understood the selection many times better after the meeting than I had going in.
In contrast to Roy's group, for six years I have taken part in the Berkeley group run by Morris Berger. Morris is a stickler for the “no outside references” rule, I am sure one of the strictest in the country. Some evenings, you so much as breathe funny and he's on your case, but others he's a little more laid back. The discussion is for two hours, and only interpretation is allowed, no evaluation. For those who wish to stay on after the two hours, the rules are off.
Most of us would probably prefer an approach somewhere between the high-tension intellectual challenge of Morris's group and the more relaxed but still productive atmosphere of Roy's. The moral of this story is, if you don't like one group, try another!
Ever thought about leading at a Great Books
event?
If you'd like to consider it, please call Tom Cox at
(415)892-2310 or Barbara McConnell at (707)829-5643.
Several day-long events will be added to the full SFGB schedule of activities during the coming year to draw new participants, according to Erma Browning, Council president. First of these is the event set for January at Pacific Telesis (see story above). Such days will follow in other Bay Area counties.
As SFGB launches these new events, the organization will continue to sponsor its regular schedule of activities throughout the year. Thirty-some book discussion groups have met bi-weekly or monthly at sites around the Bay for many years, and will continue to do so. Most, but not all, of these work from GBF's five-year series of adult readings. They will be certain to take an interest in the new series promised by GBF for release during 1997 (see story p.1).
Four annual events that have become traditions will be held again at the same sites as last year. The first of these is the autumn weekend at the Ralston White mansion on Mt. Tamalpais where a long novel is discussed. This November's book is Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace. For several years this limited-space event has sold out within days of its May announcement and 1996 was no exception.
Next is the spring weekend at Asilomar in Pacific Grove, which features four two-hour discussions: a selection of poetry, a short novel, a long essay, and a play. There is plenty of room at this beautiful resort to accommodate all who will apply within a reasonable time of the January announcement.
The SFGB Annual Meeting, open to all comers, will take place in June at the Cheese Factory in northern Marin County. When business is completed, there is always a book discussion, typically of a short novel or a play that combines humor with serious thematic material.
The last event, in July, is Poetry Weekend at Westminster House, Alamo (three two-hour discussions: a classic poet, a modern poet or a theme, and a potpourri).
All of these events will be announced in separate mailings. For a roster of local groups or other information, call Laura Holt Rubin, (510)528-3626.
In case you hadn't noticed, the San Francisco Great Books Council initiates a newsletter with this issue. For the year 1996-97, two issues are planned, this one -- the bulk of which are being mailed out with the President's annual letter -- and one that will accompany SFGB's January notice about the Asilomar event. The press run is 1,600. Letters on any topic related to the Great Books movement or to reading and discussion are invited, as are ideas for articles that readers might like to submit or have us write. Some of the most interesting, significant, or funny letters will be published, at the Editor's discretion. E-mail is the desired method of submission. All letters with an e-mail return address will be answered and others as time permits.
Erma Browning, President;
Tom Cox, Vice President;
Duke Edwards, Secretary;
Lee Jordan, Treasurer;
Laura Holt Rubin, Coordinator -- (510)528-3626.
Reading Matters - Rick White, Editor 501 Santa Barbara Road Berkeley, CA 94707 e-mail rwwhite@aol.com