Vol. 2 No. 2
Spring 1998

Reading Matters

Bay Churches Show How to Discuss Race Relations

William Jefferson Clinton should have been at the Lafayette-Orinda Presbyterian Church on January 18, 1998. He was invited. But, instead, he spent the day being deposed in the Paula Jones case. That is why the discussions he has been holding on race in America are still mired in acrimony.

He would have learned that whites and blacks grow quickly to know, to respect, and to like one another when together, in small groups, they dig into the complex ideas of a great American like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and work to understand them. The

Great Books method helps, as in each group of 18 individuals the leader takes responsibility for the quality of the discussion, asks thoughtful questions, insists the group stick to the text, only allowing personal experience that helps to understand the text, and never intrudes his/her viewpoint.

On January 18, the text was Dr. King’s posthumously published essay, "A Testament of Hope." A year earlier it had been his more famous "Letter from Birmingham Jail." This second meeting makes permanent the partnership between SFGB and these two churches to include small group discussions using the Great Books "method of shared inquiry" in their annual celebration of Dr. King’s birthday.

After two hours of discussion, the 250 participants adjourned to a lunch served by Lafayette-Orinda volunteers and followed with a hip presentation by the Allen Temple Baptist Church drill team. From there it was to the majestic, towering open-beamed sanctuary of the church to listen to a speech on Dr. King’s legacy, then sing songs of racial reconciliation.

As surely as March arrives in northern California, the SFGB Asilomar committee denies there is a theme for its Spring Conference reading selections. But the 200 who descended upon Pacific Grove this March 19-21 didn’t need special prosecutor Ken Starr to penetrate the committee’s usual stonewalling. A fool could see that the 1998 theme was "The Other Self." In 1997, as this space reported, it was "Inequality."

The evidence speaks for itself. The essay was The Undiscovered Self, by Carl Jung. The novel was The Immoralist, by André Gide, wherein the protagonist throws over a respectable life to hang out, one might say, with small boys and farm hands. The play was M. Butterfly, by David Henry Hwang. In it, a French diplomat discovers he is the opposite of what he thought all along and kills himself. The six poems included "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," where T. S. Eliot’s character struggles to find the courage to change; "The Buried Self," by Matthew Arnold (need we say more?); and "How to Like It," by Stephen Dobyn, wherein a man lets his dog make all his decisions and ends the poem staring into a refrigerator to find the answers to life’s basic questions.

Your editor took advantage of his position as discussion leader at the final session of Group 17 to nail the issue of theme with a series of probing questions. Predictably, Dick Stephens, a member of the reading selection committee, persisted in denying it. This denial has been made so often that the usually percipient Ruth Berger backed up Stephens, in spite of the fact that she had been nowhere near the committee during its deliberations. Denials repeated often enough can be surprisingly effective in persuading ordinarily canny individuals to distrust their own experience.

Oh, Billy, you sweet impeachable you!
Oh, Willy, you sweet impeachable you!
Kathleen, Paula, Gennifer and Monica, too
Got together, called the press, to tell about you.
The Senate says you're impeachable you.
Bob Bennett says you're unreachable you.
Kenneth Starr would like to pour Whitewater on you.
Hillary suggests you take a cold shower, too.
Now Tipper does not approve of your "crimes."
Your zipper must stay zipped up at all times.
Don't be a silly Billy.
Come to Hilly, come to Hilly, do!
You sweet impeachable you!

ã March 1998

These challenges found their match in the participants at this year’s Asilomar Spring Conference. Persistence and alertness uncovered all secrets, including the answer to the question posed by André Gide’s title character Michel, in The Immoralist, who begged for a "reason for living." It is to return next year, to uncover yet more conundrums.

by Gary Geltemeyer

Forty showed up for a Great Books mini-retreat on "Privacy and Security on the Eve of the Millennium" at the Pacific Bell building in San Francisco on an intermittently stormy Saturday, February 7. In the morning, those assembled broke into three groups to discuss Federalist Papers No. 1, 51, 57, and 84. Written over several months of 1787-88 by Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison, these essays argued for the adoption of the United States Constitution. In doing so, conflicts were highlighted between the rights of the whole community, as these might be exercised by the government, and the rights of individuals. The "right to privacy" was nowhere explicit in these documents.

After lunch, where the usual entertainment outside the windows of Max’s Café on Third Street across from PacBell was supplemented by a major downpour,

the group reconvened in general assembly to watch a Fred Friendly video debate between advocates of privacy and security in which prominent Americans played characters who were questioned by Harvard law professor Arthur Miller. Then Barbara McConnell, Sebastopol, chaired a town meeting where nearly everyone joined into the debate.

To this writer’s disappointment, virtually all who spoke took the view that privacy rights should be absolute and that the government should not go snooping even to ensure public safety. Many Americans have died in wars to secure our freedoms, argued Brent Browning. By the same token, we should be willing to lose some lives in peacetime.

Little reference was made to the Federalist Papers discussed earlier, which might have provided the basis for questioning that argument. No one, for instance, cited Hamilton’s memorable lines: "What is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary."

In all, the organizers deserve high marks for experimenting with a specific subject and trying a different format. And thanks to PacBell for the use of their excellent facilities.

Gary Schoepfel to Speak at Picnic

Speculation became reality in early March as Gary Schoepfel, adult program director for the Great Books Foundation, invited the San Francisco Great Books Council to be its next local partner. GBF is completing a period of partnership with the Chicago Metropolitan Council. More than a dozen new discussion groups have been established there and materials published to help others form new groups.

Schoepfel will attend the SFGB Picnic/Annual Meeting, May 30, to talk about activities that might be undertaken in such a partnership. A motion will be presented to accept GBF’s invitation and commit SFGB to the partnership concept.

Ralph Ellison’s powerful novel about life as a black man in mid-twentieth century America is the selection for discussion at the SFGB annual picnic, set for May 30, 12:00 noon, at the Cheese Factory, on the Petaluma-Point Reyes Road, a half-mile coastward of the north-west end of Novato Boulevard, in Marin County. The book is to be purchased individually.

After lunch, officers for the coming year will be elected. The Executive Committee’s new nominees are Rick White, President; Louise DiMattio, Secretary; and Grace Apple, Treasurer. Nominated for re-election are Tom Cox, Vice President; Vince Scardina, Historian; and Shirley Mortensen, Contract Negotiator. A new office, Past President, will be proposed, its first occupant to be the outgoing President, Erma Browning.

Following the election, Gary Schoepfel will talk about the proposed SFGB-GBF partnership (see story above). Discussion of Invisible Man should begin no later than 2:00 p.m.

The picnic is potluck. Participants are asked to bring their own drinks and a dish to serve four individuals.

A key was used to gain access to the Mill Valley branch of West America Bank the evening of January 29. Chairs were squeezed tighter and tighter around a rectangular cluster of tables as finally 24 individuals had entered the bank in an attempt to unravel the meaning of a long ago, fictional theft of a Russian overcoat.

About 18 times a year for the past 20 years, local resident Marjorie Scott has used a key to enter this bank after hours to hold discussions of great literature. She has led the Mill Valley Great Books Discussion Group for 40 years. For most of that time, GBSF leader training chair and current vice president Tom Cox has been a regular and he is present tonight. The reading is Nikolai Gogol’s short story, "The Overcoat." It is from the volume Order and Chaos in the new 50^th anniversary Great Books Foundation series, but it also appears in the five-year series still used by many local groups. Your editor has brought his son and three friends the age many of the regulars were when the group started.

Occasionally during the lively hour-and-a-half outside works are cited. Several times Mary Arnold, a member schooled in Russian language and history, explains nuances lost in the translation and provides historical context for the events in the story. Marjorie later tells me she allows the outside references because most participants have discussed these works together in past meetings. Mary is their resident expert on matters Russian, and the group enjoys what she has to say, so Marjorie lets it happen.

In spite of the large attendance, nearly everyone contributes more than once. The young visitors take part enthusiastically and promise to come again. Outside, it is cold, between rain showers, and your editor notes without irony that he has failed to bring an overcoat.

David Denby is New York Magazine’s movie critic and a frequent contributor to The New Yorker. We’ve been watching The New Yorker struggle with the dilemma between its leftish sympathies and its long commitment to literary excellence. We have wondered who would win the battle for the soul of this great old magazine: those who attack the canon or those who defend it. Lately there have been signs that standards of excellence will prevail. The latest such indication is Denby’s wonderful literary memoir whose very name is Great Books.

Troubled by the argument over the canon and by his own too-long immersion in popular culture, Denby decided to go back to Columbia for a year and audit the core great books courses he’d taken there three decades earlier. Great Books tells about the books, about his struggle to read and understand them, about his reactions at college age and then in middle age, how the students in the classes he audited reacted to the books, how the professors taught them. For Denby, it was a deeply enriching year. As a Great Books participant who has read and discussed most of these books more than once in recent years, I found myself extraordinarily well-prepared to delight in Denby’s intellectual journey -- to enjoy his observations and insights, both personal and intellectual, and to assess them in the light of my own. About Homer, for example, he writes:

Homer is the first of many who cause Denby to ruminate about multiculturalism:

Denby watches both his intellectual and his emotional responses as he reads and as he listens in class. Watching the professor call on students in an early session, even though it had been agreed that the professor would not call on him

This passage made me want to reflect on what I think of when I think of college, and want to ask my wife, my grown children, and my friends this simple but fascinating question.

Denby observes that students in his classes had an odd way of answering when asked to tell about themselves.

Sophocles Oedipus bothered the students greatly. Since he didn’t know that he was killing his father and sleeping with his mother, how could he have been guilty? The play, they thought, was morally invalid.

Leaning toward Platonic idealism, Denby observes that

Then leaning toward the Aristotelian view he brings in his own experience of film:

Vergil’s Aeneid:

The Old Testament:

On his feelings reading Macchiavelli:

He describes the rigidity of a multiculturalist professor whose class he visited:

On Hobbes:

Some thoughts while reading Hume:

Hegel:

Montaigne:

The impact of engagement with the canon:

Rousseau v. Macchiavelli:

Denby owns up to what he doesn’t understand and he notices what bothers him. And he tells us about it. I hope that I can learn from him and become a better reader.

Reading Matters Rick White, Editor 501 Santa Barbara Road Berkeley, CA 94707 e-mail rwwhite@aol.com