Picnic, Annual Meeting in Berkeley

Tilden Park in Berkeley is this year’s new location for the Annual Meeting and Picnic June 3.  The multidimensional event, which runs from 12-3, includes a novel discussion as well as the annual meeting and picnic.  Rob Calvert, chair for the event, promises to be there early to make sure the barbecue is reserved and the fires are lit.  Bring your own food, a dish to share with at least four, utensils, and a tablecloth, if wanted. The reading is “The Sibyl” by Swedish Nobel Prize winner Par Lagerkvist.

The novel is the story of a defrocked sibyl abandoned by the Delphic oracle.  She is sought out on her mountaintop retreat by a man who lived by the side of the road.  One day he yelled at a  criminal who was leaning his cross against the house---and was cursed--by Christ. The picnic committee selected the book, says Rob,  because it should lead to an interesting discussion with its themes of religion, morality, and the juxtaposition of the human condition and the divine.

The 1977 Random House Paperback Translation by Naomi Walford is available for $8 plus shipping on Amazon.com and $9 on Barnes and Noble.  Used copies are also available.

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Nouvelle Location for Novel:  “Don Quixote” Featured Work

A new location and a new translation of Don Quixote are the highlights of the Novel Weekend, to be held August 16-17 in Marin county at Walker Ranch.

“By the time we’re there, the hills will look exactly like the Spanish hills in Don Quixote,” says Louise Di Mattio, chairman of the Novel Weekend.  “It’s a wonderful place, she says, almost on the coast but not quite; mountains between us and the sea so we won’t be superfogged in.”

There are beautiful paths near the marine mammal center, gardens, and animals on site.  Owned by the Marin School system, the complex features bungalows for 2, 3, and 4.  The bungalows have been refurbished, so don’t be deceived by the plain exteriors, says Louise. Each of the bungalows has shared bathrooms.              A working farm, the complex has sheep, roosters, and other animals on site. There’ll be more walking than we’re used to at the previous locations, says Louise, but one of the houses is accessible to a parking lot for the handicapped.

A new translation of Don Quixote is the featured work.  Because the paperback book is hefty (735 pages), the committee has decided to save mailing costs by asking participants to buy their own copy.  Translated by Burton Raffel, and edited by Diane de Aramis Wilson, the book is a Norton critical edition, with extensive footnotes.

Although long, it’s an easy read according to a committee member who suggests reading it adventure by adventure.  She added, “Every time I read it I get something more out of it.  The first half I laugh all the way through, the second is philosophical but also funny.

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Heaney’s “Beowulf“ Translation Highlights Poetry Weekend

The new translation of “Beowulf” by the Irish poet Seamus Heaney will be featured at this year’s Poetry Weekend to be held November 10-11 at Westminster Retreat in Alamo.  A second session will feature Haiku, a traditional Japanese poetry form.  The Sunday morning session will be the always popular Potpourri, a selection of 5 to 6 poems by different poets.

Heaney selections have been popular at Poetry Weekend and Asilomar, and the Committee enthusiastically chose Beowulf as soon as they heard about the book, which contains both the Heaney translation and the original.

The epic tells of three battles. In the first, Beowulf and his crew travel to Denmark to meet the monster Grendel.  In the second, they battle Grendel’s mother.  The third battle, 50 years later, is against a dragon. 

The Haiku session will feature Japanese Haiku in translation as well as English Haiku.  The 17-syllable traditional Japanese form is a pattern of 5-7-5 syllables.

 

 

Civics in ESL Using Great Books

By Rick White

     This summer, new immigrants will learn civics through Great Books methods and materials in an experimental program at Contra Costa College.   The program will be held in English as a Second Lanuage (ESL) classes.

     Because the citizenship process lacks civic education, National GBF staff and the World Without War Council, a Berkeley civics education foundation, are joining to develop materials and train teachers.   Latino and Lao community groups will help design the program and recruit students.

The program grew from conversations between national GBF president Peter Temes and this reporter, who serves on the governing boards of both SFGB and the World Without War Council. The  Council works with immigrant aid organizations from a belief that American political community is crucial to reducing  armed conflict.   Millions of immigrants without a background in democratic institutions can endanger that community. But coupling American civics with their experience under other systems can strengthen it.

 

 

Wallis is Calling Talented Great Bookies:  This Means You!

By Wallis Leslie

The excitement of hearing new ideas, seeing new connections, arriving at new insights, is what draws us to Great Books discussion groups and events.  Just as Group Leaders help foster the ability of participants to create that excitement, Leader Training helps the leaders to sharpen their ability to facilitate such lively participation by helping enthusiastic and talented people to hone their skills at promoting Shared Inquiry.

Shared Inquiry works to create vibrant discussions because for the one to two hours of the session, the group sticks to exploring what meanings can be found in the text and saves comparisons to other books or films or life experiences until after the formal discussion. Why does this method work so well? Because all the participants have read the assigned text, but not all the participants have also read Kant or visited Kuala Lumpur or seen Uncle Vanya on Broadway.

Our Great Books Council of San Francisco, Serving Northern California, has seen an exciting increase in group formation and special event attendance. More Group Leaders are needed to keep our GB project bubbling along. Anyone interested in attending a Leader Training workshop or in exploring leadership issues should contact Wallis Leslie, 27240 Moody Rd. Los Altos Hills, CA 94022 (650-941-6206 or whleslie@pacbell.net).

Consider the personal advantages of exploring leadership abilities as a Great Books leader: improved listening skills, heightened concentration, intellectual stimulation, adrenaline rush, conviviality, satisfaction of contributing to the ongoing conversation that creates civilization, fame and fortune (well maybe not fame and fortune).

Let the energy and joy of shared intellectual discovery continue!

 

 

Asilomar Essay Selection Review: Are People Innately Virtuous?

By Oscar Firschein

How is society possible?  Matt Ridley's “The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation" explores this question. Ridley claims that society evolved as part of our nature; it is as much a product of our genes as our bodies are.  He feels that people come into the world with a predisposition to cooperate, to discriminate the trustworthy from the treacherous, to earn good reputations, to exchange goods and information, and to divide labor.  He also looks at other species to see how the essentially competitive business of evolution can sometimes give rise to the cooperative instinct.

The Prisoner’s Dilemma

A mathematical game, the prisoner’s dilemma, forms the basis for many of the book’s discussions on human cooperation.  In the original form of the game, two prisoners are presented with the following offer.  If both plead guilty, they each get 1 year; if both plead innocent, they each get 3 years; but if one pleads guilty and the other pleads innocent, then the innocent one goes free, while the guilty one gets 5 years. Each player fears that if he or she pleads guilty, the other will plead innocent, and so they both plead innocent, resulting in a 3 year sentence for each (rather than the 1 year sentence if they both plead guilty).

“Tit-for-Tat”

Another form of the game is played more than once, and we can think of the participants trading packages, where a package might or might not have something of value in it.  There is the possibility that an individual might  give the other a worthless bag of sand in return for a valuable package. One strategy for dealing with cheating is “tit-for-tat,” i.e., if my opponent trades me a worthless package in one round, then I will cheat him in the next round.  If the game is opened to many players, and if the identity of the players is known to everyone, then those players who often cheat will naturally be frozen out by the players who do cooperate.  Thus a society of “cooperators” will be formed.

An important theme of the author is that human institutions should be arranged in such a way as to bring out the cooperative side of human nature. The last chapter, “Trust," subtitled “In which the author suddenly and rashly draws political lessons,”  reveals Ridley’s hidden agenda.

"... if we are to build back into society the virtues that made it work for us, it is vital  that we reduce the power and scope of the state. We are not so nasty that we need to be tamed by intrusive government ...."

In giving his opinions as to how the human institutions should be crafted, the author changes from scientific exposition to what I felt was editorial rant (“budget-maximizing bureaucrats,” “government ... that squats like a giant flea upon the back of the nation”). In the group that I attended, there was much heated discussion as to whether or not the political language of the final chapter undermined the scientific exposition of the earlier part of the book.

 

 

The Night After The Great Books Weekend At Asilomar March 2001

By Seymour Collins

Clerk: All rise. This court is now in session. The honorable Peter Temes1, presiding.

Temes: Please be seated.

(All take their seats except the members of the jury, each of whom have been selected from the Greek Chorus2.)

Jury: O you who would find rest at my hearth, obey the rules! (They sit.)

Temes: Bring in the prisoner. (I am led into the courtroom... in shackles... and seated at a table upon  which there are but three books and several miscellaneous papers strewn about.)

Temes: Of what is the prisoner charged?

Clerk: There are multifarious charges brought against this man which will be revealed in due course. In general, it is alleged that he is not a very nice person.

Temes: These are serious charges. Prisoner, how do you plead?

Me: Not guilty, your honor, by reason of not having fully understood what it was that I read.

Temes: You mean, by reason of stupidity? (I shrug my shoulders.) Let the prosecution begin. Mr. Pinsky3, call your first witness.

Pinsky: If it please the court, I shall have them each in turn provide brief testimony.  Mr. Hopkins4...

Hopkins: That man (points to me) hacked and racked my aspens and destroyed forever a sweet especial rural scene.

Pinsky: The devil! (He stares at me with that multiple eye of his.)

Heaney5: The prisoner is unlettered. When Constantine waved his sign in the air, he was the only one who wouldn't follow.

Jarrell6: I was the one who found the accused wandering in the Lost and Found columns.

Pinsky: And, did you recognize his features? Did you grab his scruff?

Jarrell: Yes. No. He has no past and he has not much of a future.

Pinsky: You know that there was a reward for his capture?

Jarrell: I hold in my own hands, in happiness, Nothing: the nothing for which there is no reward.

Ridley7: The man's a mystery. I can never tell whether he will cooperate or defect. He can't be depended upon. I've been told that after reading my book he couldn't be nice anymore because he might really be doing it for selfish reasons. I think he may have the wrong kind of genes.

Me: Objection... hearsay... and speculation.

Temes: Noted. Mr. Ridley, reserve your comments to what you actually know about the defendant.

Ridley: The man belongs to no group... not even to a quango. He is devoid of all civic and social responsibility. He attends the sessions at Asilomar just for the fun of it. Where's the virtue in that?

Ibsen88: This man stole Lövborg's manuscript and told me that Hedda burnt it. I believed him and even wrote a play about it. Then, to make certain that his

secret was safe, he provided my Hedda with the pistol with which she killed herself.

Pinsky: Bizarre! What kind of Being is he?

Camus9: I'm totally indifferent to the man. I thought he might be my pal when he told me that he didn't believe in God but then he started to tell me his reasons, and I simply didn't want to know his reasons. He doesn't seem to realize that you don't need reasons. And, oh yes, once I heard him lie, and I just can't stand a liar.

Lowell10: The prisoner took me down the garden path, a heavy-booted lover, and told me of all the things he had done in his life. And, I could see a pattern midst the daffodils and the plashing of the raindrops. And he told me about the war; and of a friend who died in a pattern called war. Christ! What are patterns for?

Temes: Prisoner, have you anything to say for yourself?

Me: No, your honor.

Temes: Jury, how do you find?

Jury: Guilty! In the late wind of death he cannot stand.

Temes: Prisoner, you have been found guilty. I sentence you to spend the rest of your natural life in solitary... reading and re-reading the books and poems... and only those books and poems... which are on that table. Take him away!

---

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It Should Have Happened This Way:  “They Met At Rehab”

By Jim Stabenau

Scene:  A tastefully appointed waiting room in the office of Dr. Lucan placed in a fashionable suburb of Paris.

He:  Pardon me, but I can’t help myself, are you a General’s Daughter?

She:  Why how perceptive of you. How did you know?

He: Just a lucky guess. (Pause) I admired your highly polished riding boots and was blinded by the light flashing off your silver pistols.

She:  You seem too perceptive to be in a psychoanalyst’s office.

He:  Well since my student days when I realized nothing matters and I shut down, I don’t analyze much - I mostly observe.

She: You have an Algerian accent, how did you get here?

He: Well, my name is Meursault. I shot an Arab and couldn’t come up with a good reason. (pause) So, before being sent to the guillotine, my attorney plea-bargained a rehab analysis with Dr. Lucan, the French answer to Freud.

She: How did the murder happen?

He: Well I was at this terrific beach party my “pal” Raymond took me to, and I was in the heat and light thinking about feeling guilty about my mother.

She: What about?

He: Well Maman would have never permitted me to be pals with a guy who is a pimp. So I shot the Arab.

She: I don’t understand.

He: My attorney made the case that it was mistaken identity -that I really wanted to kill Raymond.

She: Wow, what a story. Has analysis helped you much?

He: Yes, quite a bit. (pause) I told my girlfriend Marie how much I loved her and asked her to marry me and move to Paris where I have this great new job. (Pause) But too much about me. How did you get here?

She: Well as you so perceptively noted, I grew up adoring my General father and our wonderful high social position. It seems one day I pointed one of Daddy’s pistols at the Judge and told him of my plan for a “beautiful” solution for ending a triangle he proposed. He rashly committed me, Hedda the Gabler, here  -  for treatment.

He: What does Dr. Lucan say?

She: He says I have a severe case of Father Fixation, Scandal Phobia, and Pistolphilia.

He: What are you going to do?

She: Daddy always had trouble accepting me. (pause) so; after the sex change, I’ll return to Norway as Hedrick Gabler, the son he always wanted.

He: Isn’t insight wonderful!

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We Invite You to Take a Journey To Understanding “Ulysses”

By K. R. Conneely

Editor’s Note:  Bloom’s Dublin Odyssey took place June 16,

Bloomsday, 2000

It’s Friday night, June 16^th, and I’m stuck in traffic at the notorious MacArthur maze in Emeryvillle.  Friends are waiting at the Rosa Pistola restaurant in San Francisco. After dinner the plan is to walk two blocks to “The Field," an Irish pub in North Beach to hear professional actors read from Joyce’s Ulysses.   My friends and I have been attending these Bloomsday celebrations every year since we first read and attempted to discuss the novel at Ralston White almost four years ago.  At the final morning session when the Great Books leader asked:  “What does it all mean?” there was an eerie silence.  The 785-page book had been unintelligible at the first reading, and even with Harry Blamires’ helpful guide, Ulysses had been a formidable work. 

However on the way home some ideas came forth and in the weeks, months, years afterwards, I couldn’t stop thinking of the magnitude of the book, the experimentation with style and the radical invention of language, the density of historical and 20^th century references, the allusions to Homer’s Odyssey, etc., but…..what does it all mean?

Bloom and Dedalus Compared

As we lurch forward inch by inch towards the Bay Bridge, I consider Joyce’s two main characters:  Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus.  Certainly the theme of fatherhood runs throughout the book, and Bloom and Stephen seem to have a father-son relationship.  Joyce, however, makes them contrasting characters.  Stephen is young, Bloom mature; Stephen is artistic, and sensitive, Bloom is practical; Stephen has an acute intelligence, Bloom uses common sense; Stephen is a loner, Bloom is affable and gregarious.  Yet they are similar in that they are both outsiders to their community.

Did Joyce mean to have Bloom and Stephen represent the most essential and significant roles in the human situation?  Bloom as “father” generates life, and that means the survival of the race.  Stephen as “artist/thinker” generates ideas that move civilizations forward.  (One could even say the artist as “creator” is the “father” to the father.)

At Ralston White I wondered why Bloom was so passive.  Why didn’t he confront Blazes Boylan who stole his wife away?  I wondered why Stephen deliberately avoided meeting his destitute sister in the street.  And why was Molly so promiscuous?  Maybe the readings will shed some light.

At the Field

In the backroom of The Field, a small stage has been set up and six male actors begin reading from “The Cyclops," chapter 12 (p. 292) which appropriately enough takes place in a tavern.  In the Odyssey, Cyclops is a one-eyed monster so Joyce creates the character of “The Citizen” (the average man?) who has a one-eyed view of everything.  He is opinionated, bigoted, nationalistic and totally unaware of the wider world.  Another major character is the nameless narrator.  The actors read rapidly in the rich, musical accents of the Dublin common man.  They skipped around through the long chapter and came to the entrance of Bloom who arrived, not to drink, but to find Martin Cunningham about an insurance problem.  As the readings continued I was surprised how The Citizen and others who had been drinking began to treat Bloom sarcastically, with deep prejudice and hostility while the nameless narrator was downright vicious.  Bloom answered the accusations and abuse with patient tolerance and with grace.  Then Bloom spoke out against injustice and persecutions of Jewish people.  He said:

“Force, hatred, history all that.  That’s not life for men and women, insult and hatred.  And everybody knows that it’s the very opposite of that that is really life.

---What? Says Alf.

---Love, says Bloom.  I mean the opposite of hatred.” (P.333)

Bloom’s Goodness

Then I began to realize that Bloom had always been kind to his father, always concerned about his daughter, continually grieving over his dead son Rudy; and while he never confronted Blazes Boylan who was cuckolding him, Bloom remained faithful to his estranged wife, Molly.  The readings showed Bloom to be a good and decent man, and as an Irish-Jew, almost Christ-like.  The readings answered my questions about Bloom’s passivity.  He was a man of peace.  At Ralston White someone suggested that Bloom was “Everyman.”  I disagree.  I now think that Joyce was showing “The Citizen” to be man at his worst, and that Bloom was man at his best.

The next reader was a radiant red-headed young actress who read Molly Bloom in “Penelope," the last chapter in Ulysses.  P. 138.  As Molly thinks over the men in her life, she rejects them all and decides that Bloom is, despite his “oddities," the best of the lot.  My mind jumps to the National Geographic Special where male caribou to the north line up to fight it out with clashing antlers.  Standing nearby, a doe waits for the winner.  She will mate only with the strongest male to assure the survival of the species.  Molly’s stream of consciousness monologue reveals a simple person, driven by her instincts.  Molly seems to be Joyce’s symbolic woman.  Her famous (and over-familiar) “yes..yes..YES” speech means continuity of their marital relationship, and presumably there will be more children.  Life will go on.  The homecoming turns out to be a joyous one for Bloom and the end of his wanderings.

Circe Episode

On the other hand, Stephen Dedalus must leave home for he has just begun his journey.  The “Circe” episode (chapter 15, p. 429+) takes place in a brothel and was the most difficult to get through until we understand that Joyce is reaching down into the subconscious mind in his attempt to include all levels of human experience (the descent into the irrational dream world of fantasy and nightmare).

In the key chapter, Stephen says “I will not serve” and then breaks with his ashplant cane the chandelier (light from others who are the authority figures: the British usurpers of his land, the dominant church).  He will leave his county and even his own family.  By asserting his intellectual self, he will provide his own light (the light of the artist who seeks truth).  By that symbolic action, Stephen moves from immaturity to maturity and towards the intellectual and creative independence an artist must have.

On my journey home the traffic had thinned out as my thoughts on Ulysses had cleared up a bit.  I now believe that on a bare-bones level Ulysses is about human survival (via fatherhood), about the importance of love, kindness and a sense of justice (Blooms’ Christ-like character, and about the need for the search for truth (the artist/thinker who shares his light with us all).

Of course there’s a great deal more to discover about this remarkable book, and so I look forward to gaining fresh insights at the next Bloomsday celebration and readings on June 16, 2001.

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Mark Your Calendar!

And See Stories Inside

June 24                    Annual Meeting, Novel & Picnic (Sun.) Tilden Park,  Chair: Rob Calvert

August 16-17              Novel Weekend (Sat.-Sun.)  Marin, Walker Ranch,  Chair Louise Dimattio

November 11-12       Poetry Weekend Alamo (Sat.-Sun.) Westminster Retreat Center, Registrar:  Ruth Korn, Chair Mary Wood

AND WATCH FOR… Asilomar 2002 April 26 to 28, 2002 (Fri.-Sun.)