Stories of California: Outstanding Photography of the Golden State

This SDG will study the many stories of California revealed in outstanding photographic images documenting the life and times of California. We will read Kevin Starr’s excellent book California for historical context and background on the evolution of the Golden State. From online digital archives, discussion leaders will select outstanding photographic images that examine subtopics detailed in the SDG schedule, including California’s gold rush era, immigration, California’s changing environment, its economic and population explosions, the hard times, wartimes, and fun times explained in Professor Starr’s essays and revealed by California’s finest photography. 

We will study great California photographs—by legendary photographers as well as by diverse artists whose works are rarely seen—to understand the California experience beyond what traditional narratives and statistical studies alone can explain. Outstanding images selected by the discussion leaders will facilitate discussions of weekly themes drawn from Kevin Starr’s survey of the golden state and reflected in online photographic collections of UC Berkeley, the Smithsonian, the Library of Congress and other photographic resources.

Adaptations: From Short Story to Big Screen

Film feeds off literature as sharks off a marlin’, film theorist George Bluestone once said. Stanley Kubrick was a compulsive reader, sometimes tearing through a book a day in his constant search for new material. Alfred Hitchcock told of imagining the shape of a film, then having to search for a story to fit his visualization. Howard Hawks claimed that the hardest part of making a movie was finding a good story and then figuring out how to tell it.” [From the introduction of our short story anthology.]

Did you know that many of your favorite movies are adaptations from short stories? Each week we will read a short story (from 10 to 40 pages) and then watch the film adaptation. From noir, to sci-fi, to horror, to westerns. Was the story faithfully translated, or did the director seek to convey a feeling, rather than plot details? Did an “auteur” director make the story their own, leaving the original author “in the dust” so to speak? Perhaps the author wrote the screenplay. What changed in the adaptation from story to screen?

Join us for this 14 week SDG, where we will explore these questions and more. The source anthology includes 35 short stories that have been adapted to film. I have selected 14, but may allow substitutions from the anthology.

The final list of films, discussion leaders, and presentation dates will be determined at the pre-meeting.

The Tyranny of Merit: Can We Find the Common Good?

Why has our society and politics become so polarized? A major reason is the economic advantages of globalization have been distributed unequally for a long time. Why has this inequality gone on without change? Michael Sandel, in The Tyranny of Merit, offers an explanation and a solution. He contends that a misplaced commitment to the meritocratic principle is to blame. The solution: the meritocratic principle must be replaced if we are to achieve a just society. 

The meritocratic principle holds that the accumulation of income is morally and legally merited by talent and hard work. Those who succeed believe they have merited their success. Sandel maintains that meritocratic hubris leads them to regard with disdain the less successful. This hubris provokes resentment in the less successful who are at the bottom of the income scale. Hence, social polarization. 

Sandel's solution is to reject the ideal of meritocracy and to reorient politics and the economy around a renewed sense of the common good. He contends that the relentless competitive race has eroded the feeling of community, unjustly denigrated losers, and has produced a cynical and arrogant elite. 

This SDG will examine Sandel's arguments explaining the current social and political polarization, its causes and his solution. This SDG will examine two other competing theories--free market liberalism, advanced by the economist Friedrich Hayek; and welfare state liberalism, advanced by the philosopher John Rawls.  Sandel concedes that both theories offer compelling objections against the meritocratic ideal, but they should be rejected because they allow for some inequalities. Is Sandel correct; is his theory superior to that of Hayek and Rawls? 

Short Stories: Mid 20th Century Women Writers

In this SDG we will read short stories of three women writers: Flannery O’Connor, Shirley Jackson, and Grace Paley.   These writers are known for short stories, yet many of the stories are no longer read or discussed.   That is remedied in our SDG, we will read two short stories in each of 14 sessions.

Flannery O’Connor is perhaps the most well-known of our three writers.   She wrote Southern Gothic short stories and novels.   We will read from her first story collection A Good Man is Hard to Find, & Other Stories from 1955.  The title story has been anthologized often.   It explores the myth of southern friendliness, and is quite captivating (pun intended).  “The River” is about a young boy who takes his baptism too seriously.  

Later the Same Day (1985) has stories written by Grace Paley over the decades.  Paley was a novelist, poet and political activist.  Her stories were often centered in NY City.  “Dreamer in a Dead Language” is a story about mothers and daughters, the power of thought and what it is like to cope.  “Somewhere Else” takes place in China and in the South Bronx.  White liberal Paley skewered in her story white liberals for thinking they have the right to claim ownership over these places and their populations.  

Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” is a famous American short story.  She was a feminist who preceded feminism’s Second Wave, and a prolific writer of short stories and novels that were collected by the Library of America.   “The Daemon Lover” follows the trials of a woman who, in her sadness and pain, hunts for the man who left her on the day they were to be married.  The title character of the story “Elizabeth” is a middle age woman working in Manhattan, having an affair with her boss which is going badly.  Feeling desperate in the City, she meets another man who she knows will be different.

Selected Movies about Irish History and Culture

I have coordinated SDGs on Irish History and Irish Literature and I thought that an SDG on Irish Movies would be a good complement. While reading about Ireland is useful, there is nothing like the emotions and visuals of a movie. They not only engage the viewer in a powerful way, but often stay longer and more clearly in the viewer’s memory.  Fortunately, there are many movies about Ireland that carry those attributes. For example, I think most people will remember the violence and fear in the movie “Belfast” long after they have forgotten the details of the Troubles and how they began.

The focus here is on movies that illuminate aspects of Irish history and aspects of life, as lived, in Ireland (including the unique Irish humor) and that are well made and entertaining. There are so many excellent movies about Ireland, made in Ireland and in America, that it is hard to choose. The movies designated below include the following historical events: the 19th century famine, the 1916 Easter Rising, the Irish war for independence, the civil war that followed, the longstanding problem of emigration, the role of the Church in forcing pregnant girls to work in laundries and give up their babies and the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Movies on life in Ireland include the iconic “The Quiet Man” and later films on the roles of women, the attachment of rural Irish farmers to the land and James Joyce’s great story, "The Dead."

The method of this SDG is to view one or two movies per week, to combine that with readings on the subjects of the movies and to then discuss the movie and the history and the themes they present. Short selections from books in the bibliography and certain short stories on the themes of the movies will be designated for most weeks and identified on-line or copied and distributed. They will be required reading, not merely optional. Finally, there are some additional movies which are designated as possibilities which we can discuss when the SDG begins—the SDG members can decide whether to include one or more of them in a weekly session, to schedule additional sessions for them or simply to leave them as suggestions to be viewed at leisure. All of the movies are easily available on one of more of You Tube, archive.com, Amazon Prime and Netflix.

The Odyssey of Homer

The Odyssey tells the story of the Greek hero Odysseus’ ten-year-long return from Troy to his island home of Ithaca. Odysseus had left his kingdom in the hands of his wife Penelope who has shown the required hospitality to guests who then abuse the code by refusing to leave the palace and courting the queen herself. Having returned home in disguise, Odysseus must kill his enemies to reclaim his kingdom and re-woo his wife, after an absence of 20 years. In contrast to the battles of the Iliad, the Odyssey is the work of a more humane singer, either another poet or an older and mellower Homer. Here justice and love are valued more than martial heroic achievement. Amid episodes, which show Odysseus fighting the Cyclops, avoiding the deadly and seductive Sirens, and falling prey to the beautiful sorceress Circe, the focus here is on character. This poem sums up Homer’s great themes of power, honor, justice, knowledge, and sexual love, themes that remain the core issues of all subsequent European literature.

We will examine how Homer created an idealized but artificial world by conflating the memory of five centuries, while his poems also reflect the social, political, and religious world of his own time. In this SDG we will examine both the poem’s literary power and technique, its mastery of narrative and psychology, and its historical context.

This SDG will read and examine Homer’s Odyssey in Emily Wilson’s recent translation - the first in English by a female scholar after more than sixty by male scholars since Chapman’s in 1616. We now understand that the putative “author,” Homer, was a singer who entertained Greek nobles with sections of his enormous creation. Only its oral beginnings can explain the method of composition, its use of repetition of scenes, the frequent formulas (“winged words”), and the poet’s use of epithets attached to individual characters.

Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Franklin is the Founding Father who winks at us.  An ambitious urban entrepreneur he rose up the social ladder from leather-aproned shopkeeper to dining with kings.  During his 84 years he was America's best scientist, inventor, diplomat, writer, and business strategist, and he was one of its most practical political thinkers. 

In this colorful and intimate narrative, bestselling author Walter Isaacson provides the full sweep of Franklin's amazing life, from his days as a runaway printer to his triumphs as a statesman and Founding Father.  He chronicles Franklin's tumultuous relationship with his illegitimate son and grandson, his practical marriage, and his flirtations with the ladies of Paris.  By bringing him to life Isaacson shows how Franklin helped to create the American character and why he has a particular resonance in the twenty-first century.  Doris Kearns Goodwin writes, "The reader will fall in love with this high-spirited, larger-than-life character who, above all the founders, was the most committed ... to the common man."

The Death of Caesar: The Story of History's Most Famous Assassination

The assassination of Julius Caesar marked the end of the Roman Republic and changed the course of Western Civilization. 

"In this story of the most famous assassination in history, “the last bloody day of the [Roman] Republic has never been painted so brilliantly” (The Wall Street Journal).

""[A] compelling, clarifying account of one of history's most dramatic assassinations. . . . [Strauss] conveys the complexity of late republican Roman politics while keeping up a lively pace." (Lev Grossman Time)

“[A] page-turner. . . . Detail after detail clothes the familiar facts of Caesar’s seemingly inevitable murder with fresh images. . . . The last bloody day of the Republic has never been painted so brilliantly." (Greg Woolf The Wall Street Journal)

“This history of Caesar by the American academic Barry Strauss is a romp, yes, but a glorious one, through the final months of Rome’s most famous ruler. . . . One of the most riveting hour-by-hour accounts of Caesar’s final day I have read. . . . An absolutely marvelous read.” (Catherine Nixey The Times (London))

"This stupendous book has all the pace and action of a top-quality thriller—murder, lust, betrayal and high politics—yet it's all true, and comes from the pen of the world's senior academic expert in the field. A lifetime's study of the ancient sources has gone into Barry Strauss's utterly gripping account of the day that the course of human history radically changed. Superbly researched, wittily written, but above all driven by a truly exciting narrative that never lets up, this is history-writing at its best. Our understanding of what happened on the Ides of March and its chaotic, bloody aftermath is forever changed, and this will be the standard work for decades to come." (Andrew Roberts, author of NAPOLEON: A Life )

“You say you want a Revolution” -- America in the 1960s

Arguably the most tumultuous decade of social change since the Civil War, the Sixties transformed and divided American society – civil rights struggles, a unprecedented militancy and engagement across the spectrum of social and political issues, a war on poverty and inner city blight, an exponential expansion in environmental awareness, space exploration and exploration of the inner self, revolutionary new music and other cultural expression, a sharpening of the Cold War and the nuclear arms race - and a redefinition of how nations and peoples fought “hot” wars. If you look at America in 1959 and jump ahead to 1969, it seems everything changed.

We will revisit this decade with Frye Gaillard as our guide through his masterful storytelling in A Hard Rain, winner of the F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Literary Prize and one of NPR’s Great Reads of 2018. Gaillard weaves together the stories of the protest movements: Civil Rights from non-violent marches to Black Power and urban riots; SDS and the YAF (Young Americans for Freedom); the Free Speech Movement that spread from one college campus to another; the anti-war movement and the pro-war counter-movement; women’s right and the embryonic gay rights movement. At the same time, he tells the stories of political, cultural and social changes from George Wallace to Robert Kennedy, from music to fashion, from changing sexual attitudes to hippies and the drug culture. Gaillard melds multiple themes to present a comprehensive account of this watershed period in modern American history.