Winter 2020

The Best American Nonrequired Reading

Description

Building on a project launched by David Eggers, the very strange Sarah Vowell brings together a collection of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, comics, and category-defining gems. Among the 28 pieces are contributions by Ta-Nehisi Coates ("My President Was Black"), Louise Erdrich ("How to Stop a Black Snake"), Lin-Manuel Miranda ("You'll Be Back"), and George Saunders ("Who Are All These Trump Supporters?").

Is there a common theme to these essays? Not really. Is there a common message? Still less so. The same can be said of those popular New Yorker collections "from the 1940s", "from the 1950s", and so on. What then can participants expect? The deeply pluralist sensiblilities of a mostly younger generation of writers—a generation for whom "consensus" and "over-arching agreement" are alien constructs. The New Yorker too conveyed a common sensibility—the New Yorker "style"—but during more innocent, less divisive times.

Weekly Topics

The selections for each section can be chosen by the participants themselves. 

Bibliography

Sarah Vowell, ed., The Best Amerian Nonrequired Reading 2017 (Mariner, 2017), 375 pp.

Let's Laugh a Little, Seriously, with Gary Shteyngart

Description

Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, …gloom and doom. Some of us have spent a whole term brooding over Anna Karenina and The Brothers Karamazov.  Not a laugh for 14 weeks!  It’s time to get some laughs from a Russian, turned American, writer.  ‘Seriously’, because Shteyngart has won, or almost won, numerous awards:   The Russian Debutante's Handbook won the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction, the Book-of-the-Month Club First Fiction Award and the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction. It was named a New York Times Notable Book and one of the best debuts of the year by The Guardian.  In 2002, he was named one of the five best new writers by Shout NY Magazine. Absurdistan was chosen as one of the ten best books of the year by The New York Times Book Review and Time magazine, as well as a book of the year by the Washington PostChicago TribuneSan Francisco Chronicle and many other publications. In June 2010, Shteyngart was named as one of The New Yorker magazine's "20 under 40" luminary fiction writers. Super Sad True Love Story won the 2011 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic literature. His memoir Little Failure was a finalist for the 2014 National Book Critics Circle Award (Autobiography)

 In this SDG  our purpose will be to enjoy and laugh, for now. And later, we will be able to tell our grandchildren, when they  join PLATO, that we were in the first PLATO group to discover the greatest classic Russian/American writer of the 21st century. 

Weekly Topics

Week one:  The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, first half

Week Two:  The Russian Debutants’s Handbook, second half

Week Three:  Absurdistan, first half

Week Four:  Absurdistan , second half

Week Five:  Super Sad True Love Story, first half

Week Six:  Super Sad True Love Story, second half

Week Seven: Lake Success, first half

Week Eight:  Lake Success, second half

Week  Nine:  Little Failure: A Memoir

Week Ten: Articles:   https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/06/10/from-the-diaries-of-pussy-cake, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/08/05/o-k-glass  and https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/20/confessions-of-a-watch-geek

Russian Short Stories

Description

The short story holds a central place in Russian literature. Many of their authors; Gogol, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Pushkin and Solzhenitsyn,  acclaimed giants of Russian literature, are well known.   But, many of these writers have only recently become known to the English-speaking world.   Taken all together the gamut of human experience they portray is great.  Some stories are tragic.  But, there is comedy -- from Pushkin's subtle wit to Kharm's dark absurdism, Dostoevsky's graveyard humor, and Zoshchenko's satirical vignettes on life after the 1917 Russian Revolution.  All of them responded to the twists and turns of Russian history.  But as we shall see, humanity, in different times and different places, does not vary that much.

Weekly Topics

  1. INTRODUCTION,  ALEKSANDER PUSHKIN - MIKHAIL, LERMONTOV

  2. NIKOLAY GOGOL 

  3. IVAN TURGENEV,FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY 

  4. COUNT LEV TOLSTOY, NIKOLAI LESKOW 

  5. ANTON CHEKOV 

  6. LYDIA ZINANOVYEVA - ANNIBAL IVAN BUNIN, ALEXANSDR L. LUPKIN

  7. TEFFIYEVGENY ZAMIATIN, MAXIM GORKI 

  8. VERA INBER, MIKHAIL BULGAKOV, ISAAK BABEL 

  9. MIKHAIL ZOSHCHENKOLEONID DOBYCHIN, MIHAIL ARTZYBASHEV, SIGIZMUND KRZHIZHANOVSKY 

  10. ANDREY PLATONOV, LEONID ANDREEV, VSEVOLOD GARSHIN

  11. DANIIL KHARMS,  VARLAM SHALAMOV 

  12. ALEKSANDER SOLZHENITSYN What a Pity, VASILY SHUKSHIN In the Autumn

  13.  ASSAR EPPEL, SERGEI DOVILATOV, YURY BUIDA, BORIS PASTERBAK, SASHA SOKOLOVA, ANDREI SINYAVSKY, SASHA SOKOLOV

  14. VLADIMIR NABAKOV, GEORGI VLADIMOV,  NADEZHDA MANDELSTRAM 

Bibliography

Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida, Robert Chandler Ed. (Penguin Books, 2006.) 

Latin American Magical Realism

Description

Gabriel Garcia Marquez once stated: "My most important problem was destroying the line of demarcation that separates what seems real from what seems fantastic."    Although the term was first used by German art critic Franz Roh in 1925, It is commonly thought of as a Latin American movement.  It is related to surrealism, but it is focused on the material object as opposed to its German roots of surrealism's more cerebral and subconscious reality.  In 1949, French-Russian Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier, developed his related concept marvelous realism. Magical Realism refers to literary fiction with supernatural elements presented in an otherwise real-world setting thus revealing the magical in this world.  Fables, folk tales, and myths ae brought into contemporary social relevance.  The narrator doesn’t explain fantastic events, the story proceeds as if nothing extraordinary happened.       In Latin America, magic realism contains another feature: politics.  This is a "Third World" society.  Brutal police and army regimes, arbitrary cruelty, murder, corrupt dictators and the underlying, unspoken hand of the “American Company” are ever present in its fiction.   Amongst the sensory exuberance of the Latin American landscape, Magic is the only explanation for the unreasonable reality of daily life that surrounds the powerless individual. And his only hope.

Weekly Topics

Weekly Topics

  • Week 1 and 2  Introduction: Definition of the movement. Origin. European precedents.

    Alejo Carpentier Bio (Wikipedia)

  • Week 3:  Alejo Carpentier short story: Journey Back to the Source from Oxford Book

    Of Latin American Short Stories, OBLASS.  Plus his book, The Chase.

  • Week 4 & 5: Miguel Angel Asturias. Selections from his short story collection,

    Mirror of Lida Sal: Tales Based on Mayan Myths and Guatemalan Legends.

  • Week 6 & 7: Gabriel Garcia Marquez.  Selections from 100 Years of Solitude and

    Balthazar’s Marvelous Afternoon from OBLASS.

  • Weeks 8 and 9: Isabel Allende. Selections from The House of Spirits (book) and

    The Stories of Eve Luna (book).

  • Weeks 10 & 11: Julio Cortazar” Selected stories from Blow-up and Other Stories.

  • Week 12: Mario Vargas Llosa: The Challenge from OBLASS and selections from

    the book Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter.

  • Weeks 13 & 14: Summaries/ Reviews/ Discussion/Conclusions.

Bibliography

1) A Study Guide for "Magic Realism",  GALE Cengage learning, (Literary Movements for Students, Vol. 2, 62 pages)

2) The Oxford Book of Latin American Short Stories, Paperback, January 1997 by Roberto Gonzalez Echeverria

3) A companion to Magical Realism (Monographies A) paperback-March 18, 2019 by Stephen M. Hart and Wen-Chin-Ouyang

4) Single Stories Extracted from books by the individual authors not covered 

The Gene: A Grand Tour and Gentle Introduction

Description

Grand Tour is an apt metaphor to describe our core book and this SDG.     

It is a story of discovery with many twists and turns, put together by our tour guide, the masterful Pulitzer-Prize-winning author Siddhartha Mukherjee.  We'll take in every major advance in the field from 1850 to 2016, we'll meet the scientists as they do their work, and we'll understand their motivation for what they are doing.

 Our Grand Tour starts in Ancient Greece with the Pythagoreans and Aristotle.  Very soon we are riding with Charles Darwin on the Beagle.  We visit the garden of a Russian monk, Thomas Hunt Morgan's cages of buzzing fruit flies, and we attend the birth of the new science of genetics.   

That's barely the beginning of the tour offered by our superlative new core book, which we will follow closely. This is top-drawer science writing--clear and understandable for a general audience, novelistic in pace and character detail, eruditely written, engaging, and informative.

If you have ever wanted to understand modern biology, not only some of the science but also its social and moral implications, the light that science shines on what race, sex, and gender really are, and where biotechnology is rushing to take us, you will enjoy this SDG.

Weekly Topics

The Gene, our core book, has 35 chapters.  They have been grouped into the 14 weeks below not strictly by page count, but also based on how much material is covered and by how much there is to discuss in the chapters for the week.  Each line in the list below corresponds to the contents of one chapter in The Gene.  The majority of weekly readings are in the range of 28 to 38 pages.

 1    Introduction to the author's family, a recurring thread throughout.
      Heredity via philosophy: From Pythagoras and Aristotle to 1850.
       Darwin and evolution: The best-adapted variants are selected naturally.
       Darwin tries to define a theory of heredity but fails.
       Mendel finds that inherited traits are passed as discrete alleles.

 2    Rediscovered, Mendel's work becomes the basis of genetics.
       Genetics is distorted into the false "science" of eugenics.
       American eugenics in the 1920s gets into racial politics, prison, surgery.
       Genes exist on chromosomes.    Morgan and his fruit fly experiments.

 3    Fisher and Dobzhansky show how genotypes lead to phenotypes.
       Griffith: A gene is some kind of chemical.  Muller: X-rays mutate fruit flies.
       Nazis turn eugenics into the Holocaust.  Lysenko's political genetics.

 4    Avery purifies Griffith-experiment debris, is left with the chemical DNA.
       Watson, Crick, Franklin, and Wilkins deduce DNA's structure.
       How does DNA in a gene provide information to build a protein?

 5    Pardee, Jacob, and Monod discover how genes are regulated.
       How do genes control development of an organism from just one cell?

 6    Berg, Boyer, and Cohen make bacterial hybrids and clone them.
       Sanger sequences the complete genome of a virus (9 genes).
       Scientists see biohazards and propose self-regulation at Asilomar.

 7    Swanson and Boyer form Genentech, genetically engineer insulin.
      "Was my father's fall the consequence of his genes?...new ways to think."
       McKusick catalogs genetic diseases. Amniocentesis. Roe v. Wade.

 8    Neo-eugenics.  What is genetic wellness?  How can causal genes be found?
       Hemochromatosis. Genome signposts.  Huntington's.  Cystic fibrosis.
       Genomic illness: cancer & schizophrenia; even crime?  Polymerase chain reaction, fast sequencing.

 9    Human Genome Project vs. Craig Venter:  H.flu, C.elegans, fruit fly, human genome are sequenced.
       Here's a summary of what the human genome sequence reveals.

10    Human ancestry, race, genes, and intelligence. "Normal" means what?

11    Sex, gender, and gender identity. XX, XY, SRY but 1000 shades of gray.
        Is there a "gay gene"?  Genes, twins, personality, and behavior.  The role of chance.

12    Waddington. Gurdon's frogs. Epigenetic marks. Embryogenesis. RNA.

13    Embryonic stem cells. Gene therapy for OTC deficiency kills patient.
        Predicting genetic risk: BRCA1, schizophrenia, bipolar disease.  Moral hazards of preimplantation genetic diagnosis.

14    Gene therapy for Hemophilia. Inheritable therapy in germ line via embryonic stem cells & CRISPR/Cas9.
        Future:  Projects of discrimination, division, and eventual reconstruction.

Bibliography

The Gene: An Intimate History 

by Siddhartha Mukherjee 

Scribner, May 2016

Edward Albee

Description

Edward Franklin Albee III was an American playwright known for works such as The Zoo Story (1958), The Sandbox(1959), Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), and A Delicate Balance (1966). Three of his plays won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and two of his other works won the Tony Award for Best Play.

His works are often considered as frank examinations of the modern condition. His early works reflect a mastery and Americanization of the Theatre of the Absurd that found its peak in works by European playwrights such as Samuel BeckettEugène Ionesco, and Jean Genet. His middle period comprised plays that explored the psychology of maturing, marriage, and sexual relationships. 

 "He invented a new language — the first authentically new voice in theater since Tennessee Williams,” said playwright Terrence McNally about Albee.

“A play, at its very best, is an act of aggression against the status quo,” Albee told a group of aspiring teen-aged playwrights in San Diego in 1989.

“Too many people get constricted by social norms, miss out by not living a full life,” Albee told the students gathered there. “The important thing is to be yourself absolutely. When I die, I would like to realize I haven't missed out on too much.”

“We don't need an attack on the conscious. We need an attack on the unconscious,” Albee told the New York Times in 1971. “[President] Nixon and the ghettos are particular horrors that have come about because people are so closed down about themselves. …Why does everyone want to go to sleep when the only thing left is to stay awake?”

The purpose of this SDG is to get into Albee’s head, and see how he developed from the beginning to the end. We will read and analyze 14 of his plays, good and not as good- sometimes discussing flaws in a work is more stimulating and rewarding ...he believed good theater is like a mirror making the audience face themselves in it.

Weekly Topics