History of My Reading: Lucretia Parsnips and The Great Turkey Heist of 1965

Flipping through a complete set of Knox Students for the 1965-66 school year reveals a few trends.  The college--students, faculty and administrators--was highly focused on the college, with the ongoing Faculty Planning Committee and its preliminary reports, and with pages of Letters to the Editor in the regimes of editors Ed Rust and Bill Barnhart.  Vietnam and related issues began to appear with increasing frequency.   Computers were mentioned, including the Computer Science major to be offered the following year.

Michael Chubrich (right) in debate, Judy Dugan moderating, Len Borden taking notes. Gale photo.

Michael Chubrich took over as Student Senate president, promising sweeping changes. Guests on campus included Senator Paul Simon of Illinois, J. Allen Hynek, the UFO advocate; the classic filmmaker Joseph Von Sternberg (The Blue Angel) and poets Mark Van Doren, Robert Bly and James Dickey.

 Knox theatre's mainstage productions were Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew (the last ever to be directed by departing professor Kim Chase) and The Mikado. Kevern Cameron directed Waiting for Godot, locating it in a circus. Among the Social Board movies was To Kill A Mockingbird.  A few Cinema Club titles inevitably suggest the college ambience: My Life To Live, The Exterminating Angel, Through A Glass Darkly, La Dolce Vita, The End of Innocence.
Immediately upon my return to Knox in the fall of 1965 for my second year, I was very, very busy.  I was news director of WVKC, the campus radio station, and doing music shows as well, which required selecting music from the station's record library (or bringing my own albums), creating a playlist for the engineer, and using a copy of it for my on-air introductions. I did jazz and folk shows, and filled in occasionally for classical shows--while adopting a slightly different voice suitable for each form (folksy, cool, FM-whispery).

I already had my news voice(s).  As the year wore on and I got more tired and bored, my David Brinkleyisms on the ten o'clock news became more outrageous. I did have one distinction: I was the first DJ in Knox history to legitimately play a rock song.  They had been forbidden, until the station director (Mike Bourgo) bowed to the inevitable.  The first rock song?  "Help!" by the Beatles. (It was at the end of an original radio mystery that Skip Peterson and I wrote.)

My summer conversion to the Beatles was continuing--I was rapidly accumulating Beatles records and other material, as we shall see (read on.)  There was some negative reaction to WVKC's belated rock revolution, however-- from students (including an offended letter to the editor.)

 One more note about WVKC.  In February (1966), the first combat death in Vietnam of a Knox alumnus was recorded: Albert Merriman Smith, class of 1960. He'd also worked at WVKC.  His father (also Albert Merriman Smith, though he'd dropped the "Albert" professionally) was the White House correspondent for United Press International, one of the wire news services we used for our newscasts.

I became an editor of Dialogue, the campus essay and issues magazine, now established in its second year.  I joined the editorial board (with students Kevern Cameron, Steve Goldberg and Dennis Stepanek, and faculty members Douglas Wilson, Gordon Dodds and John Pascucci) and by spring, I was functionally the managing editor, preparing the issue for press.

 I also began writing a column for the Knox Student, called Metaphor.  I started with a piece ostensibly "explicating" the expression "one book man." For a long time I thought I'd embarrassed myself by totally misunderstanding it. In 1965 I thought it meant a dogmatic person who derived their beliefs from the equivalent of one book.  Later it seemed it really meant an author who manages to write or at least publish only one book.  (An example of that would unfortunately be me.)  But it turns out that the original phrase "man of one book" from Thomas Aquinas meant what I thought it meant in 1965.

The only Metaphor column anyone remembers was one I wrote on a particularly frenzied night in November (I think I wrote it at the Toddle House, where I spent many late nights after my midnight radio show) that used a strange punning language to describe the weekend as a society or gossip columnist would--in this case "Lucretia Parsnips" or movie columnist Louella Parsons.  The names in particular drew attention (for example,"kafka livingston" was Kathy Lydigsen, "maybe jefferson" was Mary Jacobson, who returned the favor by dubbing me "big coincidence.")

Afterwards I heard from at least one English faculty member about my "Joycean" language, derived from Finnegans Wake by James Joyce.  I smiled and nodded knowingly but in fact I'd never looked at a page of Finnegans Wake.  My model was John Lennon, whose similar punning style was on display in two books, the recently published A Spaniard in the Works and the earlier In His Own Write, which I'd absorbed over the summer.  However, I hastened to acquaint myself with the works of James Joyce outside of A Portrait of the Artist--and he became an obsession for many years.

I have since learned that my experience essentially replicated John Lennon's.  When his first book came out, a critic mentioned its Joycean origins, but Lennon hadn't read Joyce either--though he did after he'd been influenced by him.

 My fellow columnists for the first semester were Kevern  "Casey"Cameron ("The Noisemaker") and Skip Peterson ("The Styleboat Skipper.") Cameron ignited a letters debate between Professors Brady and Doug Wilson, and Skip and I were envious.  But the three of us also collaborated in different combinations (I believe we may have written each other's columns once--I'm pretty sure I wrote a spoof of Cameron's.) I'm sure the three of us once got together to write a combined letter to the editor we thought was hilarious, after which we repaired to the BV for more liquid refreshment, returning to campus arm and arm and singing, a unique experience in my college career.

Unidentified Englishman (probably a duke by now) and me

I was still active in the Knox debate club, and in particular participated in a debate with two touring student debaters from Cambridge University in England.  Judy Dugan and I were each paired with one of these lads, on one side or the other of the topic (as we say in America), or the question (as they say in Brit.)  Judy and I did our standard research and serious preparation on whatever it was.  But the Brits were much looser, employing wit, rhetoric and sometimes fanciful argument.  I eventually got into the spirit with a few ripostes of my own that went over well, so we had a great time.

The Gale photo.  Mark Brooks and Neil Gaston behind me.

But my big public speaking moment that fall was addressing the Student Senate on the issue of how students were selected to participate in the Faculty Planning Committee's work (which is the occasion of my photo on the title page of the 1966 Gale yearbook.)

 I was part of a group that drafted a statement, and I wrote the accompanying speech.  I read it first before at least some members of this group, and specifically included the words "denizens of Olympus" so I could see Mary Jacobson make a face--she disapproved of such rhetoric. I made some changes based on their comments (but I kept "denizens of Olympus" in anyway. It gives me a laugh even now.)  As writing, the speech is pretty good--probably more accomplished than my columns--and clearly modeled on the style of Robert Kennedy.

 So with all of that elevated activity, none of it having anything to do with college sports, no one would suspect me of collaborating in the crime of the year.  But that was a key to our success--we were not the usual suspects.  So after more than five decades, now it can be told: the true story of....

The Great Turkey Heist of 1965

The closest equivalent college campus to Knox is Monmouth College in nearby Monmouth, Illinois.  The annual football game between the two schools is an historic rivalry, and the winner is awarded the bronze statue of a turkey.  Why?  Beats me.

  Anyway, the winning school keeps and displays it until the other school wins it back.  Except...part of the rivalry is finding ways to steal the Turkey in advance of the Big Game.  And this is what a highly unlikely crew did.  Our photos were published in the Knox Student--with our faces obscured.  So--Knox students of a certain age-- prepare to be shocked.

Ed Rust

The mastermind was Ed Rust, editor of the Knox Student.  In a letter to the editor at the end of his tenure I described him: "In conversation he is jittery, his eyes are piercing, his head and shoulders are bent forward, his chin jutted, all giving the impression of disorganized intensity."
 Today I would just recall him as a combination of Robert Kennedy and Dennis the Menace.

 Rust enlisted the unlikeliest of suspects: Jim Bronson (the tall, clean cut, affable photographer and writer for the Student) and the truly shocking one: Ruth Mesing, recently appointed as one of the first student representatives on the Faculty Committee on Student Affairs, along with Bob Misiorowski.  And, for some reason, little old Indie me.  How Ed talked me into it I don't know, but he could be persuasive about his enthusiasms.  (There were others in that photo but I don't recall who they were.)

RFK with Ed Rust reporting

Rust, who had seen entirely too many James Bond movies (Goldfinger was the latest hit in the series), concocted an elaborate plan, a real caper.  He obtained a car somehow (this was when Knox students weren't permitted to have cars on campus, or even to drive one)and sent Bronson and me to the Monmouth student union.

Jim identified himself as a photographer for the Monmouth student newspaper, and I was his assistant.  He sweet talked the union's (adult) manager into allowing him to take a photo of the Bronze Turkey in the display case.

 Only Jim kept getting a reflection from the glass, so he asked the manager to take the Turkey out of the display case.  But we needed still more light--daylight for instance, and so the manager accompanied us as we took it outside.  Just then at that very moment, he got an urgent phone call (Rust? Mesing? calling from a phone booth within sight of us) and had to go back inside.

Bronson was looking into his viewfinder while I held the Turkey.  He motioned me a little farther back.  Then a little farther.  And when he was sure the coast was clear, he waved me away.  We had the Turkey.  It was a heist, though I believe we liked to call it the Great Turkey Coup.

 But it wasn't over.  The Rust caper had a few more twists and turns. We met back at the car and Jim drove off, but he didn't head back to our campus directly.  Part way back to Galesburg he pulled off the road into a secluded area, where, under some trees, there was a second getaway car waiting.  It was a station wagon, the back of which had one of those compartments in the floor for the spare tire.  The Bronze Turkey went in there, with a nice rug atop the compartment.

Ruth Mesing and Miz wait for a Student Affairs meeting to start

Ruth Mesing drove the station wagon, the real getaway car.  I rode to Galesburg with her, while Bronson drove back alone.  So if anyone was looking for two guys riding together, they wouldn't find them.

 Meanwhile Ed Rust distributed fake editions of the Monmouth newspaper on their campus, announcing the theft of the Bronze Turkey, by "townies."

My participation ended there, but the fallout continued.  The next day Monmouth dropped a one page edition of the Knox "Stud" on the campus from an airplane.  Later, five pillowcases of feathers were dropped on the Monmouth campus.  Then Monmouth students tried to raid the Knox campus but one was captured and held overnight in a frat house.  Then Monmouth students did the same to a Knox student.

  The escalation might have continued, but by then it was time for the actual football game.  Which Knox won--the team's only victory of the season.

  The Theatre of Smoking

 I associate two other sets of memories with this school year.  I've previously recounted my New York misadventure with the tape of songs by my hometown folk trio, the Crosscurrents.  But that didn't end the Crosscurrents.  The other two members were high school friends, Clayton and Mike, who attended a college close to home. That fall, Clayton and I decided to write songs together long distance: I would write lyrics, send them to him, and he would write the music.  When I went back, the three of us would work out the song.  We wrote perhaps a half dozen songs that way.

 I vividly remember writing one of the lyrics-perhaps the first--on a yellow pad, in the Knox library.  That's a kind of holy memory.  They were good songs, though the lyrics were a little flawed.  One of them became pretty well known among a small audience.

 The other memory was of how I took up cigarette smoking.  It happened in the Gizmo, where I was entertaining the table with imitations of how various professors smoked.  Teachers smoking, let alone smoking in class, was new in my experience. But these were the '60s, and pretty much everyone smoked, pretty much everywhere (although at Knox, women were not permitted to smoke and walk at the same time.)  I got laughs by holding a cigarette with two fingers in an erect V, very close to the hand, as Mr. Grutzmacher had.  And smoking the cigarette down to the last quarter inch, as Mr. Haring did in my political science class.

The act was such a hit that I repeated it.  After a few times I just kept on smoking the cigarette, and then I started buying them.  I went from Salems to unfiltered Pall Malls in my senior year with lots of stops between.

At some point I discovered the variety of obscure and foreign brands sold in the Knox Bookstore and began trying them all.  I especially got a kick out of the multicolored ones--the actual cigarettes were odd shades of magenta and florescent green and so on.

 In the 70s when I quit (after succumbing to Gauloises and Gitanes) I identified this theatricality as part of what made smoking so habitual and (apart from the physical addiction of tobacco) so hard to kick.  How one held the cigarette, when one breathed in and out in rhythm with smoking, especially while talking; the cigarette as "a baton on the end of your gestures," made cigarettes an integral part of personal style and daily identity.

Speaking of theatrical, one of the actual courses I took this year was modern theatre history with theatre professor William Clark, who persuaded me that if I was going to write plays, I ought to know something about theatre. The text was Mordecai Gorelik's New Theatres For Old.

While I found the class less than mesmerizing  I did get something like a grounding in stagecraft history and theatrical styles.  I read plays and wrote about them.  I particularly enjoyed Ibsen's Ghosts and a little-known Tennessee Williams play, Camino Real.  In later life, when I found myself reviewing and writing about theatre, I maintained the habit of reading the plays I was seeing, and reading as much about them as I could.  This was often more fun and rewarding than seeing the productions.

And speaking of Phil Haring, I took his Modern Political Theory class second semester.  We sat around a large table, and so had plenty of opportunity to observe his smoking.  I remember we read a number of paperbacks, covering political theorists such as Hobbes, John Locke and David Hume, onto more contemporary theories such as applying behavioral psychology in The Behavioral Persuasion in Politics by Heinz Eulau, a taste of things to come.  I wasn't fond of that approach, as I wrote in a pretty good final paper.

I enjoyed instead the observations of Philip Whitaker in his 1964 book we used, that seems to have completely disappeared from the planet since: Political Theory and East African Problems.  His observations on political theory rather than East Africa were on point.  Still, I ended up not being motivated to continue in political science, which I had briefly considered as a possible major.

 In future posts, I plan to discuss the two writing courses I took this second year with Sam Moon, and the two literature courses with William V. Spanos (I never could call him "Bill") and the Whitman/Wallace Stevens seminiar with Douglas Wilson--all of which decided me.  But to end this post, I must recount the continuing influence of the man who wasn't there, the Ghost of Fred Newman.

  The Ghost Who Talks

Fred Newman's absence was a presence when classes resumed in the fall of 1965. Photos of the demonstration in support of him the previous spring appeared in the Knox Student.  The tensions among students, faculty and administration continued, and Newman was evoked in various commentaries.

Meanwhile Newman himself was in New York, teaching at City College (CCNY.)  That fact led a group of students to a further and ongoing protest--the wearing of CCNY sweatshirts.  There actually weren't any, we found, and so we had them created.  They arrived all together, and a fairly large group of us repaired to some off-campus apartment (probably Mike Hamrin's) to claim our blue sweatshirts with the white CCNY letters.  We returned to campus together, and entered the Oak Room together for dinner. The effect was slow to sink in but it remained for awhile, including some bitter criticism in letters to the editor, suggesting traitorous behavior.

 Newman's ghostly presence continued throughout my year, even academically.  It was most pronounced that fall, when I was using his language and accompanying it with his arm and hand gestures, and the way he rolled back on his heels where he stood.  In the Oak Room after dinner once, Wendy Saul commented on this, and added that I not only was beginning to resemble Fred Newman, "some people think you are Fred Newman."

Since childhood I found myself entering the image, so to speak, of figures I admired.  While other boys got themselves Davy Crockett coonskin caps, I felt myself become Davy Crockett, speaking and moving like Fess Parker had in the TV shows and movies, or rather feeling I was.

 I did something similar when I was learning, for example, to play and sing Bob Dylan songs or Beatles songs.  I became them internally, and outwardly imitated their voices and so on.  These were explorations and even ways of learning the songs, so eventually I would integrate their styles in my own way. But Wendy's comment made me realize I had gone too far this time.  The ghost of Fred was taking over.  I had to let it go. Besides, I had just bought my first John Lennon cap.

Still, all that year the influence remained in my classwork.  I took a philosophy of language course first semester (I don't recall the teacher) and a Theory of Controversy course second semester, taught by speech professor Donald Torrence (who was also in charge of debate.)  That practically was another philosophy of language course; I recall we read A.J. Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic. 

The text for the philosophy course was probably Readings in the Theory of Knowledge, edited by John Canfield and Franklin Donnell.  I remember we spent a lot of time on long excerpts from Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.  

My papers for both show a marked preference for books from the Newman course the previous year (notably Quine's Word and Object), and a style of discourse often similar to Newman's "Rules and Games" speech.  Even my final paper in Modern Political Theory began with a Wittgenstein/Newman riff on theory, rules and games, and returned to it later.  Reading that paper now, I have to observe that it actually was apropos, and successfully integrated those ideas for observations which I find valuable in looking at political situations today.

 Fred Newman however was not actually a ghost, and we were in sporadic contact by letter and phone.  Christmas vacation is often the occasion for big academic conferences (which cover for head-hunting and job-hunting for academic positions) and there was to be a philosophy conference in New York. Senior Michael Hamrin, one of Newman's students (who later entered the Stanford graduate program in philosophy, where Fred got his advanced degrees) had a VW bus at home in Joliet, and the plan was for him to stop by in Greensburg and pick me up on the way to Manhattan.  Judy Dugan, who lived in Chicagoland, would meet up with Hamrin for the trip. I was excited, not only about New York and the conference, but about the occasion of my two worlds coming together: two Knox friends (especially Judy) would meet my hometown friends, Mike and Clayton.

 Hamrin and Judy were scheduled to arrive at my family home on Christmas day. But the phone rang early on Christmas with Mike Hamrin on the line, explaining how his VW had been rear-ended on a city street.  He and Judy were uninjured but the VW was damaged to the extent that it wasn't safe to drive.  So they didn't come.  There were several further occasions when my two worlds were supposed to meet and didn't.  When they finally did...well, that's another story, for another time.
 

Fred talked about joining the faculty of Antioch College, a prestigious liberal arts college in Ohio, known for its unconventional academic approach.  I decided to apply for transfer to Antioch, which he encouraged. By spring, he'd been rejected for the job, and I'd been rejected for a scholarship. He wound up at Case Western Reserve, and I remained at Knox.

Fred also spoke about the possibility of a summer job for me, and for getting me a grant for summer school at Harvard.  Neither of these happened either.  (I'd forgotten most of this, but much of it was recorded in my letters home, which my mother saved.) Fred Newman returned corporeally to Knox in the spring, gave a well-attended talk in the Commons Room and a long interview on liberal arts colleges in the Knox Student.

 There were other highlights to my second year.  Stay tuned for posts on Sam Moon, William V. Spanos and Doug Wilson.  Other posts in this series can be found by clicking the History of My Reading or Knox College labels below.

History of My Reading: Living Paradox

In early 1965--the second half of the 1964-5 school year--Frederick Delano Newman was approaching 30, and in his third year as a professor of philosophy at Knox College.  Born in the Bronx, he worked as an apprentice machinist and in other jobs after his father died and left the family destitute.  At 18 or 19 he joined the U.S. Army and served in Korea just after the Korean war officially ceased.

 Thanks to the G.I. Bill, he graduated from the City College of New York, which (according to its web site) was known as "Harvard of the Proletariat" and "the poor man's Harvard" because of its "academic excellence and status as a working-class school." Newman got his PhD from Stanford University, the self-styled Ivy League college of the West, just before he began teaching at Knox, which at the time liked to call itself the Harvard of the Midwest (complete with Harvard's purple and gold.)

 At Knox he was friends with Douglas Wilson and William V. Spanos of the English Department (among others), and so I probably knew of him from Wilson (my academic advisor) in my first semester.  Newman and Wilson were principals in a folk music ensemble, famous that year for their satirical song about "the rug," which--if memory serves-- told the story of Knox buying the world's largest carpet and building a Fine Arts Center around it.  The CFA had just opened.

But I'm pretty sure my first direct experience of Fred Newman was in the intro philosophy course (Philosophy 115) I took that second semester.  I probably knew that--like my fiction-writing course with Harold Grutzmacher--it would be my last chance to take one of his courses, because it was to be his last semester at Knox.  But I'm not entirely sure about the timing, since Newman himself was not told until January that his contract wasn't going to be renewed after this semester (so late in the year that it was itself a violation of rules established by the American Association of University Professors.)

 A disturbing number of young and favorite faculty members were leaving Knox that year, as others had the year before and more would the year after. Newman's abrupt and mostly forced departure was the most dramatic example of the Knox brain drain, and that drama played out all semester, culminating in a Student Senate resolution and a protest march at graduation.

But while this drama slowly built to its climax, my ongoing and intensive experience was this philosophy course, the first I'd taken.  It was not, we were emphatically warned, about a "philosophy of life," or even the Great Thoughts and schools of philosophy through history.  Newman had studied analytic philosophy with the charismatic Donald Davidson at Stanford. Its general areas of interest were logic and language (which happens to be the title of what I believe was one of our texts: Logic and Language, an anthology of essays by the likes of Gilbert Ryle, John Wisdom and G.E. Moore.)

 Logic and language also happened to be areas of my intense interest and aptitude. As I was to learn later, this brand of analytic philosophy emerged from Oxbridge--the universities of Oxford and Cambridge in England-- beginning in the early twentieth century.  One emphasis among several was dubbed Ordinary Language Philosophy, which questioned academic reliance on specialized or technical terms (especially jargon) and instead analyzed the meaning of words and expressions in everyday use, and their relationship to philosophical questions.

A.J. Ayer

(There was also a reductionist version of analytic philosophy called Logical Positivism, championed by Oxford's A.J. Ayer.  It was the subject of many a debate at Knox and elsewhere before collapsing under its own weight.  Playwright Tom Stoppard mentioned in his Paris Review interview that he'd seen Ayer on television responding to the question of what were the main defects of logical positivism.  "I suppose its main defect," Ayer said, "was that it wasn't true." Nevertheless, it still managed to rise from the dead in various late 20th century movements.)

Beyond the Fringe: Oxbridge Quartet

This analytic/ordinary language philosophy was so ingrained in those English universities that it became a basis for the characteristic humor of an age, first through the Oxbridge quartet (Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller and Alan Bennett) who devised and performed Beyond the Fringe in the early 1960s (most directly in the sketches called "Oxbridge Philosophy" and "Portrait from Memory" which was about Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore.)

 That style of language and logic play also inspired the likes of David Frost (That Was the Week That Was),  the members of Monty Python's Flying Circus, and Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)--most of them Oxbridgers.  It also influenced the work of several English playwrights--notably Tom Stoppard, who wrote a play about academic philosophers (Jumpers), and Michael Frayn, who wrote a long book of philosophy, which I reviewed for the San Francisco Chronicle Book Review. This is not to imply that this philosophy course was a joke (though Quine's writing and Newman's talk could be playful and witty.)  On the contrary, it was among the richest, most consequential and most intellectually mind-opening courses I took at Knox.

  I remember the class as being huge.  I believe we met for lectures in the Fine Art Center, perhaps the main theatre or the music theatre.  The lectures were supplemented by tutorials, with either Newman or the only other member of the philosophy department, Donald Milton. Perhaps Milton lectured as well, but Newman was definitely the main attraction, a mesmerizing and theatrical performer.

I'm not sure what books we were required to buy for this course, if any, but I'm sure of several books that were central to the course (we may have been given handouts from various chapters):  Mind and the World Order: Outline of A Theory of Knowledge by C. I. Lewis (a book originally published in 1929) and Word and Object by Willard Van Orman Quine, a contemporary Harvard philosopher.  If I didn't acquire those books during the course, I did shortly afterward.  We also intensively studied at least one essay ("Two Dogmas of Empiricism") from Quine's essay collection, From a Logical Point of View.

We were definitely given handouts, including texts of Newman's lectures (double-spaced mimeographed purple ink copies.)  I also have a long article by Warner A. Wick from the Philosophical Review that looks like it came from this course.

We wrote frequent short papers, some perhaps based on articles like this, which were the subject of our tutorials. The tutorials were held in the philosophy office where Newman and Milton would hold them simultaneously in different parts of the room. Each would be sitting in one chair, with an chair for the student opposite. We filed through, one after another. It reminded me of two priests hearing confessions, except we didn't kneel.

 Philosophy 115 was not a standard introductory course that presented a range of material, organized by historical chronology or types, which students were expected to learn to identify.  We were introduced instead to philosophy as an activity.  We were dropped in the middle of philosophical undertakings--into what seemed like live discoveries and debates.  We weren't learning about philosophy; we were learning to do philosophy.

 Along the way there were new ideas and a new language, and our heads were swimming among the given and interpretive, analytic and synthetic, a priori and empirical, not to mention relativistic ontological relativism.  But we learned most of the terms and ideas on the fly, inside the analyses being done. This was an electric combination.

The books and essays we read were making actual arguments to advance knowledge, as were Newman's lectures, or at least some of them.  As students we were focused on Newman's preoccupations and his brand of philosophy (which I realize now in paging through two of his subsequent books, Explanation By Description and The Myth of Psychology, had American roots in the pragmatism of William James as well as certain Oxbridge figures.)

 But a semester is not a long time, and this approach to an introduction seems as least as valid as the more standard one.  In one sense it could be said that instead of learning the history of swimming and the various methods, we were thrown into the pool to learn how to swim.

More than that, I felt it as a model completely new to me: a course in which students witness and share in the ongoing work of the teacher in their field.  What could be more exciting than that? That impression was augmented by Newman's availability.  He was on campus a lot, in the Gizmo even at night, and although discussions could be wide-ranging (and funny), the kind of analytical approach we were learning in the course was always present, if not predominant.  (For some reason I recall one specific day when Newman sat in the Gizmo with his back against the heat register or radiator.  He talked for hours, even though he had a cold.  Then he got up, declared that he'd sweated out the cold and felt better, and left.)

 What were we learning? Especially what transferred beyond the discipline into other areas of knowledge and life?  Of course that varied for each student.  But at this remove, two areas occur to me as prominently in the mix for many.

 First of all, to question, beyond what we may already have learned to question.  Not just the accuracy of facts, the legitimacy of sources, the faulty arguments (by authority, for example) or illogic.  But the meaning of every statement, every word--its logic and implications.  Philosophy analyzed the internal logic--the hidden assumptions, the unquestioned contradictions--of entire fields of endeavor, such as science (including social science.)
  It wasn't a stretch to ask similar questions about politics or literary studies, or relationships.

 Second, the defining role of the mind in our reality.  In effect, this philosophical approach stated that the world as we know it is as much a product of the mind as the mind is of the world.  In a meaningful way, we are the medium in which the apprehensible and comprehensible universe exits; our abstractions, analogies and stories construct a universe.  We couldn't exist without the given world, but the world we knew couldn't exist without our mental participation.

 This is a paradox, and the paradox is us.

This single insight of the mind's active relationship to reality becomes crucial to approaching such disparate subjects as quantum physics, the Tao and Zen meditation, modern literature (Wallace Stevens, for instance), Vietnam and Yellow Submarine ("It's all in the mind, ya know.")

G.E. Moore

It's a heady moment when the stability of the world is shattered, and you can no longer see yourself as simply a receiver or observer of it.  The first temptation is to go immediately to the extreme.  There is a philosophy student rite of passage when you're convinced by the argument that you can't prove anything actually exists outside of your mind.  Fred Newman said that G.E. Moore's argument for the existence of physical objects was to wave his big meaty fist in your face, and ask if you wanted to test its reality.

 The philosophy we studied--of Quine and Lewis particularly, but with roots in Kant etc.--posits a given world, but humans define it in the most basic and subtle ways.  Moreover, we don't often do this individually.  Reality and its elements are a product of social agreement.

This is the subject of the one paragraph of Quine I've always remembered.  He points out that calling an object "red" is a product of learning and agreement--we don't really know that everybody sees exactly the same color, and that indeed there are differences in the light that create slightly different colors, but we still call it red.

 Here's the paragraph (from the first chapter of Word and Object): "Different persons growing up in the same language are like different bushes trimmed and trained to take the shape of identical elephants.  The anatomical details of twigs and branches will fulfill the elephantine form differently from bush to bush, but the overall results are alike."   

There was a certain shared euphoria among students in this course.  I remember a long conversation with an older student named Barbara Johnson about the course that was exhilarating (and not just because she was.)  This course fulfilled dreams of what college could be. And the college was about to take it away.

Paul Shepard

The year before, Knox lost pioneer ecologist Paul Shepard; if there are future historians, they will recognize him as one of the geniuses of the 20th century.

Jerome Schiller also left. He was hired a year before Newman, and together with him, began to built an academic philosophy department where none had been before.

 At the end of the 1964-5 school year, Gabriel Jackson, widely viewed as a brilliant historian and teacher, was leaving.  Student Patricia Perry wrote: "Dr. Jackson is a tremendous human being, enormously talented, interested in almost everything, with a reverence for life.  He is a first-rate scholar with a concern for the humanities, for social justice, for rational and compassionate solutions to human problems.  In his classes, one gets the impression of his true concern for problems that matter."

 Writing professor Harold Grutzmacher was leaving, depleting the writing faculty by half. Also leaving was Rowland K. Chase, chair of the theatre department, who not only directed a stellar production of Hamlet this school year, but wrote a lecture/ essay about his approach to the production published in Dialogue--the only such occasion in my time at Knox.  Kim Chase had also revolutionized the Studio Theatre program to be more student-oriented, and revitalized theatre at Knox in the process.

 Some 18 faculty members were not coming back in the fall.  There is always some turnover, and people have individual reasons for moving on that students of my generation were probably not equipped to understand, such as career advancement, money to raise a family, escape from Galesburg, family preferences and relationships, for example.

 But some faculty exits had troubling factors in common, having to do with the college's uneven commitment to academic excellence, and conflict with the administration over policies, especially over the onerous student codes (chiefly women's "hours" or curfew, but other issues as well) that were becoming serious causes of campus conflict.

Most troubling was the quality of several of the teachers who were leaving.  Having experienced excellent teaching, Knox students were not happy about losing these opportunities.  Many felt betrayed. A charismatic teacher like Fred Newman would probably have been the focal point of student anger anyway, but the nature of his situation ensured it.  Unlike the others leaving (who weren't on one year contracts), he had been fired--in a brutal way, halfway through the school year.  Knox avoided national censure by offering him a one year terminal contract, which he refused.

The reasons for his firing were the sources of rumors all semester.  In April, the editor of the Knox Student, Ed Rust, interviewed Newman, and got his version.

 Newman talked about the achievements of the philosophy department in a sudden array of classes and--for the first time--philosophy majors, but also disappointments and difficulties of a two-person philosophy department--requests to expand it were denied.

 Then he talked about the reasons he thought he was fired.  Newman was part of a group of young faculty members who worked within established channels to increase institutional opportunities for student participation in college decisions, and especially to modify women's hours, with the aim of eliminating them with a simple sign-out system for juniors and seniors.

 That seemed close to success the previous spring (of 1963-64), he said, but a sudden reversal of the Student Affairs Committee vote led to alarm that the administration was closing the door on considering changes.  Classes were over for the year, but students still on campus wanted to talk about this, and discuss active responses, including a demonstration at the last remaining event of the year, graduation.  One of those meetings was held at Newman's home.

 According to Newman, the college president (Sharvey Umbeck) accused Newman of leading or instigating this putative revolt, using a figure of speech I hadn't heard since a particular nun employed it in my fifth grade: "heads will roll."  (Newman said he had opposed a demonstration at graduation, and in the end students didn't demonstrate anyway.)

 Rust's interview ended with the information that the other philosophy teacher, Donald Milton, was offered a contract to stay at Knox but declined.  Also that the one philosophy teacher Knox had hired to replace them had changed his mind and wasn't coming.

As of April, Knox had philosophy majors and philosophy students, but no philosophy department for the following school year. Rumors again circulated--spread by at least one administrator I heard them from--that there was more to Newman's dismissal: something so dark and sinister that it couldn't be specified. Meanwhile,  the senior class "by a substantial margin" selected Fred Newman as their Senior Convocation speaker.

In May, a resolution crafted by an ad hoc student committee passed the Student Senate 26.5 votes to 4.  The resolution asserted that "a valuable member of the Knox faculty has been dismissed for reasons other than his academic competence.  Specifically, he is being dismissed for taking a position with respect to the social structure of Knox College, a position differing with the official administration policy."

 The resolution called a dismissal on such grounds "irresponsible" and "a threat to the intellectual welfare of the entire student body." It ended with this: "We, the students of Knox College, will express our concern on Friday, May 21, 1965."

That was the date of the Senior Convocation.  The demonstration the administration apparently feared the previous spring was happening one year later.

 The last Knox Student of the school year, also dated May 21, contained Ed Rust's editorial, stating that while claims were made that Newman was lying about why he was fired, no one offered contrary evidence.  There was a long essay by student Gordon Benkler and several pages of letters to the editor, many in support of Newman as well as other departing faculty, especially Gabe Jackson.

 Probably the most significant letter was from Jackson himself.  He countered the charges that Newman's interview was "full of lies."  There were "omissions, a few errors of detail, and some distortions of motive which understandably hurt a great many peoples' feelings--my own included.  However, the interview is, on the whole, highly factual..." Jackson's letter ended with two sentences that would reverberate for years to come:  "I do not know the extent to which the administration and trustees are determined to create a great liberal arts college at Knox.  I do feel that I know that a truly excellent faculty and excellent student body cannot be maintained within the present codes."

This issue of the Student also contained the text of Newman's speech to the Senior Convocation, entitled "Rules and Games."  It was reprinted a year later in Dialogue. Reading it today, it remains well-cadenced, eloquent, heartfelt and insightful.  It is personal and at the same time creates a thoughtful context for the 1960s but also for our densely computerized age.

 It continued themes of our course as well as a theme of the year for me--the defense of individualism.

 Individualists, he said, are aware that in "acting in accordance with existing norms" they are choosing to endorse these norms, and are "sensitive to the fact that these norms are, in part, a result" of their choices.  Norms or rules cannot become moral crutches. "Individualism needs defending," he said.  People can "dehumanize" themselves.

 Aspects of the address are also very interesting in light of Newman's own later career.  At the time, with its evocations of Wittgenstein, it continued and--for those of us who were his students--completed our course in philosophy.

  I don't remember much about the actual demonstration that spring.  In memory I thought it happened after the graduation ceremony.  I seem to recall being in Seymour Union to get my picket sign, waiting for it to start.  I remember it as being silent--a long line, single and double file--more of a funeral procession than a raucous demo.  Or maybe that's what I felt--that it was a funeral for my Knox College hopes, for the possibilities I saw in the course I'd just experienced, that seemed to be taken away in the next instant.

  Effects of this philosophy course and the events of that spring--personally and at Knox more generally-- continued into the next year. I intend to pick up the story in a future post.

  As for Fred Newman, by that late spring I'd established something like a personal relationship with him. He volunteered to drive me and my boxes and suitcases of stuff to the Q train station to send home for the summer, in exchange for my babysitting for an evening so that he and his wife could go to what amounted to a farewell party.

 We exchanged a few letters (though none survive), and I saw him occasionally over the next three years. He seemed to come back to Galesburg at about this time every spring, including 1968, when the last students who'd had him as a teacher were about to leave.

It was perhaps the year before that he arrived a little later, when Galesburg was already gripped in its solid block of summer heat. Probably my last memory of him was outside the apartment where I was staying on West Berrien.  He'd been in a mood, almost hostile at times, alternating with gloom.  I saw him sitting on the hood of a car, looking into the sunset.

CCNY today

After Knox, Newman taught at his alma mater, the City College of New York.  There was some talk of Antioch, but he wound up at Case Western Reserve in Ohio.  His official biography says that he was forced out of his positions at both schools when he insisted on giving his male students As, to ensure they kept their 2-S deferments from the draft and weren't shipped off to Vietnam.

 Once when he returned to Galesburg he was promoting his new idea, an independent program called the Robin Hood Relearning Corps.  He also mentioned a summer experiment, in which he and three other philosophers and their spouses lived in the same house, so they could do philosophy full time.  The only result, he said, was that all four marriages broke up, including his own.

 By the 1970s he was out of academia, and those two anecdotes suggest directions his life would take.  I remember him once cursing psychologists as "failed physicists," an offhand remark that continued to seem apt in many ways.  Just as his philosophical mentors claimed that reality is socially obtained, he decided that psychology required a social practice.  He and others developed a new kind of therapy, at least partially based on some of the theories that got attention in the late 60s, such as the work of R.D. Laing in the UK.  He became a therapist, with highly controversial methods.  Some of his work on personal and social development was with underclass black and Latino youth.

Newman also became a player in New York politics (he ran for Mayor at least once), and a playwright with his own theatre.  I have no personal knowledge of any of this, so I'll just quote his New York Times obituary:

  "Fred Newman’s influential role in New York life and politics defied easy description. He founded a Marxist-Leninist party, fostered a sexually charged brand of psychotherapy, wrote controversial plays about race and managed the presidential campaign of Lenora Fulani, who was both the first woman and the first black candidate to get on the ballot in all 50 states. He helped the Rev. Al Sharpton get on his feet as a public figure and gave Michael R. Bloomberg the support of his Independence Party in three mayoral elections, arguably providing Mr. Bloomberg’s margin of victory in 2001 and 2009. He created an empire of nonprofit and for-profit enterprises, including arts groups and a public relations firm. He wrote books on psychology and philosophy as well as plays. One play, about the 1991 riots between blacks and Jews in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, was condemned as anti-Semitic by the Anti-Defamation League. His greatest impact came through mobilizing his followers, sometimes called “Newmanites,” to build alliances with third parties, including that of the Texas independent H. Ross Perot."

When I heard about his death after a long illness at the age of 76 in 2011, I looked up this dizzying information: he's got a wikipedia page as well as his own website and material on the East Side Institute site.  He's got his own Vimeo page and C-Span page of videos.  I can't comment on the insights he had on psychology and politics, or dramaturgy for that matter, since I haven't really perused them.  But I did see that he continued to have enthusiastic followers whichever way he turned.

I began to see Newman not as a phony or a charlatan, as he has been called over the years, but as a charismatic personality, and as much a captive of it as others were captivated.

 I've known other people since with similar traits: that brilliance that focuses with complete belief, together with an insistent persuasion and cultivation of complicity--until they drop it and pick up something else with the same conviction.

 This is not necessarily bad but can be dangerous.  Generosity is accompanied by a need for the emotional connivance of others, and at worst there is a blindness to consequences and disparagement of non-believers. The first effect of that charismatic energy, to quote a multi-year student of Fred's, was a kind of ecstasy: "I fell completely under his spell."  But also: "Fred left quite a trail of victims, and quite a trail of followers."  This former student detached himself from Newman's orbit when he began to see destructive consequences, long after he left Knox.

 In similar circumstances, others apparently either overlook or rationalize such consequences, or believe they are not primarily consequences of what the charismatic figure said or did. Or they remain so convinced or just overwhelmed by the brilliance and the vision that nothing else matters as much.

   His complexities, it seems to me, don't require condemnation, just wariness.  Specific actions or ideas can be evaluated on their own. The charismatic personality is hard to resist but can become stifling as well as exhausting, so sometimes--or maybe inevitably-- you eventually just have to move on.  But the words are still there to be read and considered.

  The Newman I knew introduced me to Quine and Wittgenstein, and to seeing the world in a different way.  In "Rules and Games" he quoted Wittgenstein about what games had in common--don't think or assume you know, but really look.  Newman also said of his speech that he wished he'd been asked "to hear for you rather than talk to you."  Those two statements remained guides for me and my work from then until now.

 The 1965 Fred Newman ended his Senior Convocation Address by returning to Wittgenstein, and his last words: "Tell them I've had a wonderful life." "Even those who never understood were to be thanked for allowing him to rant and rave and to be his individualistic brilliant self," Newman said.  "I am surely no Wittgenstein and I do not believe I am about to die.  But I feel compelled to conclude by saying to all my friends who have understood as well as to those who gave me the opportunity to persuade, 'Thank you.'"

Searching for Utopia: The History of An Idea
by Gregory Claeys
Thames & Hudson

When I saw this book displayed at Northtown Books here in Arcata, it reminded me that while the once promising field of Future Studies has waned, there’s a curious new interest in Utopia Studies. In this era of dire predictions and popular fictions of apocalyptic futures it seems counter-intuitive, but it is precisely in dark times that utopian visions flourish.

This volume is one in a series of illustrated histories, but the pictures are less impressive than the prose. Claeys debunks several persistent mischaracterizations about the literature of utopia, first and foremost, that “utopia” necessarily means a perfect world. Most utopian stories are about a “radically improved” society. Like the story that gave the idea its name—Thomas More’s Utopia—it often responds to what we might call the tyranny of the 1%, and depicts a more egalitarian society.

But utopian stories vastly predate More’s 16th century work, and appear around the world, from indigenous cultures to Chinese, Hindu and Muslim civilizations.  Many have religious roots and hark back to a mythical Golden Age. That changes with H.G. Wells and other modern writers who begin locating utopia in the future, now the dominant notion.

Utopia was often located on an island or a hidden place, like Shangri-la. In Thomas More’s time, America was the hoped for place where utopia could happen, and utopian ideals drove many actual political and social experiments, from the founding documents of the United States to hundreds of communities organized on utopian lines in the 19th century.

Some utopias turned very dark, especially when linked with scientific pseudo-theories (like eugenics) and technology. When attempted by murderous dictatorships, the catastrophic results poisoned the very idea of utopia. And so psychology as well as politics enters the utopian story. External change is not enough; self-knowledge becomes a utopian endeavor.   This survey of course can't include everything, but it should be noted that among psychologist writers who addressed this matter of approaching a better society through individual self-knowledge were Carl Jung and his American successor, James Hillman.  From another point of view, the Dalai Lama has spoken and written about this subject specifically.

Claeys’ survey of science fiction—the chief generator of utopian fictions in modern times—is cursory and not particularly insightful.  It brushes by the particular contributions of Ursula LeGuin, George Zebrowski, Greg Bear, Bruce Sterling, William Gibson and other contemporary science fiction and fantasy writers, but in particular Kim Stanley Robinson, who is especially known for his utopian concerns, and who edited a volume of utopian stories.  But worst of all, the world’s most widely known utopian saga of the past half century isn't even mentioned: Star Trek. This is a glaring omission, even for a Brit.  Then again, he ignores the most recent incarnation of Doctor Who, which confronted this topic in a number of stories, including one which involved the quest for a mythical planet called Utopia.

The eloquent final chapter examines the present, when the response to onrushing ecological disaster caused by our civilization is to shop harder. He concludes: “The old ideal worlds can lend us hope, inspiration, a sense of what to aspire for as well as what to avoid. But our ideal world must be very much our own creation, and a serious reckoning with the fate we face if we fail to create it.”

Utopia, like hope, is an activity of the present.  Zebrowski and Kim Stanley Robinson are particularly insistent on utopia as a process, which is an analogue to President Obama's goal of a perfecting what can never be perfect, that "more perfect union."  Utopia is a process of imagination and effort, motivated by basic human impulses, including love for future generations and our planet.

The Essential William James
Edited by John R. Shook
Prometheus Books

Long eclipsed by the giants of psychoanalysis, Freud and Jung (James met them: liked Jung, hated Freud) and seemingly made irrelevant by drug-happy behaviorists that dominate psychology now, William James is currently receiving new interest and respect.  His trust in self-examination and what's sneeringly referred to as anecdotal evidence together with laboratory evidence is increasingly getting a second hearing.  His emphasis on practical effects and action that brought Aristotle up to date, yet his insistence on complexity and room for mystery, keep him current in many fields of science and speculation.  As an early link between philosophy and psychology, he continues to show the way.

This selection of 18 essays by William James is preceded by the editor's 41 academically-oriented pages on his thought.  Any selection of James is welcome, especially published-- as this one is-- in a sturdy paperback with clear type.  But there are other such selections--for instance The Heart of William James, edited by the excellent James biographer Robert D. Richardson.  A few of the essays are the same in both collections, but many are different.  Though the editor of this volume implies reasons for some of his selections, a clearer explanation for why these constitute the "essential" William James would be helpful.  Annotations and footnotes could also clarify the many casual references James' makes to events etc. that his audience would have known, but which are now forgotten.

Gift Books 2010

The Spirit of the Buddha
by Martine Batchelor

The Spirit of the Quakers
by Geoffrey Durham
both Yale University Press

These two volumes are part of a series published in association with the International Sacred Literature Trust. Both are primers that use extensive quotations from the founding and important texts of their traditions. Martine Batchelor, a former Buddhist nun, uses the texts to illustrate her own narrative. Geoffrey Durham uses more quotations and texts, including journals and letters. Batchelor's book provides a glossary of terms and detailed list of sources; Durham's a chronology of Quaker history and an index. They are both solid introductions to their respective traditions, as well as useful selections and organizing of texts for experienced adherents. So they are worthy candidates for gifts to the curious as well as the convinced.

Getting Darwin Wrong: Why Evolutionary Psychology Won’t Work
by Brendan Wallace
Imprint Academic

The New Science of the Mind: From Extended Mind to Embodied Phenomenology
by Mark Rowlands
MIT Press

One of the unfortunate consequences of relentless attacks on the Darwinian concept of evolution by religious and political zealots is that scientists and others often respond to all challenges in Darwin’s neighborhood as fundamentalist enemy attacks. But there are legitimate questions from those who also reject creationism and broadly speaking consider themselves Darwinists.

These challenges are represented by three books with similar titles: What Darwin Got Wrong (by Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini, 2010) questions some of Darwin’s own conclusions. Darwin’s Blind Spot (Ryan, 2002) summarizes new science that challenges Darwin’s most dominant scientific descendants, known as Neo-Darwinists (Richard Dawkins, for example.) And this book, Getting Darwin Wrong, challenges a theory in another field that in the author’s opinion misuses or misconstrues Darwinian evolution.

This epic theory has been misused from the start. Even 90 years ago George Bernard Shaw observed that Darwin “had the luck to please everybody with an axe to grind.” The first and perhaps still most influential were the Social Darwinists (survival of the fittest justifies predatory capitalism, etc.) and proponents of what philosopher Mary Midgley calls the Escalator Fallacy of evolution as inevitable progress. These days it can also be the sloppy or cynical use of natural selection to support a supposition, scientific or otherwise.

In this book Brendan Wallace is not attacking the general idea that the human psyche was influenced by evolution, but the particulars of the school of experimental psychology that uses Evolutionary Psychology as its brand name. He identifies it as holding that the brain processes information as a digital computer, and related “cognitivist” theories of mind as popularized by Steven Pinker, for example. Evolution, they say, has bequeathed a rigid “cognitive architecture” with pre-installed programs for dealing with the world. (Ironically, another theorist attacked in Getting Darwin Wrong is the co-author of What Darwin Got Wrong.)

While there’s some metaphorical appeal in such general statements, Wallace argues that the precise theory is a logical and empirical house of cards, and leads to a warped sense of how our minds work—one that turns out to repeat inferential errors of both the Social Darwinist and Escalator fallacies, and the simplistic Neo-Darwinist emphasis on the individual, as opposed to the group and the environment.

In general Wallace asserts that this theory at best oversimplifies both natural selection and the human mind, as well as revealing yet another academic dogma that may have survived not because it is valid but because famous people professed it, and academic departments and careers depended on it.

In The New Science of the Mind, Mark Rowlands argues for an approach to mental processes different from the dominant cognitive science models, without rejecting them. He argues that cognition is “embodied” (it occurs not only in the brain but elsewhere in the body) and “extended” (mental processes “extend out, in various ways, into the organism’s environment.”) He develops his theory of the “amalgamated mind” as “the conjunction of the mind embodied and the mind extended.”

Neither Wallace or Rowlands directly addresses the work of the other; neither even appears in each other’s index. (For those keeping score at home, Rowlands does subdivide the field into Cartesian, non-Cartesian and anti-Cartesian cognitive science. As far as I can tell, he’s non, Wallace is anti.)

Rowlands treatment is more extensive and theoretical (and his book has the more appealing cover and layout) but strikingly, neither he nor Wallace delves into much brain science. Their approach is philosophical, emphasizing close logical analysis (Wallace mostly in dispute, Rowlands mostly in support of his theory.)

While both books are written clearly enough to be read by readers who haven’t followed the ins and outs in this field, they both require a lot of attention and some specialized knowledge (especially Rowland.) Though both eventually include a level of detail that was beyond my interest, I do remember this kind of writing (rigorous, with a minimum of jargon and some humor) with some affection from my philosophy courses in college.

I come away from these books still suspicious of theories of mind based so much on computers (or in Rowland’s case, on ideas that sound as if inspired by GPS and the Internet), but noting the cautious expansion of ideas of mind Rowland espouses. I’m not convinced they are expansive—or accurate—enough to do the rest of us much good, yet.

My Summer Reading

Summer for me is more a time for writing than reading. Still, so many books, so little time. So far this site has been devoted mostly to formal book reviews but that's meant posts are few and far between. So I'm going to try to add more "notices" of new books I receive, and books that pique my interest based on what other reviewers say about them. And I'm going to experiment with these little reports on what I've been reading, which will include new books and old, and re-readings. This summer's reading so far has been such a mix.

I reviewed (below) the third volume of Kim Stanley Robinson's climate crisis trilogy, Sixty Days and Counting. In June, I went back and re-read all three volumes in order, starting with Forty Signs of Rain and Fifty Degrees Below before re-reading Sixty Days and Counting. When I finished, I had to keep myself from starting them all over again. I loved being in that world. I was especially surprised that I liked the second volume best, at least for the story, since sometimes that's a kind of bridge volume in a trilogy. Then again, wasn't The Empire Strikes Back the best of the Star Wars trilogy of movies?

I'm glad I re-read Sixty Days, too. The first time through I focused on the characters and story. The second time, I found more provocative and useful information and ideas about the climate crisis. If I happen to run into Barack Obama (which is really unlikely, since I live in California) I would recommend reading these books for a good sense of the issues, challenges and possibilities in dealing with the climate crisis.

Science fiction is my preferred genre reading, although selectively: of what I call the science fiction of consciousness. Also last month I read Greg Bear's Moving Mars, an excellent work of sci-fi storytelling. Intelligent about the future, too. His Darwin's Radio is one of the most remarkable s/f novels I've read; a contemporary classic in many ways. And now I'm reading a volume of George Zebrowski's short stories, Swift Thoughts. It doesn't seem to have the story that started me searching out and reading his work, though, which was about Jesus Christ appearing on the Tonight Show. So right there I've named three of my favorite contemporary s/f of consciousness authors: Robinson, Bear and Zebrowski.

I also re-read three classics from the original s/f of consciousness author, H.G. Wells: The Invisible Man, The First Men In the Moon, and In the Days of the Comet. "Invisible" and "Moon" are wittier than I remembered, and "Comet" is mostly a realistic novel about Wells' own youth, kind of transition out of his scientific fantasy phase. It's easy to see why at the time Wells was taken seriously simply as a novelist who happened to write about these unusual subjects, like Joseph Conrad wrote about ships and Africa. He describes the practical difficulties of being invisible--he had to be naked, people who can't see him keep stepping on his feet, etc. (James Whale's movie version follows the story more faithfully than I remembered, though adding the love interest, but his emphasis is more on the adventure of it.) "Moon" offers its social critique, but it's an absorbing story, with enough physical detail to see it. Same goes for "Comet." I enjoyed these.

Before I leave genreland, I should report that several years ago my partner Margaret and I started reading the Harry Potter books aloud to each other. We eventually did it for all 7 volumes, and in between we tried some other books but somehow nothing else took. Then we were alerted to Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials Trilogy (we heard about both series' from different friends in the university drama department.) We finished the third volume in early June. This triology deserves all the praise it's gotten. Some of the writing is so gorgeous I laughed out loud as I read it. We also saw the film made of the first volume, The Golden Compass, and enjoyed that. Why wasn't it more popular? It will be interesting to see if the second two are made into movies as well.

Speaking of drama, I also read plays. Most recently a lesser known one by Noel Coward called Quadrille. Like Wilde and the early Stoppard, Coward is fun to read for the verbal wit. I enjoyed it.

In the department of old books read mostly for pleasure, a library discard of The Living Novel, a series of essays by novelists edited by Granville Hicks and published in 1957. It was in response to the "death of the novel" which preceded the death of the author as a popular topic. The contemporary novelists include some now forgotten, but also Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, Wright Morris, Flannery O'Connor and Herbert Gold. It's a fascinating volume. Though the problems faced by novelists and contemporary novels that these essays discuss are still familiar, and arguably are worse, I couldn't help thinking as I read of the novels and novelists that were about to burst on the scene anyway.

The best essays for my interests were by Bellow and Ellison. Bellow's analysis was often astute, and his observations epigrammatic. For instance, "A novel is written by a man who thinks of himself as a novelist. Unless he makes such an assumption about himself he simply can't do it." "By refusing to write about anything with which he is not thoroughly familiar, the American writer confesses the powerlessness of the imagination and accepts its relegation to an inferior place." He suggests the impulse, the questions behind novels and the compulsion to write them: "Why were we born? What are we doing here? Where are we going?"

Ellison's essay is impressively scholarly, especially on the American novel. Since the novel reflects change, "..if the novel had not existed at the time the United States started becoming conscious of itself as a nation...it would have been necessary for Americans to invent it." He also suggests questions that the novel addresses: "What is worth having and what worth holding? Where and in what pattern of conduct does true value, at a given moment, lie?"

Summer is also a time to assuage a guilty conscience and catch up with at least a few books that arrived new and sat patiently waiting past their season. For instance, Nobility of Spirit: A Forgotten Ideal by Rob Reimen (Yale.) I liked the theme, I enjoyed entertaining ideas from Whitman, Thomas Mann and others, and I felt the book's narrative strategy succeeded in terms of keeping you reading, although in the end I'm not sure what the central ideas are. It begins with a personal narrative of a dinner the author had with a daughter of Thomas Mann, Elisabeth Mann Borgese, who was his longtime friend, and Joe Goodman, an old friend of hers who also escaped from Germany in 1938. (Oddly they--and Thomas Mann-- came to the U.S. on the same ship without realizing it in advance, the New Amsterdam, which was also the name of the ship my grandfather came over on from Italy in the early 1920s, but it could not have been the same ship, as his was broken up in 1932.)

In New York, Joe was an eccentric composer and Whitman devotee who worked in bookstores. He arrives at the New York restaurant in November 2001 with his Cantata on the theme of the Nobility of the Spirit. Later we learn of intriguing elements of it, but also that he never finished it, and indeed burned all his notes before he died. When Elisabeth tells Reimen of Joe's death, he says that Joe was a great man. Elisabeth disagrees-- he was not truly great because he did not have the endurance to finish his great work. That's an interesting point of view, but then, Thomas Mann was her father. Nevertheless, Joe is a haunting character.

The rest of the book deals with philosophical and political ideas through dramatic dialogues, some among characters in Mann's novels and other works, some imagined or partly imagined among historical characters. The ideas are provocative and the dialogues are absorbing, and I wanted to remain sympathetic to his central championing of nobility of spirit, but Reimen's arguments against intellectual caricature falter when he ignores political and social history in his dogmatic statements about 9-11, and he oversimplifies the concept of utopia only as the absolutely perfect society envisioned by Hitler and Lenin. None of this is disqualifying, but there remains a feeling of dogmatism and yet vagueness, although there are many interesting passages.

Then it seems like the wheels come off in the final dialogue in the book, which to me came off as just inexplicable. Perhaps the Nazi priest's harsh indictment represents all that threatens nobility of spirit today, and the tortured dissident has that spirit. (A bit ironic, given that torture has most recently been inflicted and championed by the government based on the same black and white view as the author.) This last dialogue is also troubling because it's not clear what it is supposed to be--a fictional account of a possible nightmare, or what. That and other aspects of it aren't sourced, and because of it, the general lack of sufficient sourcing calls into question the accuracy of all previous dialogues, including the events in the restaurant. So if it is a work of fiction--postmodern or not--it is often an absorbing read, but possibly a diabolical book.