Maybe it’s because I love group learning, group dynamics, working cooperatively, Salon gatherings and creating effective community. Maybe it’s because I love film and using film for group learning and transformative purposes. Maybe it’s because I have so many friends in the SF Bay Area who teach yoga or lead workshops about finding balance.

Whatever the reason(s), I was deeply struck by a short award-winning film titled Balance that we watched today in my Masters course titled “Group Learning.”

Go ahead and watch it now and/or come back and watch it when you finish reading:

The class had many parts. Here is an over-simplification. Professor Daniel Wilson facilitated an in-depth discussion about three articles describing different group/community dynamics and discussing what worked and what did not work. Then we transitioned into…you guessed it…groups…where we discussed these articles and did small group presentations about the dynamics of certain groups. One of the foci of the presentations was “What factors contribute to effective ‘groupness’ and what factors take away from it?”

Many of the responses after this video related to how the film related to the readings we had, our cohort groups, and even the groups we formed to give the presentations. We discussed when a group of community starts to go “downhill” and lose it’s “group-ness.” After class we informally related the film to the fundamental drama and dilemma of humanity, how power and selfishness can corrupt, and even related the the film to the well-known parable of the difference between heaven and hell (having super long chopsticks and feeding each other rather than feeding ourselves!).

The video is on one hand quite haunting and on the other hand deeply inspirational.

I hope you like it!

**I should also add that a friend of our professor, a Japanese man who graduated from our program 20 years ago, visited for the day and took video and photos of our class! By the end of the class he had already created and edited a 5-minute I-Photo video of our the class we had just completed! He showed the the video–complete with music in the background–in the last few minutes of class and left us with our jaws dropped and some tears in our eyes!

This entry is not so easy to write. I’ve worried that this blog might mistakenly be interpreted as either a “poor me” story or as bragging about how in the face of adversity I got into Harvard. But telling the simple truth of my story is what matters to me.

I wish to share about my experience of going from a family on welfare and food stamps to being accepted to graduate school at Harvard University.

My parents met at the University of Connecticut in about 1964 and had me when my mom was 22 and dad was 26. A year later they had my sister Terri. For complex reasons my dad left when I was about 5 years old and from then on we saw him saw him about one month a year in the summer. He was unable to provide financial support. I’ve looked from many angles at my dad’s actions and have concluded that he was relatively young and could not take this kind of responsibility. I’ve learned to understand him a lot more over the years and to forgive him as much as I am able.

My sister and I agree that our mom was a courageous hero, giving all that she had. It is difficult for us to imagine how she could have given more and because of her we averted tragedy. She had about 2 years of college science classes under her belt from UCONN and eventually found a nursing program in the Napa Valley. I remember how we suddenly packing everything into a U-Haul and drove up Highway 5 toward Napa. My mom was understandably anxious and at times was on the edge of panic attacks. When we arrived in Napa we lived first in a cheap hotel room and then in low income housing. My mom applied for welfare and even food stamps. As hoaky as it might sound, I use the term Campbells for this blog because it represents cheap canned food, the kind you buy when you are on welfare. If it had not been 1972 in the United States with welfare available the benefits that came to women as a result of the Equal Rights Amendment) we would have been in deeper trouble.

At one point we lived in a friend’s home and later, because of my mom’s desire to live communally, be part of the “back to the land” movement, and to save money, we lived in a kind of commune/co-housing arrangement on our friend’s 44 acres in the western Napa Valley. We could not afford an elaborate structure so we built a simple “pod” which amounted to a wooden deck and a pea pod-like structure with a pot belly stove and a camode that consisted of a hole in the ground. At times we had no electricity although that was in part from choice as the adults preferred kerosene lamps.

After 4-5 years there our communal friends became devotees of guru Adi Da and we had to move into the town of Napa. I remember my mom being nervous about finding affordable housing and her relief at being told that we could rent the back in-law space of a friend’s home. This space amounted to one large room and a bathroom for all three of us. A year or two later we moved “up” to a one bedroom basement apartment and a bunk bed for my sister and me. It was cramped. After a year or two in that arrangement we moved in with a family of four and both myself and the son of that family slept in a converted garage space. Both because of limited space and because of the relatively low consciousness of the Napa public schools, I remember having a very difficult time. Like many public schools, there were bullies who said hurtful things about being poor.

Thanks to the hard work of my mom and some careful planning, when I was 13 and my sister was 12 we moved to the Berkeley Hills neighborhood of Kensington. We were the only family in Kensington that needed to live communally so as to afford the rent. We were probably the only family in Kensington who did not own their home. I worked first as a paper boy for the Oakland Tribune and then as the boy who closed down the local Young’s Market meat department/deli. Every afternoon I worked for about an hour with tasks such as clearing off large equipment, putting meat away in a large refrigerator, emptying a large barrel of oil and wiping down surfaces. I was very aware of our economic situation.

My elementary school years were spent in a lower-lower-middle class context while in my teens we were middle class but surrounded by kids who were upper middle class and had many extras. My friend Andrew had a new car by the age of 16 and many kids took regular vacations to Tahoe.

I’m 1/8 Spanish and about 1/4 Jewish, and after years of having a Peruvian, Spanish-speaking baby-sitter and learning Spanish in California public schools, I remember spending time with other poor Hispanic kids in East Bay areas and knowing intuitively that my life was, in many ways, more similar to theirs than to the mostly middle class and upper-middle class kids of my Kensington neighborhood.
I struggled in various areas of my life but managed to be successful in two areas: tennis and academics. In some ways the statement that education is the “great equilizer” was true for me. I had no consistent dad to check in on my progress at school. My mom spent a lot of time working and was not able give us some of the financial support we needed. That said, my mom was an incredibly loving mom emotionally and gave us a lot of hope, as well as a sense of community.

Due to the lack of awareness and organization of public school administrators, I was put in the classes with lower to middle performing students. Eventually teachers noticed that I earned A’s and moved me up. By sophomore year I was in “high stanine” courses and by senior year in AP courses. I did not fit in very well socially with these kids but performed well academically. At the end of El Cerrito High School I had a 3.8 GPA. I was considered in the category of a geek/nerd, did not socialize much and did not even know what it meant to drink until I was 17.

The upper-middle class homeowner’s kids generally received private SAT tutoring and some had outside college counselors who charged parents to counsel/coach them to get into the best schools. We had one college counselor–Jennifer Allaire–at El Cerrito High and when I went into her office at the beginning of my senior year I was not even clear what college was. We did not discuss it at home. To my mom’s credit, she put more emphasis on communication and living a full life; I hold no resentment toward her and deeply appreciate who she was for us.

I was aware that there was a huge college called UC Berkeley the next town over but was not sure what it actually meant to go to college. Jennifer was surprised that my grades were high and that I had little to no idea of what to do with them or what it meant to have good grades. I feel so fortunate that she could devote a little time to help me apply to the UC network of schools. As it turns out I was accepted into the freshman class at UC Berkeley.

At Berkeley I was exposed to even more upper-middle class privilege. The privileged Marin County, Lafayette, Los Angeles and New York (just to pick a few examples) kids seems like alien to me and I had no idea what they were talking about or what they were doing with their money, connections and social capital. They knew things about society and how to navigate within it that were completely foreign to me. When I attended a fraternity or sorority party I was looked at (in my interpretation) as a lower-middle class semi-hippie kid from a public school. I did not understand the music, popular culture and film references they made. But I did not know the musical groups that were more closely associated with middle and upper middle-class communities. I also did not have the kind of support that a college student needs to truly excel academically, such as how to identify the best major given my talents, interests and capacities. I had no ideal how to find and connect with the best professors, how to go about getting to know professors in office hours, and how to study efficiently. I literally watched the upper-middle class kids rise up the ranks, get better grades, take GRE tests and get into law or medical schools right after college. It was as if this process of moving up the ladder was the most natural thing in the world for them to do. Many of them were guided by mom, dad, and other family and friends who were alumni of Berkeley or other similar schools. I paid for Berkeley with Pell Grants (for low income kids), loans and a tiny contribution from my parents. Luckily it only cost a little over $1000 a year for tuition at a UCB. Nevertheless, by the end of college I did not have the understanding or training in what it took to get into a competitive graduate school.

Upon graduation in 1990, in the midst of post-Tiennamen Square, the Fall of the Berlin Wall/Communism, and the First Iraq War, I experienced a rude awakening–the awareness that I was in the lower-middle class of society and would have to work every day for several hours at the equivalent of about $15/hour while paying off my college loans. I could barely afford rent, did not have a car, and actually went back to live at my mom’s for a while.

Just after college I spent most of my time with my girlfriend Kristi (who was upper-middle class from Marin County), and my best friend Chris (who was also upper-middle class and whose dad was a lawyer). My life was rocked by the transformative education of Landmark Education. My greatest interests were this kind of transformative education, group counseling, and Vipassana meditation retreats. I also had a burning desire to find and create a community movement; something that would feel like a family. I stayed frequently at my girlfriend Kristi’s community house in Berkeley and started to talk to friends about community. A major turning point occured when I recognized when my best friend Chris and I decided to consciously create community. Community had been, after all, part of what “saved” my family from deep trouble. I decided to employ this attitude of community inclusion to more areas of my life. One summer I met a recent UC Santa Cruz grad named Erwan Davon who was spending 2 weeks at our community house while visiting a friend who lived there. Erwan and I had a series of intense and life-altering conversations about the phenomenon of community, and together organized three 5-hour “encounter groups” with the overt intention of creating community. The participants were all made up of friends of mine. Erwan and I facilitated these encounter groups in a way that created extraordinary results. In these early years we brought together what would later be called “The Old School Community” and we named it, appropriately, “The Community.” This included friend like Stuart Gillfillan, Adam Coutts, Chris Birkner, Jamie Kahl and Rich Reinholdt. Over the next 20 years it grew into a community of literally hundreds of people made up of several different sub-communities like The Community, Rhythm Society, Arete, Life As Art, Authentic World and more.

If I had had the money, family, resources and/or free time I would have entered a good education or counseling program in these early 1990′s. Instead I devoted my time to volunteering at Landmark and helping friends like Erwan and Jerry Candelaria use this community of friends to fill transformative weekend workshops they developed. Lacking any kind of “financial education,” rather than focusing on my own career, I focused on creating community which ultimately helped to fill the transformative courses of my friends. Once again, I watched upper-middle class people in their 20′s go to grad school, often with the help and connection either directly from their family or indirectly from the power of the “family conversation.” I watched from the sidelines the very real impact of the privilege that came from having money and thus power and opportunity. The need to pay bills, including college loans, contributed to my not going to grad school building my own career.

I did what provided the best possible paycheck…I taught and did informal counseling the inner city public schools. In the time period between the mid-90s’ and mid-00′s I taught almost every subject at almost every secondary education (6-12th) grade level. I unintentionally became a specialist in general interdisciplinary education. I accidentally became a “general specialist.” Eventually I managed to land a job teaching Communications and Critical Thinking in a General Studies program at the equivalent of a Junior/Career College. I was an informal school counselor and taught 12th grade Psychology at one point. I was also a school director for a few months. Soon I found that I knew a little bit about everything in education, including counseling. Because I wore so many hats in education I understand how all subjects in schools are interconnected and part of a web, network or system. This awareness dovetailed well with the popularity of the integrated education-Green-interdisciplinary education movement. Quite by mistake and by trial and error I was uniquely positioned to know a lot about “integrated” or “whole child” education.

To my surprise, three years ago I learned that most top schools of education, due to our increasinly interconnected world, had recently developed some form of integrated-interdisciplinary-interdepartmental graduate education programs. The essays and statements of purpose I wrote for Columbia Teachers College’s interdisciplinary doctorate education program in New York City were more natural and authentic for me to write than probably any other students who applied to that program. In the application I simply described the way my career had gone and what seemed obvious to me.

I was accepted into a doctorate program in Education at Columbia! The professors I met who understood this new wave in education naturally liked my views and office hour discussions tended to be long, fulfilling and mutually satisfying. They appreciated my background in SF Bay Area “transformative education” and thought my way of connecting the concept of Fractal images to education and learning were novel. I was the top student in one of my doctorate classes and unexpectedly played the role of part student-part graduate student teacher’s aid.

My strong relationships with professors at Columbia and two A+ course led me to learn more about Harvard’s Graduate school of Education. I applied to their Interdisciplinary “Special Studies” program. The process was long and painstaking, including the GRE test and super confidential online letters of recommendation and elaborate essays and sample writings. I knew that they accepted a very small percentage of applicants.

To my shock I was accepted to Harvard’s program while visiting the San Francisco Bay Area this spring. At first I did not know how to take it and did not tell anyone. My shocked reaction reminded me of the line “How did I get here?” from the Talking Heads song titled “Once in a Lifetime.” Acceptance to Harvard went completely against my sense of identity as a poor White-Hispanic-Jewish kid who was not part of the priveleged class. I was a boy who grew up living with other families, in basement apartments and forms of co-housing. I was a boy with a mom on food stamps. My image of myself was one of not belonging, especially not at Harvard.

Such a boy does not go from Campbells to Cambridge.

One of people’s favorite parts of the city, the Mission is known for it’s amazing Mexican food.

And, of course, it’s coffee.

In the past 16 days I’ve walked, ran and driven through the neighborhood many times now and been quite intrigued with a few cafes in the area. I grew up in Berkeley and now live in Brooklyn, so I’ve seen some of the world’s best cafes. But I’ve discovered four cafes in the Mission that really stand out, and in completely different ways. I’ll share them in the order I discovered them.

1. First is a cafe called Philz Coffee on 24th Street at about Harrison. There are a few different locations.
Here is the website: http://www.philzcoffee.com/index.html.
Here is a YouTube video (be sure to watch the description of “Ambrosia” coffee at 1:09!):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1JTXhV-c5U&feature=related

This cafe is truly unique, about as unique as my friend Kirsten Fletcher who introduced it to me on my third day back in the Bay Area. It’s difficult to decide on all of the interesteing flavors. The interior is beautiful, just like the murals right outside the door. I highly recommend it!

2. The second is a cafe suspiciously across the street from Starbucks and a branch of UCSF on the corner of Florida and Mariposa (actual accress is 1890 Bryant) called Coffee Bar.

Here is an image I like that captures some of the spirit of that part of Potrero Hill-meets-Mission:

Coffee Bar

I know, you’re probably thinking “what a boring name!” Well, maybe so, but the inside of this place is not boring at all. You walk through an old gate, then a ramp, then into a gorgeous art filled space with every seat filled with Missioners, some of them working away on their computers and some chatting.
Here is the website: http://www.coffeebar-usa.com/HOME.html

3. The third cafe I stumbled upon is more like a coffee bar. It is called Rodger’s Coffee and Tea at 3520a 20th Street at between Valencia and Mission. This smaller and unassuming cafe had a great interior, a wonderful smell, and some interesting people hanging out. It’s housed in a warehouse space with lettering from the 60′s that say something like “Cannery” with those big 60′s metal letters. They sport “The Original One Cup at a Time Free Coffee Card” which is exciting, because the way they work it is that you get the first cup on them, buy the next eight, and enjoy your tenth cup free!

Here is a photo, and I don’t know if this is Rodger or not (there is actually a video of Phil himself of Philz on YouTube):

Rodger's Coffee

A review I found expressed this: “This is one of the best cups of coffee you’ll get anywhere in the Mission, or in the city for that matter. And it comes without the attitude, which is saying a lot (ahem, Ritual Roasters and Blue Bottle). For those who are seriously into strong brewed coffee, I highly recommend the Fog Lifter or the Turkish. They also have fresh basked treats. My personal favorite is the bread pudding! Yum! Looking for a real coffee experience? Tired of posers? This is the place. But shhhh don’t tell anyone, the San Francisco Coffee police will probably come shut them down if they find out that someone has dared to serve great coffee without hipsters or attitude – and in the Mission of all places.”

4. Last, but not least (although certainly the least square footage) is Ka’fe 99 Sq Ft. It is at 3150 18th Street between Treat and Folsom. Oh my goodness this place is small. I don’t think there are any chairs…maybe one stool or something. They say “Need a break?” (Yes!) “We are there for you! Thank you for supporting our tiny adventure in your neighborhood!”

I could not find any photos online, probably because Ka’fe 99 Sq Ft is too small to show up in photographs.

I told two employees how much I loved the place and they let out a squeal of enthusiasm that filled the entire place.

Here is an opinion expressed in an online review:
I stumbled upon my Deliscious smooth earthy espresso because the rain had just flooded the cafe I was heading to… what a great little corner cafe. Could be found in the village or the left bank of Paris. 2 chairs outside (the rain had stopped). A teeny salon next door. This is one of the reasons I live in sf. The 99 sq inch cafe is my newest favorite find!”

I hate to say it, but I think East Village and Brooklyn might be lagging behind in the coffee shop department compared to the Mission in San Francisco!

Well, that’s it for now. Feel free to add your comments and/or to let me/us know about some of the other best cafes and coffee bars in the Mission district or even in the Bay Area.

For way too long there has been a split between the traditional courses of universities and the non-traditional, transformative workshops that are popping up all over the world, especially in places like the SF Bay Area. A bridge is being built between them in the form of universities like California Institute of Integral Studies. However, transformative education has been looked down upon, or at least been perceived with cynicism and suspect, by traditional Ivory Tower schools like Columbia, Stanford and Harvard Universities. But now it seems that the traditional world is catching on, realizing this is where the future is, and the incredible power of the transformational curriculum is showing up on traditional programs.

Here is the best example I’ve seen so far. I intend to take this course with the intention of teaching a similar course at my own education center in NY and SF Bay. To me it is one of the most important bridges that is needed in education at this time!

ORLD 4828

Imagination, Authenticity, Individuation, and Transformative Learning

Facilitated by Patricia Cranton

Background

The theory of transformative learning has developed over three decades into a comprehensive and complex description of how learners construe, validate, and reformulate the meaning of their experiences. The impact of transformative learning on the theory and practice of adult education is recognized by all scholars in the field.

Traditional transformative learning theory, as developed by Jack Mezirow, relies heavily on learning as an individual, cognitive process. Though Mezirow does acknowledge the role of intuition, imagination, and affect in the process, they are not central to his theory. Also, Mezirow recognizes the importance of social change as a goal of adult education, but he sees his focus as being on the individual learner. He suggests that it is the educator’s job to help individuals get to a place where they can work toward social change, but it is not the educator’s goal to address social change directly.

Transformative learning scholars have expanded and elaborated on traditional transformative learning in a variety of ways. Many new works have appeared in recent years, emphasizing more imaginative and intuitive approaches to transformative learning theory (see the reference list). In this course, Transformative Learning: Imagination, Authenticity, and Individuation, I we can review the traditional theory and then turn to an in-depth exploration of the more recent developments in the field.

Tentative Topics and Time Frame

Introductions (Jan 20 to Jan 27)
Traditional Transformative Learning Theory (readings from reading list) (Jan 27 to Feb. 3)
Transformative Learning: Multiple Ways of Knowing (Chapter 2, text) (Feb. 3 to Feb 17)
Intuition, Imagination, and Affect (readings from reading list) (Feb. 17 to March 3)
Planning the remainder of the topics (March 3 to March 10)
Remaining topics to be decided based on planning session.
Text and Readings

The text for the course is:

Hoggan, C., Simpson, S., & Stuckey, H. (2009). Creative expression in tranformative learning: Tools and techniques for educators of adults. Malabar FL: Krieger.

Additional readings will be available online as we go.

Learning Projects

Participants who are taking this course for three credits will be asked to engage in a learning project in addition to their participation in the course discussions.

The choice for the content and format of learning projects is completely open. Here are some things that people have chosen to do in other transformative learning courses:

a short story illustrating transformative learning
an autobiography or life story related to your transformative experiences
a poem
a painting, photograph collage, or drawing
a review of a book or article on transformative learning
an integrative essay on various perspectives on transformative learning
a CD of music selections representing a transformative journey
a reflective journal

Jeffrey Sachs is an economist and Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. He is professor of Sustainable Development at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs and a Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia’s School of Public Health. He is Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, and the founder and co-President of the Millennium Promise Alliance, a nonprofit organization dedicated to ending extreme poverty and hunger. From 2002 to 2006, he was Director of the United Nations Millennium Project Millennium Development Goals, eight internationally sanctioned objectives to reduce extreme poverty, hunger, and disease by the year 2015.

This interview blew me away. Some of the highlights were as follows:

“We tend to remember the leaders who kill many people, but not those who imagine the possibility of peace.”

“People don’t tend to think about economics until they are older. It’s related to the question of what works in the world and what doesn’t?”

“My life changed when a Bolivian asked me in 1985 to come to his country and see what it (and runaway inflation) was really like in practice. I went. My life purpose in academia has taken a different path ever since.”

“It turns out that the basic principles of economics apply even at 12,000 feet above sea level!”

“I saw how my practical knowledge could actually be applied, which was somethin that emotionally expanded me and my life purpose.”

“I helped get the unpayable debt of Bolivia cancelled, which resulted in many other Southamerican debt cancellations. It was only because I was tenured at Harvard that I was not scared to talk about such ideas.”

“I happened to go to Poland on April 4, 1989 and was able to participate with and see a revolution happen before my very eyes that related to the dissolving of the Soviet Union and fall of the Berlin Wall.”

“In the midst of our great power, the US is one of the most insular countries in the world.”

“Remember what Margaret Meade famously said: ‘Never doubt that a small group of committed people can change the world. Indeed it is the only thing that ever has.’”

“Transition Economics has now become a field with thousands of followers and disciples and agents.”

“I try to define problems in such a way that they can be solvable.”

“I fell in love with Keynes who dealt with the politics of economics.”

“With most of our real world problems, specialists are not able to help us as much. We need interdisciplinary approaches.”

“I’m still black and blue from the work I attempted to do with Russia just after the USSR dissolved. The Americans simply did not want to make much of a difference there, when they could have done so much. From October 1991 until December 1993 I felt like I was in a Russian hurricane. While I was focused on helping Russia and Poland get on their feet, Cheney and Wolfowitz were focused on securing American dominance in the world.”

“I raised 1 billion dollars for Poland’s currency. I tried to do the same for Russia and hit road block after road block, thanks to people like Cheney.”

“I was told that because 1992 was an election year that my good ideas would not be put into action. I did not believe this could happen at the time. It did.”

“My wife is a physician and so helps me with using the powers of ‘differential diagnoses’ of problems.”

“I went to Zambia early on, saw the realities of malaria, and was in shock that no one was there helping.”

“I worked with the global fund for AIDS, helping Kofi Annon from the United Nations.”

“One of the paradoxes of modern times is that we have so many committed communities of people but that they for the most part of very little access to the policy-makers.”

“I now go around the world having tantrums in public places so it is heard. I had a tantrum the other day at the UN.”

“At the Earth Institute we have 800 scientists and everything on the earth is game!”

“One of my projects right now is small order farmers who can make more food. Obama seems to be excited about it.”

“I worked with Bono on cancelling debt in the developing world and Bono went on to write a book about how poverty can be ended.”

“FDR and JFK were heros of mine because they posed problems in a way that they could be solved. I believe Obama will eventually do that to the same level of skill.”

“Climate change is the absolutely most essential issue right now and so all other goals are linked back to this goal.”

“Quite simply Wall Street needs to say sorry and we need to tax them.”

“We need a better vocabulary of values and ethics.”

Thank you for a very interesting evening, Jeffrey Sachs and Howard Gardner!

NY Review of Books Panel at Main Library

On Thursday, November 5th I attended a wonderful event at the NY Public Library on the corner of 5th Avenue and 42nd Street, near Bryant Park. Two floors down into the basement of this famed library was a gathering from NY Time Review of Books representatives Daryl Pinkney, Ester Allen, Michael Cunningham and Greel Markus.

The theme of the evening on this 10th Anniversary of the NY Review of Books included acknowledging the NY Review of Books Classics publication company created by Edwin Frank.

This esteemed panel was interviewed in a well lit room in front of a crowd of about 50 people, their four chairs in a semi-circle, the atmosphere imbued with the flavor of “discussing-great-literature-in-the-basement-of-an old-library-on a-drizzly-November-evening.”

One of the authors had written books with titles like Mystery Train and Lipstick Traces and about people such as Bob Dylan, Bill Clinton, David Lynch and the French Situationalists. I wondered what connected all of these themes.

Part of the topic for the night was publishing houses that focus on classics. One of the members of the panel mentioned that they grew up under the spell of the luminous Penguin Classics with their beautiful covers and sense of authority. Even amongst the most successful of authors there came with Penguin a fantasy that “maybe I will have a book in the Penguin series but I will probably have to be dead first!”

One of the first questions the moderator asked was inherently interesting: “What books did you enjoy so much that you could not put them down?”

Another member of the panel spoke of her deep love associated with publishing houses that bring together such a diversity of different classics: “For me it’s as if I am invited to a party of authors who don’t know each other and I get to introduce them to each other.”

Still another member of the panel spoke of his love of the care that is put into choosing extraordinary art for the covers of the books in the series: “For me it’s almost as if the art on the cover of the books tell me something about the books that the books don’t even know about themselves.”

Care is put into bringing a unique variety and diversity to the collection. For example, on the list of authors of NY Review is the book Ferdinand the Bull by Munro Leaf and other selections you might not necessarily expect; in fact the list is considered so “hyper-decontextualized” that even Harpo Marx is on the list!

The NY Book Review at some point had a special list of “worst sellers” because they noticed that some of those books were often considered some of the most loved and appreciated of the books to their reader base; they often received requests for the worst sellers from readers who felt this would ensure that they would like them!”

Some of the quotes I appreciated from the evening were:

“What I find interesting is what is out of print.”

“Books mess wonderfully with your sense of time.”

“My favorite are the underground, off-beat, romantic books.”

“We all owe a debt to literary critic Edmund Wilson.”

“Read the Anatomy of Melancholy.” (mentioned 3 times)

“I tend to have confidence that if a book is on that list (NY Review of Classics) that it will be transformative for me.”

“Part of the excitement is wondering which book or books in the series will have that deep impact on your life.”

“We all have books that we feel we should read or should have read but for some reason we did not. But then there are books that fall in that interesting category of books that you ‘shouldn’t have read’ but you did, such as Heinlin’s Stranger in a Strange Land!

“We used to have a fun kind of book club in which we had a game where we competed to see who could humiliate themselves the most. The way to win the game was to name a book that almost everyone else in the room has read but you have not, which is a variation of naming a book that no one else in the room has read and you admit that you gave in and read it!”

“My favorite genre is 20th century Russian writers whose work was suppressed under Communist/Soviet rule, and whose work is just now being acknowledged and appreciated.”

“The nice thing about real books as opposed to the electronic/Kindle versions is that you definitely have ‘heft in your hands.’ In the same way, there is something about actually holding a pen or pencil that ingnites something special in some writers.”

But the best quotes of the night were from critic Daryl Pinkney (see photo above):

“Some come to NY to become a Jewish intellectual; I came to NY to become a Mad Black Queen.”

“No, I have not read that book. But I’ve pretended to read it many times.”

“Never say never when it comes to books.”

Rhythmic Cries: A Cross-Cultural Analysis of the Battle of Algiers

In the film The Battle of Algiers, an understandably frightened member of the French military during the Algerian war of independence in the late 1950s memorably refers to the “unintelligible and frightening rhythmic cries” uttered by the cascading crowd of demonstrating and revolting Algerians. One wonders: unintelligible and frightening for whom? Not, presumably, for the revolting Algerians, for whom the sounds were probably associated with catharsis, liberation and social justice. Thus, as I will argue and explore here, one might say that almost any conflict is at least as much a tension between opposing or contrasting perspectives as it is between opposing realities.

The Battle of Algiers is ideally suited for deep reflection and analysis of topics related to power, conflict, conflict resolution and related topics. The film has “stood the test of time,” proving to be relevant to some of the deepest and most problematic conflicts inflaming our world today. The United States Pentagon held showings of the film in the early days of current Iraq War. Insurgency movements use it as part of their training. Topics that it addresses—such as terrorism, torture and the nature of conflict—are deeply relevant to today’s geo-political realities.

One of the many perspectives from which The Battle of Algiers proves ideal for analyzing conflict is social-cultural. The film, especially as viewed through the eyes of experts on cross-cultural issues, sends a message to those interested in conflict and peace: learn how to be cultural integrators who sew a quilt of peaceful co-existence, or risk being swept up in a vicious cycle of cultural prejudice, distrust, conflict, aggression, war.

In Conflict Formulation: Going Beyond Culture-bound Views of Conflict, G.E. Faure claims that a society’s “underlying meaning is provided by culture” and that “culture is not just one variable in the methodology of conflict studies, but rather the law of variation of the methodology of conflict studies…Conflict as a concept is laden with cultural bias…. It is perceived, defined and dealt with differently (in each culture) and thus culturally rooted.” Faure explains how different cultures capture the notion of conflict and conflict resolution differently depending on their cultural context, offering the fascinating example of the New Guinean Cargo Cult of the 1950s and how fixed their cultural explanation was of the hidden meanings that explained their plight as a colonized and oppressed people.

The degree to which the Algerians and French were entrenched in their explanations of their conflict is similar. The Algerians had a relationship to their 130 years of colonization that was unique to their cultural perspective. They had many generations of “intellectual capture” of aspects of their French colonizers. The film does a remarkable job of showing the many misunderstandings and misinterpretations that both sides had regarding each other. In the same sense that the New Guinean Cargo Cult leader could not be convinced of the Australian “truth” even when presented with “evidence” on his trip to Sydney, the culture of the Algerians served as a filter through which they experienced the French colonial policies and vice-versa. The most striking example of the filter through which the French dealt with the Algerians occurs when the French military leader describes the nature of Algerian resistance using crude geometric drawings forming a long, tree-like structure. He uses the analogy of a “tapeworm” to describe the organizational structure of the Algerian resistance, which reinforces his assertion that the tapeworm’s “head must be cut off.” This way of framing the Algerian organization contributes to the acceptance of the French military perspective that they must interrogate and torture the Algerian members of this “tapeworm.” The French military leader says that they must “know” the opposing structure to be able to eliminate it: “To know them is to eliminate them.” This statement is profoundly dehumanizing, for the Algerian independence fighters become, in the mind of the French military, more like pieces of a worm than human beings.

Another way in which cultural misunderstandings and misinterpretations hijack conflict resolution is through what Kimmel calls “Fundamental Attribution Error,” in which perceived negative behaviors are attributed to personality. These negative attributes inevitably lead to negative emotions (in the victimized people) and to increased perceived negative behaviors, which in turn lead to further negative attributes, resulting in a vicious cycle. In The Battle of Algiers the French media clumsily label the Algerians as illiterate, brick-laying, draft dodgers in need of “serious reform.” Like many oppressive colonial powers, most French military officials looked through the prism of their own culture and callously degraded the Algerians. According to Kimmel, it is just this sort of negative attribution that served as a filter through which the Algerians began to exhibit behaviors that reinforced the French interpretation of the negative attributes that were applied to them, and thus the vicious circle continued. In one of the more extraordinary scenes in the film, an Algerian intellectual responds to the questions of reporters in such a way that he calls into question the labeling by the media of Algerian bombings by three women as an act of “cowardice.” He challenges the reporter’s use of this term by asking how it compares to the French military’s use of napalm to kill innocent civilians in Vietnam. The fact that this film includes Vietnam in its narrative speaks even more deeply to its relevance to U.S. policies toward other cultures.

M. J. Gelfand, L. H. Nishii and J. L. Raver explain yet another way in which cultural differences play a central role in conceptualizing conflict. Their conceptual model is called “Cultural Tightness-Looseness.” This model addresses cultural bias from the notion that what we often attribute to a value system inside the mind of a person is actually more accurately understood according to the external factors that the authors call tightness (strength of social norms and sanctioning) or looseness (weakness of social norms and sanctioning). The Battle of Algiers can be seen as providing an exploration of this phenomenon. In some of the most poignant scenes of the film, we witness the effect of the Algerians’ cultural call for all citizens to give up alcohol, drugs, prostitution and other behaviors that are deemed in their culture to be ethically and morally reprehensible. In this sense the film shows the “cultural tightness” of the society, the manifestation of which is that those who lie outside the moral norm are taunted and chased through the streets by their own people. The larger purpose of this moral crackdown was to keep the resistance, appropriately, tight—meaning well organized and streamlined. According to the perspective of those who promoted this view within Algerian society, only by upholding a high standard of morality could the Algerian resistance weed out those who were not truly committed to its cause. This dynamic, if the French had been attentive enough to understand it, might have contributed to resolving conflict more effectively: declaring a shared goal (for example, improving ethical and moral behavior of all persons) could have served as a potential bridge and thus provided negotiating points between the French and Algerians.

Finally, J.P. Lederach’s Preparing for Peace: Conflict Transformation Across Cultures provides another model for conceptualizing conflict. Lederach suggests that there is a “dialectic and paradoxical component” in conflict transformation. He suggests that there is even “some positive potential to conflict” in the sense that “the energy of seemingly irreconcilable ideas are enhanced if they are held together.” In this model, “peace and conflict can go hand in hand, setting the context for each other.”

It was through Lederach’s discussion of this paradoxical conflict dialectic that I was able to draw the most inspiration and insight from The Battle of Algiers. Lederach’s writings enhanced my understanding of the scene in which Algerian prisoners cry out to Allah, as well as the scene showing the wild-eyed inspiration that the adults felt when the boy took the microphone from the French propaganda officer and assured the Algerians that they were doing the “right thing” in revolting. In both of these scenes I sensed short-term conflict within a transformative container. Most of all, however, Lederach helped me to understand—in greater depth—the scene in which the Algerians made noises that the Frenchman called “unintelligible and frightening rhythmic cries” as they spontaneously (and rhythmically!) broke through the French military barriers. In this scene the Algerians seemed to embody the raw transformative power described Lederach’s dialectic—a kind of paradox of conflict transformation. In those moments conflict was not necessarily a bad thing. It was not necessarily something to be avoided. Rather, conflict was part of the deeper “conflict/peace” dialectic that Lederach describes, conflict and peace magnetically interconnected with the energy of the other in the name of a deeper transformation of society and thus history. From this perspective, the “unintelligible and frightening rhythmic cries” may have been unintelligible to most of the French occupiers; to many of the Algerians, however, they were the intelligible rhythmic cries of transformative change and liberation.

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