Gil gets back from "vacation" and chats with St. John's College tutor David Townsend about the transcendence of good conversation, and the possibility of adding comic books to the Great Books curriculum.
The Virtual Memories Show
Season 2, Episode 6 - My Old School
(upbeat music) - Welcome to the June 2012 episode of The Virtual Memory Show. I'm your host, Gil Roth, and I am back from vacation. Of course, my idea of vacation's a little different than most people's. I spent the post-Memorial Day weekend in Annapolis, Maryland, taking part in a four-day seminar of the fiction of Flannery O'Connor at St. John's College. I finished my master's degree at St. John's in 1995, and even though I often tell people those are the best two years of my life, I rarely get back down there. I think I was only there for homecoming in 2000 and the annual croak came at you against the Naval Academy in '05 or '06. We whooped their ass. But I got a brochure from the college last year about this summer's Piraeus seminars, and I noticed that two of my favorite tutors are gonna be running one on Flannery O'Connor. I'd never read her before, but I decided I just had to get back to the college and return to the conversation. I guess that makes me a 17-year cicada of learning or something. The thing is, St. John's is not your normal college. The Annapolis campus, there's one in Santa Fe too, was founded in 1696, but its current incarnation dates back to 1937. That's when Stringfellow Bar and Scott Buchanan came in and redesigned the curriculum to focus on the traditional liberal arts. That means grammar, logic, and rhetoric, which are known as a trivia, and arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. No, really, astronomy. That part's known as a quadrivium. Bar and Buchanan modeled the college around those arts and used what we call the great books as the basis of the curriculum. Classes are all discussion style, no lectures at all. Also, there are no departments. And there are no professors, just tutors, who kind of serve the same purpose, but they don't profess. Oh, you'll get the idea later on. The undergrad program is remarkable. I really wish I had taken that, but I was way too flighty at 17 or 18 to even get what great books are and why I would have done well to study them. By 22, I learned a lot about how much I had to learn. Anyway, the time I spent in the Graduate Institute, we call it the GI, really was the best time of my life. Of course, I didn't know it at the time. And maybe I'd forgotten just how wonderful it was before this trip to Annapolis. I mean, once I got into the historic district downtown, I found myself just drowning in memories. Almost every step revealed another recollection or another resonance from the life I used to lead. I'd say I was without a care back then, but that's just hindsight. I'm sure that at the time, even the most trivial stuff seemed like it was life or death. But enough of that. I had a fantastic vacation. I got to spend four days in conversation with 15 other students who ranged from 23 to maybe 73 about some insanely well-written and mysterious fiction. Plus, I got to catch up with my old tutors and revel in my old stomping grounds. And a pal of mine from those GI days came out to visit on Saturday. We had a blast walking around town, visiting my old house, and then hitting the crab feast the college put on for the seminar guests. By the end of the first day, I came to realize how much I missed good conversation about books in my day-to-day life. By the end of the weekend, I kind of found myself regretting not having set up my life so that I could be a tutor at St. John's. I mean, I know, I know. I'd get tired of it. I'd have screwed things up somehow. I'm idealizing the place out of all proportion. But it really was heaven to me. I can't convey just how ecstatic I was to walk through the town again and relive all those memories and the conversations. Always the conversations. But it wasn't just about the past. I was happy to meet so many new people, all of whom were there because of this shared experience we have with these books. There are people who cared enough to make the trip out there to talk and learn from each other. And I think I can convince the tutors to consider one of my favorite novels for next year's seminar. Either way, I'm sure I'll come back for more. [MUSIC PLAYING] The Flannery O'Connor seminar was run by David Townsend and Tom May. And both tutors were kind enough to sit down with me for interviews during the weekend. They each meant a lot to me during my studies. I was so happy to reconnect with them. The only problem was I find myself kind of intimidated, I guess, or at least afraid of saying something off the cuff that sounded dumb, which is silly because we'd had such easy conversation in seminars and during meals and walks between classes. I think I just was pretty uneasy during the recordings themselves. At least, that's what I sound like to me. You can be the judge. Our first conversation is with David Townsend. He's been a tutor at St. John since 1974, starting at Santa Fe and then coming to Annapolis in 1984. One of my fellow grad students considers him a genius, which he characterizes as, let's see, the ability to explain very difficult concepts to people who are clearly not as smart as him. I think that's how he put it. We had a seminar together in politics and society segment of the GI. And I'm inclined to agree with my pal's assessment. When did you come to St. John's and what brought you here initially? I came in 1974. And I was always interested in St. John's. I wanted to come as an undergraduate. And the reason I didn't was because it was expensive. And I took a test, an ACT test, and got a full scholarship to Loyola as a result of the ACT test. And I hadn't even applied to Loyola. So I thought at that time it was an act of God that wanted me to go to Loyola. So I didn't come to St. John's, although I pursued it. And it was always in the back of my mind. So after I got my PhD at Harvard, I applied to St. John's. And I wanted to go west and moved out to Santa Fe to teach at St. John's. I guess I think it's interesting in terms of its revolutionary philosophy of education. So the fact that you would have round table discussions in which you diminish the master's slave relationship that we seem to have kept from the European system where the nobility lecture to the peasants. And then the peasants write it down. And then the peasants are told that they know things. That seems to me to be a foolish system. And in the American experiment, we don't really believe that anymore. And yet there's aspects of our educational structure that are still like that. You have a kind of nobility of authority. And then people imitating that. And I think the power of St. John's is in the classroom and in the round table discussion and in the truth coming off the table and everybody having the same text. So everybody's literally on the same page to start with. We talked about this before in our little pre-conversation. My undergraduate experience sort of came from the opposite. It did revolve around these round table conversations. But everything was built around not original text themselves, but whoever could come up with the best deconstructionist, feminist, et cetera, commentary on a certain text without necessarily showing that they had the book itself. What was your PhD in, by the way? It was in English and American literature. Who did you focus on? I wrote a thesis on Thoreau Whitman and Stevens as American visionary poets. Great. OK, three. I don't unfortunately have enough expertise, and especially with Wallace Stevens, who I always found. I don't want to say impenetrable, but it never penetrated me. Well, the aspect of Stevens, which connected for me with Thoreau and Whitman-- both Thoreau and Whitman have a vision of America. Whitman has this wonderful book called democratic vistas in which he tries to explain the spirit of America. And of course, it's true in his poetry that he's-- I mean, he is an American. As he says in "Song of Myself," Walt Whitman, an American, a cosmos, one of the ruffs. So I think I'm interested in that American experiment aspect of St. John's, too, that there can be a community in which the hierarchies of teacher and learner are diminished. And there's not much separation between the two. That makes a lot more fun to teach, to be leading a discussion. Not so much in the grading papers mentality or recite that. I mean, you want people to learn to write, and so you want to review their writing, and that's all very important. But the real meat of what goes on is in a conversation in a classroom. And when you're having a real conversation, it's a transcendental experience. Sure. Makes you happy. That's why I came down here for this weekend. It's been quite a long time since I've had that sort of-- especially in this level of number of people who are involved in the number of voices we get from such a broad age range that we have. What book do you enjoy, I don't want to say, teaching? Enjoy having a conversation about the most. Oh, that's like asking me to choose among my children. OK, but there are certain books that-- I mean, I always come back to Dante and to Melville's Moby Dick. Brother Scaramazoff, of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy's "Born Peace." For 18-year-olds or whatever age the undergrads are, what do you think is perhaps the most challenging-- or what's most challenging at least in terms of your ability to keep a conversation on track? Which is a way of asking what's most difficult one to teach, I guess? Well, the Bible presents its challenges because people come to it with certain preconceived notions. And they're very invested in those preconceived notions. So to actually read the text of the Bible and have a conversation about it that's open can be a challenge. And I think for a discussion leader, you know, trying to keep people to look at the text and not bring in the conclusions that they're already bringing to the conversation, that's hard to do. Do you have any sort of-- I don't want to see tricks, but techniques for when you see a conversation starting to go off the rails like that? I guess you pick things up. It's not rocket science, but you try to get people to speak who are saying things that you think will advance the conversation and by the use of sometimes body language, or sometimes just saying someone else talk now. The people who are just pontificating and saying things that really aren't moving things forward. Yes, we did have a moment during Flannery O'Connor yesterday when somebody introduced a letter she had written 10 years after the book that she sort of-- that's very nice, but I'm not sure we need to rely on what the author had to say 10 years later about something she wrote at the time. Yeah, I think the conversation is not ultimately about information that you import. And a lot of academics is about information as if you can pour wisdom into empty souls, like sight into blind eyes. And I don't think you can do that. I think-- I mean, there is a phenomenon of education that's like that. It's probably more appropriate to technical trades, but to really get a conversation going about the meaning of something that's really not a matter of importing information so much. What sort of experiences have you had with alumni subsequently? Have any come back to campus or gotten back in touch with the US Post, in particularly surprising circumstances, gone on to do something that you wouldn't expect, perhaps, a St. John's education to really prepare one for? Well, Gil Roth publishes the novels of Samuel Delaney. That's not something I'm going to expect. Well, that comes to the question of the difference between undergrads and GIs. What do you see actually between-- what are the biggest differences, I guess, for the graduate students? I know we take a much narrower, more truncated version of the program than the undergrads. But from a tutor perspective, how different are we? Or what are the differences? How do they play out in conversation? Well, the graduate students tend to be more mature, so they have more life experiences to bring to the conversation. So that's extremely interesting. The undergraduates tend to be younger and tend to be a little more arrogant in the way that delightful way that young people are. So that's also very interesting. They're always in your face, and there's no deference. And I think that's very healthy. That's good, too. So I like doing both kinds of teaching. The GIs, the Graduate Institute students, they actually read some things with much more depth and much more careful preparation than the undergraduates. They're here because they are really invested. They've had other life experiences. Many of them, and they're really coming back because they really want to come back. Whereas when you're 18 years old, sometimes you really don't know why you're in college. You think it's something you ought to do. And you may certainly might. You may certainly might. Quite as invested as you would be when you're older. And also, we just get to read some of the books a lot more slowly. We plow through things sometimes. So I mean, the undergraduates have a more unified experience and that they're here for four years, and they're all reading the same things for the most part. So they have the background and the substance that they can build on, which the graduate students may not have. You can't expect that someone who's reading the Bible has already gone through Euclid. They may or they may not have. Whereas with the undergraduates, you can build on that expectation. So that really makes it a little easier in some ways with the undergraduates. But I think the graduate students are really more exciting because they have more life experiences and because they have more commitment in some way to the educational enterprise. I tried to convince myself that it was a worthwhile program or that the undergraduate program I somehow would tell myself was good. But 18 is far too young to be reading the Bible and Plato and this and that. And if anything, I think it was just me at 18. Perhaps it would not have been the best course of study. Well, I don't think it is too young, but I think there's certainly texts that can become richer as you get older and have more experiences. And I do a lot of teaching in various venues. So I teach at the Federal Executive Institute. I'm teaching sort of senior executive service types who are very experienced in government. I'm teaching in the prison, so I'm teaching prisoners that may not be very well educated at all. Teaching high school students, teachers, college deans. From all different perspectives, it's very interesting to see how they talk about these very rich and seminal texts like Plato's Republic or Aristotle or Hobbes or Locke. And do you try and approach those all from the same St. John's model, the same round table, essentially? Yeah, I think that's the best way to go. So I'm involved with the Aspen Institute. We also do these kinds of seminars which are round table discussions. Some of the people that were instrumental in founding Aspen was found at the new program at St. John's back in the '30s and '40s. How difficult is it in some circumstances to get people to answer when you launch an opening question? As we saw in our conversations with Flannery O'Connor, there are times when we all just sit a little bit silent for a minute or two trying to get things started. At least in a St. John's context, we know that that's how this is going to be structured and how this is coming. Is that like a familiarity, a problem, in some of the other teaching circumstances you're in? If they're not-- I mean, if you're in a prison-- I don't think of it as a problem. I would say that now in the prison, we do the Touchstones Project. So we basically have one page readings because the levels of literacy are various. So we might read Plato's Cave, which has been put on a page. And that's read out loud at the beginning. So everybody has the same text and everybody's at the same level, even if you're not literate. They've at least heard the text. The questions that-- I mean, questions I ask for opening questions are questions that are real for me. So whether the question gets answered immediately or not-- and usually they're questions that can't be answered because if they could be, I would hope that I would have come to some kind of conclusion. But a more open-ended question that's going to generate conversation and get people to think about something in terms of whether it has meaning or whether it has value, things that are really never ultimately concluded, but that are so important as to what the relations of values are one to the other. I mean, I think there's no agenda in that regard in the conversation other than this is something that's really interesting to me. I wonder if it's interesting to anyone else in this room. And sometimes it isn't. It's certainly the most part. It really is. And so I learn a lot from the people around the table. If we can flash back to your childhood, when did you get this bookish? When did you understand that this is essentially the course of life you wanted to pursue? I don't think I was a great reader in childhood. I had a lot of comic books. Me too. That's good. I read a lot of those. And then I started reading-- I think it was-- I was probably around 13 when I discovered John Steinbeck. And I just realized I read everything he wrote. And I thought, that's kind of unusual. So I think you go to school on people. You find somebody that really inspires you. And then you start finding other people. And so I guess it built like that. That put you out of place at all growing up? I don't know anything about your circumstances. No, I just went to public school. And then no, particularly stellar education. And then I ended up at Loyola College, which was a Jesuit college at the time. Still is-- really had a lot of Jesuit teachers. And I was very interested in theology. I was raised to Catholic, went to public school, went to Sunday school. I was always interested in these spiritual questions. So I guess I regarded that the teaching and the learning as a kind of spiritual experience, which I still do. It does seem to me to be a transcendent and spiritual experience. There's always things to discover. And there are always aspects of people that are just wondrous. Again, why I come down here for the conversation. I've been thinking of trying to start a book club back at home. But I realized that was essentially to generate into wine drinking and gossip fests. I figured maybe I could put on-- I used to have something called the smart guy's salon that I did in New York City with Samuel Delaney and a few other pals of mine. We would just get together at-- well, we'd get together in Times Square at the WWF restaurant and cafe. And really try and juxtapose the really smart people surrounded by very, very dumb steroid abusers and spandex. It was a neat gimmick back in around 2000 or so. But we would have just good conversation, even if we weren't all focused on a particular book at the time, which, again, it's coming down here for a weekend and sort of getting this. Well, you can have lots of good conversations. But I think for me, the teaching aspect or the learning that works is when everybody does have a text in common. Because there is a tendency to think that there is a great hierarchy between the intelligent and the uneducated. And the bad students have nothing to teach the good students. And I've found that in prison and in teaching in high schools, in cities, that's simply not the case. The so-called bad students will take enormous risks that the good students won't think of taking with a text. And they'll say things that just astonish you. And so if you can get everybody reading the same text, it's surprising how constructive and valuable a conversation will be once people are willing to be reasonably polite and set rules for themselves. And what you do in a classroom is create a small republic and let people make their own rules if they don't like the rules that you're applying. And you have to try things out to see. Sometimes something you hadn't thought of is important. When I went into the prison, I said to the prisoners, are there any-- here's the nature of the conversation. Are there any other rules we ought to have? And they said, yeah, no cussing. No, OK. That became very important. Again, it could be a way to shout someone down, otherwise, or-- Or insult someone, or-- So it's not something I'd thought of. There's also no knifing or anything, too, I guess, but it's about-- I'm not saying anything. Now, we talk about the curriculum at St. John's in addition to having this roundtable and this mode of learning. It's also a very particular subject matter, being these foundational works of civilization, as we know it, which then leads to questions of how that curriculum gets settled on and how it changes over the years. How have you seen it shift or change in the time that you've been here? It hasn't changed a great deal from the time I was here in '74. There are, of course, changes in the contemporary scientific readings that we do in labs. So there'll be more contemporary papers on physics, that sort of thing. But in terms of the main curriculum, I mean, the battles do tend to occur over the literature of the 20th century, for example, whether Virginia Woolf is on or off, whether Flannery O'Connor, who has been recently taken off, should we put back on, which, of course, she should. And I think there is maybe a movement toward more philosophy what's considered to be philosophy. I consider everything to be philosophy, but particularly, for example, the Flannery O'Connor was taken off and replaced by Heidinger. So there you have that kind of philosophical academic reading. And I think literature is harder to read. It reaches deeper into the heart and into the emotional intelligence. And people have more trouble with it. So people can become more comfortable with philosophical texts, which are-- More systemic. Well, they sometimes have lots of jargon, which makes it easy for a teacher to explain things. Yeah, as opposed to leaving something, it's very wide interpretation. Yeah, interesting. So besides Flannery O'Connor, what else would you either restore to the curriculum, or do you have a personal favorite that you think should be added? I like some of the comic writers that are also hard to teach like Ravelay, who's been taken off. I would definitely put Ravelay back on. I would like to see the Quran put on the curriculum. I think that's a text that we all ought to be reading. You'd mentioned when we were having lunch yesterday that you'd done some study. I think he'd read it once or twice. You'd said for a program you were working on. Can you sort of tell us about that? Or what have you learned that you didn't have any idea of before you started reading it? I did not know. I'd have made new little parts of it. And I guess I think the spirituality of the Quran really impresses me. There's this direct relationship between the individual and God. And there's no partners and nothing in between. And it's very personal, it's very spiritual. So the mystical aspect that one might be aware of in Christianity from Irish monks or the mystical aspects of Dante, in which you get to this vision of things, that's very prevalent in the Quran. And so as a spiritual book, I think it's interesting. There are also many parallels. Of course, it's like the Third Testament. I don't know if this is the way one ought to talk about it theologically, but it affirms the legitimacy of the Torah and the Gospels. That hurt it. Yeah, two Muslims defining Judaism as religion 1.0, Christianity is 2.0, and Islam is 3.0. Yeah, and Abraham is the father of faith. I mean, if you want to know what faith is, you look at the life of Abraham, and God says Abraham, and he says, here I am. So that's true in all of those texts. There are differences. The Book of Mary, we were talking about this the other day, but I just had my first grandchild, and I was in the waiting room waiting for my daughter to give birth, and I was reading the Book of Mary, which is in the Quran. And in the Book of Luke, it says that she brought forth a child, wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger, which sounds fairly easy to do. But in the Quran Book of Mary, the account is that Mary was an enormous agony, and she was struggling, and she said, I wish I were dead. This labor is so hard, and she grabs onto a tree, and she's standing up and bribing in pain, and this voice comes and says, you're going to be OK, Mary, just look at the tree. It's full of fruit, things, and there's water at your feet. You're going to get through this. A very interesting and different account on the same event. It's very beautiful and lyrical. Beautiful. A lot of beautiful poetry. Good one. I don't know any Arabic, so this is-- Yeah, we're trusting it in translation, I guess. Yeah. And because I've got my particular set of interests in literature, stayed up with comics at all, or you were-- Because I could send you some good ones. Yeah, not the superhero stuff. There's some nice minds. I'd love to see-- I'd love to see. Well, I always kind of try to see what Robert Chrome is doing these days, and his translation of-- I saw it in his illustration of Genesis. Yeah, that was very interesting. Of course, a mouse, I think, is fantastic. Yeah, I was wondering if there was ever going to be a comic added to the curriculum here, or we would have to assume it would be mouse, or something else that's held in that. I would love to do seminars of these, actually. Yeah, if you were doing a pyreus on that, or Jaime Hernandez's "Love and Rockets," which I'll send you a big collection of. That's called my radar screen. Yeah, it's some of the best literature that's come out in any genre in the last 30 or 40 years. It's really remarkable, the things that are going on in that area that-- I would love to do a seminar on that, actually. I would certainly say that my first introduction to the classics was a series of comics called classics in this period. Oh, gosh, yeah, I remember those. Some of which were just terrific. You know, you could do a very interesting exhibition or series of seminars on the illustrations of great text. I mean, some of them are really obvious. If you thought Dante's Divine Comedy-- Sure, the Dore, but Baccaccio and up to the present, there are just so many people that have done interesting illustrations. Yeah, oh, over the Rockwell Kent version of Moby Dick, I remember seeing that in "Barry Mosher" and who did it without depicting any of the characters. Oh, interesting. I don't know that one. I have to look where you see St. John's going or where you see yourself within the hierarchy here. Oh, well, where I see myself as I would continue to teach as long as I am able, because this is really enormous fun. And I would never want to retire. Why would I, the most fun thing to do in life is to talk to people, interesting people about interesting books. This is what I get to do. My regret this weekend, like we've mentioned during lunch just now, being down here, I thought I really should have found some way of pursuing becoming a tutor at St. John's. Not that I've had any of the intellectual rigor of most of the guys I know doing this, but-- I guess the one thing I would say in the terms of the direction, I proposed Islamic classics, Middle Eastern classics program, which would be another master's program. And I would like to see that developed. And we have segments for that, politics and society and literature and philosophy and theology. And I think that would be a very interesting one semester a piece for each of those units. Yes, yes, yes, yes. I might end up getting laid off in a couple of years. We'll see if we've got some free time in my hands, or like many of the guys in the Pyreus this period, they're apparently retired, which they all seem too young to be retired. I agree, I agree. But I think that with the importance of Islam in the world, it's just interesting in coming upon all of this, not to think of those as non-Western, because that's really right in the center of the West. And I think there are a lot of scholar soldiers now that are particularly interested in this that would want to take place. Is there any interaction with the Naval Academy over this? Yes, we do have Naval Academy teachers and graduates that come to the Graduate Institute. I find them to be wonderful students, combination of Athens and Sparta. Terrific, I want to cross the street from the other. Yeah, I remember there was ethics courses and such that were being taught across both back when I was here. Actually, yeah, actually they brought in-- there was a scandal at the Academy some years ago where-- Yeah, that was during my time. The stole an electrical exam? The electrical exam. And so they brought in Marines, actually, to teach ethics. And many of them came to St. John's to take the Graduate Institute program, because this is really the best way to teach values as well, is not with a series of bullet points, but to get people to connect with their core, with their center. I mean, the values are always going to be in conflict, but to wrestle with those conflicting values and center them in yourself. That's really the basis of leadership. Mr. Townsend, I appreciate your time. Thank you. Thanks very much. [MUSIC PLAYING] And that, my friends, was David Townsend, a tutor at St. John's College. My conversation with Tom May went on so long that I decided to split this episode into two parts. You can download it from my website or go to the iTunes store and search for virtual memories. I'm Gil Roth, and you are awesome.