Archive for the 'men's group' Category

Theme ideas for a book/movie discussion group

Mark K April 21st, 2008

About a year and a half ago, I created a book/movie/discussion group. A couple of things about it that make it unique are that all of the members are men, that we include both books and movies, and that there is usually a theme that unifies the materials.

My inspiration came partly from the NPR weekly radio program This American Life, which is based on a theme each week, with three stories that relate to that theme. The connection between the stories, as in our group, is sometimes a bit tenuous, but that can sometimes make the discussion even more interesting. One month, for example, who chose a movie and a book which didn’t seem to be related and then left it up to each member to explain what he thought was the theme that connected the two.

In planning for our group, I often search the Internet for movies which relate to a certain theme and find that it’s difficult to find resources which are helpful in doing this. I thought it might be helpful to others if I provided this list of what we have done so far.

  • theme - Living off the grid, book - Into the Wild (Jon Krakauer), film - Grizzly Man
  • theme - Culture Crash, book - The Tortilla Curtain (T.C. Boyle), film - Crash and Grand Canyon
  • theme - Interests, passions, hobbies for life, book - It’s Only Too Late if you Don’t Start Now ( Barbara Sher), film - The World’s Fastest Indian, Surfing for Life
  • theme - Wandering, book - Zorro (Isabel Allende), film - The Terminal, Motorcycle Diaries
  • theme - Intuition and Intention, book - The Tipping Point and Blink (Malcom Gladwell), film - What the Bleep do we Know?
  • theme - Fame, book - A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (Dave Eggers), film - Almost Famous
  • theme - Creativity, book - Lennon Remembers (Jan Wenner), film - No Direction Home
  • theme - On the Road, book - On the Road (Jack Kerouak), film - The Sure Thing
  • theme - Dropping Out, book - The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger), film - Five Easy Pieces
  • theme - Small Town, book - Look Homeward, Angel (Thomas Wolf), film - The Dish
  • theme - Immortality, book - Immortality (Milan Kundera), film - The Unbearable Lightness of Being
  • theme - Finding your roots, short story - All This Family (Greg Sarris), film - The Shipping News
  • theme - Inappropriate humor, book - Me Talk Pretty One Day (David Sedaris), film - Borat
  • theme - You choose the theme, short story - NASA’s Successful Quantifying of Comedy Timing (Penn and Teller), film - The Talented Mr. Ripley
  • theme - War and cold war, book - Slaughterhouse Five (Kurt Vonnegut), film - The Lives of Others
  • theme - A book and movie that are important to you, book suggestion - Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man (James Joyce), film suggestion - The Deer Hunter
  • theme - Fathers and Sons, book - Life With Father (Clarence Day) and The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini), film - The Son
  • theme - Male bonding, book - The Teammates (David Halberstam), film - Diner, Rio Bravo
  • theme - Oil and blood , book - Oil! (Upton Sinclair), film - There Will Be Blood, Giant
  • theme - Alienation, story - The Metamorphosis (Franz Kafka), film - American Beauty
  • theme - The detective code, book - The Maltese Falcon (Dashiell Hammett) film - Gone Baby Gone, The Maltese Falcon
  • theme - Creating the impression of being well-read, book - How to talk about books you haven’t read (Pierre Bayard), film - Il Postino

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How to talk about books you haven’t read

Mark K April 19th, 2008

I’ve found the perfect book for my book group, Pierre Bayard’s How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read.

As I described in a previous post, it’s been an ongoing struggle to get a group guys to actually read a book before coming together to discuss it. So now Bayard offers the perfect solution - you don’t actually have to read a book in order to carry on an intelligent conversation about it, with the added bonus of possibly convincing others that you have actually read it!

Bayard’s contention is that a classroom setting is the only place where you are expected to memorize a book and then regurgitate the facts on a test. Each of us, whether we actually read the entire book or not, only keep selected memories from the book, memories which are often colored by our own experiences and what we want to take from the book. When we discuss a book, we are trading comments about the way that book affected each of us and how it relates to the culture in general, not reciting the chapter and verse of what we have read.

He recommends these accepted ways of not reading the book:

  • just skim
  • don’t even pick it up
  • get your information from secondary sources such as reviews
  • read it, but then forget it

Bayard claims that reading a book in its entirety might actually distract one from having a good discussion about the book and to reinforce his point, quotes Oscar Wilde, who once said, “I never read a book I must review, it prejudices you so.”

In that spirit, I’ve decided to recommend this book to my book group which is meeting next week. I will leave it to their own judgment as far as how they want to actually “read” the book.

Who knows, I might actually read it myself!

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Real men read books

Mark K February 3rd, 2008

I was told men don’t like to read. Men aren’t very good at getting together unless it involves competition, bloodshed, or gambling spoils. Men don’t do book groups.

So I joined a women’s book group.

It was great. The women read the books. They got together monthly. They talked about feelings and had deep discussions.

There was only one problem - they didn’t always get around to actually discussing the book.

That’s when I came up with Men Who Pause.

I would prove the world wrong. Men, I knew, really did long to come together in ways that didn’t require icepacks, peace treaties, or taxidermy. They could gather, using literature to stimulate good conversation.

Each month we would choose a theme with a corresponding book and movie. We would meet and talk about ideas which the book and movie inspired. Men are good at what the child psychologists call parallel play - two little boys can’t jump in a sandbox and have a heart-to-heart, but give them a toy truck, a couple of sticks, and some dirt and they know exactly what to do.

No one knew what to expect. The first film was Grizzly Man and the book was Into the Wild. The theme amounted to: “If you make a really bad decision out in nature, you will probably have an unfortunate experience at one of two ends of the food chain.” Discussion questions were assigned. One member spoke for many, smirking as he dismissed these stories about “two idiots who had it coming.”

Each month, it got a little better - the discussions were deeper and livelier. There was only one small problem: Unlike the women, our members seldom read the book.

We tried “dumbing down” the curriculum; read one chapter, use Cliffs Notes, just read the dust jacket. Some showed up with brand new books, then offered strong opinions, quoting liberally from the first three pages. Leadership was questioned; rotating leadership was instituted. It appeared there might be torn rotator cuffs and mayhem after all.

Then came the successes. A former nonreader admitted that he had now become a book-finisher. During a Jack Kerouac discussion at a San Francisco bar, we were told by young hip women that it was cool to see old guys talking about books. A stranger at a restaurant, overhearing our discussion of The Catcher in the Rye, offered a fifteen-minute monologue about a guy he once knew named Holden.

Then last summer, we planned a campout and only three of us showed up. After dinner, we sat around the campfire and Ashwin cautiously pulled a never-before-shared manuscript from his backpack. He proceeded to read incredibly personal, painful stories that he’d written about his childhood in India. Patrick and I sat in the dark and listened in awe.

We still have a lot to learn about how to do this whole book group discussion thing. But I’m confident that pages, chapters, and someday, entire books will be read. And discussed.

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Men’s Group - May 2007 “Small Town”

Mark K May 1st, 2007

We selected “Look Homeward, Angel” by Thomas Wolfe and “The Dish” as our book and film for May. We didn’t do too well with the reading - we decided that if we added up all of the pages that each of us read, we still hadn’t finished the book. Although some of us found Wolfe’s prose to be artfully done - almost like poetry - we found that it was just too much work to make it through 500+ pages. Although some of “Angel” did take place in a small town it wasn’t the same as “The Dish”, in which the small town becomes almost like a major character in the story. Speaking of major characters, the group met in an appropriate small town setting - the quirky downstairs bar in the American Legion log cabin in San Anselmo. Our major interaction with our fellow patrons this time involved dodging the backwards thrusts of pool cues.

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Men’s group - Holden Caulfield and brainwashing

Mark K April 11th, 2007

Last Friday, our book/movie/discussion group met at Brainwash in San Francisco. Brainwash is a unique combination of laundromat and cafe, with live entertainment in the evenings. The eight of us squeezed into a corner around two tables, with one of us perched at a higher level on what would later become the stage. It was a bit difficult to hear the conversation with the noise level (from people, not washing machines) and I was conscious about disturbing our neighbors, some of whom were intently surfing the Internet on their laptops. At one point, the guy who was “sharing the stage” with us, shut down his computer and joined our conversation. He had been listening and knew that we were discussing Holden Caulfield, the narrator of The Catcher in the Rye. He started in on a lengthy discussion of a guy he once knew who had the last name Holden who was also a big fan of the book. The woman next to us was scowling into her salad most of the time and made such an unpleasant face when asked if we could borrow the extra chair at her table that we backed off. The guy who worked at the register had a few things to add to the discussion as well. He claimed that the name Holden was significant because the character was “holding on” to his childhood.
Afterwards, I thought that this venue was less than ideal because of the interruptions and distractions, but now I’m wondering if maybe I’m not seeing the forest for the trees - if our group is truly a bunch of men who pause once a month, maybe these other people are part of the big picture - what we are doing is drawing attention and interest, positive, negative or otherwise and people outside of our group are taking time out from their laptops, salads and registers to enter the discussion through words or expressions. Hmmmm……

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Men’s Group - April 2007 “Dropping Out”

Mark K March 10th, 2007

We selected two classics for April, both dealing with characters who “dropped out” in a sense, and then went on a journey searching for something. The book is J.D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye” and the film is “Five Easy Pieces” starring a young Jack Nicholson. We’re thinking that we’d like to meet somewhere fun again this time. Any ideas? Speaking of dropping out, I just found out that J.D. Salinger is still living! Even though he’s been living in seclusion in New Hampshire and hasn’t given an interview since 1980, I have a feeling that he just might join our discussion if we ask him!

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Men’s group - road trip to North Beach

Mark K March 10th, 2007

Last night the met at Vesuvio for a night of discussion “On the Road”, Kerouac and the idea of taking to the road. Our first “road trip” meeting was a huge success - it was hard not to stay on the topic sitting in a place surrounded by pictures of Kerouak, Ginsberg, Cassidy and the other Beats and having drinks in the same place where Jack himself had hoisted a few. We even drew the attention of some fellow customers who thought that it was really cool that some old guys would get together to discuss books (or maybe they just said that because they wanted our leftover pizza). The consensus was that our film choice, “The Sure Thing” was okay, but was dated and had a limited audience - teenagers (and maybe not even today’s teenagers). We were all pleasantly surprised that “On the Road” was a pretty straight-forward narrative - it didn’t read like the stream-of-consciousness rant that many of us had anticipated. However, it did have a huge outpouring of energy and careless zest for life that would be understandably appealing to people living in the 50’s - the age of the gray flannel suit, McCarthyism, and the cold war. Any other comments on your reaction to the book or, for those who attended, the evening at Vesuvio?

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Men’s Group - March 2007 - “On the Road”

Mark K February 16th, 2007

At our last meeting, we decided to take turns choosing the book, film, or theme. John suggested that we read Jack Kerouak’s “On the Road”. The group decided to stick with the “Road” theme, but chose a road film with a very different feel to it - “The Sure Thing”, the 2000 film starring John Cusack and Daphne Zuniga. In keeping with our theme, we decided to take March’s meeting on the road as well, and will meet at City Lights Bookstore (owned by beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti) and the Vesuvio bar nextdoor. For more information on these two San Francisco landmarks, click on the links.

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Men’s Group - February 2007 - “Creativity”

Mark K January 20th, 2007

Last month when we talked about “fame” it led to a discussion about the creativity of a writer - Dave Eggers in the Case of “A Heartbreaking Work” or Cameron Crowe, the Rolling Stone writer on whose life “Almost Famous” was based. We talked about books and films that could shed light on the people and creative process behind art, music, and literature. People suggested everything from a biography of Van Gough to a tell-all stories of rock bands. We (I) finally decided that we would watch the Martin Scorcese documentary on Bob Dylan, “No Direction Home” and read the book “Lennon Remembers” - a book about John Lennon, based on a Rolling Stone interview by Jann Wenner.

Men’s Group - January 2007 - “Fame”

Mark K December 20th, 2006

The title of the book A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius says it all. Is this a book written by an incredibly self-absorbed twenty-something who thinks that the world should pay homage to his greatness before he actually accomplishes anything, or is it a tongue-in-cheek, clever satire about the author and his generation? We’ll also take a look at a young man’s brush with fame from an earlier generation with the film “Almost Famous”. Does each of us have a secret desire to be famous and a feeling that it’s just a matter of time before the world appreciates our greatness? This is the kind of question that we hope to explore during our January meeting.

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