https://digitallis.isg.siue.edu/files/original/c11686e054bf83b4820c769328842e1e.pdf 45a91d82d3af3bf09fd1e373256a64c7 PDF Text Text . Vol. 1, No.3 October 25, 1957 Compiled weekly by Information Service, Southwestern Illinois Residence Office, Southern Illinois University, for the staff members of the Residence Centers, the Newsletter is made possible by the cooperation of staff members who have contributed news items. F-A-C-U-L-T-Y N-E-W-S~L-E-T-T-E-R Next week Thursday afternoon the Southern Players Touring Company of SIU will present "She Stoops to Conquer" at the Alton Residence Center. The student players, organized six years ago, spend the entire fall quarter touring southern Illinois. During this quarter the students-all juniors or seniorstake no other subjects. Each player gets to play several different parts during the quarter and also takes his turn as make-up man. The players even make some of their own costumes and scenery so that when they go out later as teachers they ~ how to direct school plays. There will be no admission charged for the performance at the Alto.n Residence Center which is open to students and faculty. In other towns; where they are sponsored by civic groups, they get a percentage of the box office receipts. The idea is to break even, according to Jess W. Turnbow, who handles their booking from his office in Carbondale. One of the players acts as business manager, handling all of their fiscal matters, and a graduate student drives the bus which carries them and their scenery. Dr. Archibald McLeod, Speech Head, Carbondale campus, selects the plays presented by the group, and he or other members of the speech department travel with them. Chelsea Bailey, supervisor, Division of Technical and Adult Education, told the East St. Louis Rotary Club Wednesday about his more than two years in Iraq. Bailey, a rotarian, was one of the three organizers of the Rotary Club in Baghdad in 1955. He says that on their first ladies' night only the wives of Americans and other Westerners showed up. On the next ladies' night a few Iraqi wives attended; but on the ladies' night held just before Bailey returned to the United States, two-thirds of the wives were present. Bailey pointed out that Baghdad is a city of contrasts. While it has beautiful homes, half of the people live in mud huts much as they did at the time of Christ, except that they have kerosene stoves now. Baghdad is surrounded by desert. Its temperature goes to 126 in the summer, and there is no rain from May until October. Last week Dean Willis G. Swartz, Graduate School, Carbondale, District Governor of Rotary, addressed the same club. · Rotarian Swartz was introduced by Rotarian Harold See. �- 2 A picnic for the students and staff of the East St. Louis Center is scheduled for this evening at the Grand Marais Club House, 6:30 - 11:00. According to the office of the park, the route is as follows: Take State Street north to 73rd. Go right on 73rd to the main entrance of Grand Marais Park. Follo\v signs to parking lot for club house on island. Tom Evans, student affairs, East St. Louis, said yesterday that a wiener roast (as well as non-meat refreshments), will be followed by juke box dancing. This is the first all-student activity planned by the student advisory committee introduced at the 11:00 a.m. assembly at the State Street Baptist Church. Dr. Laurence Mceyeny, Qhysics, Alton, told the Alton Kiwanis Club Tuesday that the Russian satellite, Sputnik, although it is being pulled by the earth, is moving no closer to the earth. Reason: It is traveling 18,000 miles per hour in a line perpendicular to the straight-down motion. (Physicist McAneny will draw a picture for anybody who cannot understand this simple explanation -- ed.) Next week Faculty Newsletter will report on two talks Dr. Eric Baber is giving Monday one before the Alton Rotary Club and the other before the Alton Chapter of AAUW. Dr. Robert '~· Duncan, English, Alton, gives a sermon this corning Sunday morning in the Unitarian Church on Third Street. Topic: "Religion of Robert Frost". Duncan, who cam to SIU from the University of Wichita, has been interested in Frost for ten years. He has just had an article published on "Byron and the London Literary Gazette" in the fall issue of the Boston University Studies in English. Duncan also writes for money. His short story "I Flew through Hell for Love" which originally appeared in the magazine Air Facts in June is being republished in Air Force Magazine. He lives with his wife and three husky sons at 2918 College, Alton, Illinois. : ..... -------·· ',·------ ----- Newsletter this week secured a copy of the talk on Supermart Culture that Professor William Going presented before the St:. Clair County Institute of Junior and Senior High School Teachers at Mascoutah two weeks ago. (Going, who was invited to give the talk on the recommendation of our executive dean, was later pressured for a cut of the profits when the dean found that be was being paid hard cash for the talk. Newsletter in the interest of possible faculty action in the matter is bringing the whole-sordid affair to light -- ed.) , Going· pointed out in his address to the institute that fashions in culture, like fashions in clothes, shift and change, and he cited the comic strips as perhaps one of the most popular forms of mass communication today. Are they cultural? Going says one thing is certain: they follow some of the same patt~rns as do works that we usually call cultural. �... - 3 - For example, Dagwood's appeal is the attraction of daily doings, and in Dick Tracy the exotic is everywhere and there is romance. Then there is Lil' Abner, where Al Capp satirizes Liberace as Loverboynik, General MacArthur as General Bullmoose, etc. These three strips are excellent prototypes of realism, romanticism, and satire -- three of the standard patterns of so-called literary culture. (Using these strips as springboards and items for analyses in the teaching of literature and social studies is often more profitable than fighting them.) Not only the comics but jazz, bebop, and rock-and-roll have the mass appeal of popular art. Are they cultural? Again, certain of the basic elements of classic music are present in each of these. Jazz relies monotonously on the principle of syncopation, and rock-and-roll centers on the fortissimo downbeat with iteration ad nausium. "Is a canvas sprinkled with white sand, containing one black dot, and labeled ''Infinity" a real work of art?" asks Going . "One thing is certain. Such a picture makes the beholder think, and its negativeness challenges his positive world." In the last centry Matthew Arnold in Culture and Anarchy spoke of the individual perfection toward which one should aim. His successor, T. S. Eliot in Notes toward the Definition of Culture concludes that no perfection in any one of the several activities of culture, to the exclusion of others, can confer culture on anybody. The wholly cultured individual is a phantasm; and we are driven in the end to find culture in the pattern of a society as a whole, Culture then may be described as that which broadens the choices of life. Accord~ng to Eliot, " Culture is what justifies other peoples and other generations in saying, when they contemplate the remains and the influence of an extinct civilization, that it was worthwhile for that civilization to have existed." On the relation between culture and education Going says: "In our rush to educate everybody in everything, we are lowering our standards, and more and more abandoning the study of those subjects by which the essentials of our culture -of that part of it which is transmissible by education -- are transmitted." He says that the proliferation of courses must be weighed carefully, and that the teacher must exercise all of his ingenuity to teach in depth and breadth. Like the size and variety of our supermarkets, the skills and knowledge of the present-day world increase and multiply at an alarming rate. Going concludes that fn the final analysis he is a cultured human being who is highly skilled in some one art or science, trade or profession; and who is aware of the values of other arts and trades. We can no longer bow the knee to an art appreciation course as the place where culture is handed out, we can no longer worship the college degree as a guarantee of culture. The cultured individual is dependent upon the culture of a group or class and the culture of that group or class is dependent upon the culture of the whole society to which it belongs. The great artist does not emerge in a cultural vacuum. This fact is at once the hope and the elusive challenge of all public education. Going quoted from the Postheumous Fables of the late William March, whose last novel The Bad Seed was originally produced by Hollywood. Professor Going is in the process of editing "Ninety-Nine Fables by Hilliam March" for a university press. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Faculty News Bulletin October 1957, Vol. 1, No. 3 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource October 1957