> My local Iranian friends get together every Tuesday, read Persian
>
>poetry, talk politics, and eat. Only one of them is an academic (my
>Persian teacher, who is writing a dissertation on Persian love stories
>and erotic poetry), and the rest work for the Ohio EPA, the state
>government, etc. It would be good to have culture like that.
>
When I worked at Tandem (1986), I would meet with the software engineers every week for lunch and read through a Shakespeare play. It would take about four weeks to get through a play. This was not my idea, but theirs. I was recruited cause someone found out that I was writing a dissert. and specialized in the English Renaissance. It was wonderful.
Two weeks ago, we were having a corporate sponsored outing and the grunts, given a choice between the San Jose Art Museum and several paint-ball, sports options, chose to go to the Art Museum (almost unanimously.) What's funny is that everyone voted for it thinking they'd be the only ones to do so.
So, you'd actually be surprised. Book clubs are fairly common, etc. The interest is there; the time and energy is often not.
Basically, the commercial culture has become so barren and repetitious, people are starved for something else.
Joanna