Welcome!

Welcome to the Tuesday Dinner Club. This is (going to be) a group blog about cultural experiences that we want to share with each other — good and bad. The idea is to establish a kind of salon amongst friends. Wikipedia's definition of a salon is “a gathering of stimulating people of quality under the roof of an inspiring hostess or host, partly to amuse one another and partly to refine their taste and increase their knowledge through conversation and readings …”

Melanie and I often remark to one another that we have wonderful friends, people with terrific character, intriguing ideas, and interesting tastes. When we're in their company, we love the invigorating conversation, but now that we live relatively far away from most of our friends, we rarely have the chance to share their company and all of the aforementioned pleasures that come with it. We miss it! Certainly our friends constitute a collection of stimulating people of quality; I don't know that we are necessarily the most inspiring hosts, but we'd love to have a regular gathering with you all.

Hence this blog. We figure that by sharing what we're up to intellectually, artistically, and culturally, we can keep up some semblance of the community and enrichment we had in each other's company. We think it will be fun, and it should be a good place to keep up with one another, hopefully with a bit more depth than Facebook.

What to write? Eugenio Montale wrote that “True culture is what remains in a man when he has forgotten everything he has learned. This, however, presupposes an absorption, a profound penetration of his character.”

I like this quote, but this is not exactly what I mean when I say that this blog is a place to share cultural experiences. Were Montale the blog editor, the content might be rarefied, but I fear the submissions would be meager. It saps the fun from the endeavor to require us to report only those experiences so sublime or atrocious that they seep into the bone. Besides, such deep experience would take a lifetime to collect, and we don't have time for that.

This blog, therefore, has a simpler mission: to be a place to collect reports on books read, art seen, movies watched, music heard, food eaten, wine drunk, etc. And of course, your thoughts on the same! No need for a formal book or music review, just write what you've been reading, for example, whether you like it and maybe a bit about why, perhaps some pointers to reviews (written by people who get paid for this sort of thing) you agree or disagree with, and there you go. Or maybe suggest some interesting articles on the web to take a gander at. That sort of thing.

We'll get the ball rolling, and we hope you'll join in!

About the name: It's taken from the Thursday Dinners of King Stanislaus Augustus Poniatowski of Poland, who held regular salons of artists on Thursdays between 1770 and 1784; on Wednesdays he invited “educators, scientists, and political activists.” (And never the twain should meet? Sounds like C.P. Snow's The Two Cultures, which might be worth discussing, as might Brockman's Third Culture, at some point.) Since we straddle both groups, we decided to hold our dinners on Tuesday! (Both Wednesday and Thursday Dinner Club were already taken as blog names, too.)