Archive for July, 2016

Nyet.

A few days ago we wrote about lies and totalitarianism. Then I revisited Nobel writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn‘s essay on the subject in The Washington Post. It was dated February 12, 1974, the day he was arrested and deported. It was published nearly a week later on February 18. The article a useful reminder that sometimes the Soviet society had a lot in common with our own – perhaps because both are predicated on human nature, which is pretty much the same anywhere.

“At one time we dared not even to whisper. Now we write and read samizdat, and sometimes when we gather in the smoking room at the Science Institute we complain frankly to one another: What kind of tricks are they playing on us, and where are they dragging us? Gratuitous boasting of cosmic achievements while there is poverty and destruction at home. Propping up remote, uncivilized regimes. Fanning up civil war. And we recklessly fostered Mao Tse-tung at our expense – and it will be we who are sent to war against him, and will have to go. Is there any way out? And they put on trial anybody they want, and they put sane people in asylums – always they, and we are powerless.”

Well, we’ve fanned wars, too. And propped up remote regimes. And we’ve sponsored monsters and then turned against them. This election year has convinced me that lies are a bi-partisan, non-partisan, international issue, throughout all ages.

Solzhenitsyn declared war – the only war within his power: the personal non-participation in lies. “This opens a breach in the imaginary encirclement caused by our inaction. It is the easiest thing to do for us, but the most devastating for the lies,” he wrote. “Because when people renounce lies it simply cuts short their existence. Like an infection, they can exist only in a living organism.”

Solzhenitsyn in Cologne, 1974

It will be dangerous. “For young people who want to live with truth, this will, in the beginning, complicate their young lives very much, because the required recitations are stuffed with lies, and it is necessary to make a choice. But there are no loopholes for anybody who wants to be honest: On any given day any one of us will be confronted with at least one of the above-mentioned choices [actually, below-mentioned here – ED] even in the most secure of the technical sciences.”

“Either truth or falsehood: Toward spiritual independence, or toward spiritual servitude.”

You say it is still not easy? It is easier than self-immolation or a hunger strike, he writes. “And he who is not sufficiently courageous even to defend his soul – don’t let him be proud of his ‘progressive’ views, and don’t let him boast that he is an academician or a people’s artist, a merited figure, or a general – let him say to himself: I am in the herd, and a coward. It’s all the same to me as long as I’m fed and warm.”

His 9-point pledge, that he invites everyone to join, wherein you:

• Will not henceforth write, sign, or print in any way a single phrase which in his opinion distorts the truth.
• Will utter such a phrase neither in private conversation nor in the presence of many people, neither on his own behalf nor at the prompting of someone else, neither in the role of agitator, teacher, educator, nor in a theatrical role.
• Will not depict, foster or broadcast a single idea which he can see is false or a distortion of the truth, whether it be in painting, sculpture, photography, technical science or music.
• Will not cite out of context, either orally or written, a single quotation so as to please someone, to feather his own nest, to achieve success in his work, if he does not share completely the idea which is quoted, or if it does not accurately reflect the matter at issue.
• Will not allow himself to be compelled to attend demonstrations or meetings if they are contrary to his desire or will, will neither take into hand nor raise into the air a poster or slogan which he does not completely accept.
• Will not raise his hand to vote for a proposal with which he does not sincerely sympathize, will vote neither openly nor secretly for a person whom he considers unworthy or of doubtful abilities.
• Will not allow himself to be dragged to a meeting where there can be expected a forced or distorted discussion of a question.
• Will immediately walk out of a meeting, session, lecture, performance or film showing if he hears a speaker tell lies, or purvey ideological nonsense or shameless propaganda.
• Will not subscribe to or buy a newspaper or magazine in which information is distorted and primary facts are concealed.

Not a dictator, but a scholar. (Photo: Rachel Moltz)

When Mao Zedong died on September 9, 1976, hundreds of thousands of people poured into the streets, weeping over the dictator who is responsible for at least 50 million deaths.

According to Frank Dikötter of the University of Hong Kong, the cult of personality turns everyone into liars. “These are not true tears,” he told an audience at the Hoover Institution last week. “It’s not really clear who is really crying. Everyone knows there is lying. Not everyone knows who is lying.”

Dikötter is the author of Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, which won the 2011 Samuel Johnson Prize, Britain’s most prestigious book award for non-fiction. He spoke at Hoover about “The Making of the Cult of Personality in the Twentieth Century.” He is working on a “global history of the cult of personality,” focusing on prominent dictators of the 20th century.

“Millions were led to the death as they cheered their master,” said Dikötter of Mao. “The cult of personality obliged everyone to become a sycophant, destroying their dignity in the process.”

The Dutch author quoted Dostoevsky‘s Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov, saying the ruler has two tools at his disposal: on one hand magic and mystery, on the other, the sword. Yet “the cult of personality” is born of the age of democracy. “Dictators depend on popular support,” he said. A totalitarian ruler needs at least the illusion of a mandate at the ballot box.

Romania’s man about town.

“The rise and fall of dictatorships is often determined by the cult of personality,” Dikötter said. The creation of the cult is far from a solo effort; a dictator needs plenty of support. “There is, at least, a ministry of propaganda, an army of photographers, bureaucracy, whole sections of industry, the army.” Mao, for example, had a whole industry to produce cult objects. Under Pol Pot, who caused the death of millions, a whole prison was dedicated to printing images of the leader and developing cult objects. Dikötter said the regime failed precisely because Pol Pot was unable to establish himself as a cult personality.

 Dikötter noted that there were some excellent studies on the cult of personality, although in many cases scholarly efforts remain scattered. In the case of Germany, for instance, the first exhibition of cult objects about Hitler took place only five years ago. “It seems almost obscene to look at the shiny surfaces the state produces rather than at the horror it hides,” he said.

The shiny surfaces also have a practical purpose: “In a dictatorship, you develop the image and the cult so that you will not have to turn to force. That’s the point.”

Forever young.

The ministry of propaganda, photographers and others have plenty of work to do. For example, Romania’s Nicolae Ceaușescu traveled the country so much that he seemed to be everywhere at once. He made a record 147 whistle-stop tours of the entire country between 1965 and 1973. Some regimes rubbed out the images of fallen aides and sidekicks from photos (Milan Kundera famously describes how Vladimír Clementis was erased in a 1948 photo when he fell from favor).  Ceaușescu went one step further: he had himself inserted himself into photos of meetings he never attended, sometimes meetings that occurred at the same time miles away from each other, suggesting a sort of bilocation. After his fall, the cult images came down very rapidly.

Adolf Hitler, author of the Holocaust, buffed his image throughout the 1930s. Popular images portrayed him as a vegetarian, non-drinking, non-smoking, hard-working, modest man – and not just in Germany. “You can read it in the New York Times,” said Dikötter – dictators make a point of courting the foreign press and journalists, and the favor is apparently returned. The Hitler Nobody Knows (1933) was almost a companion volume to Mein Kampf. Hitler is always seen without his glasses.

Propaganda presented Benito Mussolini as “good family man, a far-seeing statesman, a stern dictator,” said Dikötter. The voice of the leader is an important tool in the legend, and Mussolini used it for maximum effect in his balcony speeches – ““a metallic voice with sentences delivered like the blows of a hammer.” While many of Italy’s poor did not have ready access to the radio, loudspeakers suddenly appeared in the public square, to make sure they got the message.

By contrast, genocidaire Joseph Stalin hardly speaks at all, but that’s just as important. He appears before millions of the Red Guards and says nothing. “By not speaking he becomes the center of gravity,” said Dikötter.

Ceaușescu, like the other dictators Dikötter studied, drew his inspiration from others. In his travels, “he was smitten by what he sees in China and Korea – he takes it quite seriously,” said Dikötter. “Dictators don’t do this on their own.”

They draw their lessons not only from other lands, but other histories. They must present themselves in an imaginative line of succession rather than as illegitimate upstarts who grabbed power. Thus, Stalin presides over the canonizing of Lenin. The Ethiopian genocidaire Mengistu Haile Mariam, responsible for killing 500,000 to 2,000,000 people, adopted the symbols and trappings of the Emperor Haile Selassie, whom he had killed and buried beneath the palace, before turning to Marxism-Leninism. Mussolini presented himself as the reincarnation of Caesar Augustus.

Kim Il-sung presented himself as the tradition of thousands of years embodied in his very own person. “It’s difficult to pull it off, unless you have a hermetically sealed state, like North Korea,” said Dikötter.

“Papa Doc” Duvalier in Haiti, who killed 30,000 to 60,000 of his countrymen, was the only one who reached into another world for his authority. He used voodoo as a prop to develop his cult of personality, and he took it very seriously. He came across to his minions as a gentle person in dark glasses, half-mumbling as if he were casting spells.

Yes, someone asked, but what happens when the dictator becomes sleek and very fat. Surely the starving and impoverished workers are no longer bedazzled by the ugly frog that waddles before them?

“Once the image develops, it tends to stay fixed,”said Dikötter. “It stays fixed and ever youthful, even though Mao in his last years looked pretty ghastly,” with black teeth, Lou Gehrig’s disease and, yes, very overweight.

The funeral of Mao: faking it.

The good doctor with the Dalai Lama. (Photo: Firdaus Dhabhar)

Dr. James Doty is one of the more fascinating people I know – I’ve written about him here and here. He is the founder and director of Stanford’s Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE, pronounced “see care”), which is at the forefront of a growing movement to bring the tools of psychology and neuroscience to the study of empathy, compassion and altruism. His friend, the Dalai Lama, is one of its benefactors.

I visited him last week at his office to discuss his brand new book Into the Magic Shop: A Neurosurgeon’s Quest to Discover the Mysteries of the Brain and the Secrets of the Heart, which has quickly climbed the New York Times bestseller list. It’s terrific tale – and he assures me it’s all true. The book begins with his impoverished childhood on the edge of the Mojave Desert, the son of an alcoholic father and clinically depressed and suicidal mother. He describes his struggles to go through medical school, eventually becoming a distinguished neurosurgeon. But most of all, it tells of the important lessons he learned in a magic shop in a rundown strip mall when he was twelve years old.

A video clip of my 2010 interview with him is below. And here’s an excerpt from the introduction:

There’s a certain sound the scalp makes when it’s being ripped of of a skull – like a large piece of Velcro tearing away from it’s source. The sound is loud and angry and just a little bit sad. In medical school they don’t have a class that teaches you the sounds and smells of brain surgery. They should. The drone of the heavy drill as it bores through the skull. The bone saw that fills the operating room with the smell of summer sawdust as it carves a line connecting the burr holes made from the drill. The reluctant popping sound the skull makes as it is lifted away from the dura, the thick sac that covers the brain and serves as its last line of defense against the outside world. The scissors slowly slicing through the dura. When the brain is exposed you can see it move in rhythm with every heartbeat, and sometimes it seems that you can year it moan in protest at its own nakedness and vulnerability – its secrets exposed for all to see under the harsh lights of the operating room.

The boy looks small in the hospital gown and is almost swallowed up by the bed as he’s waiting to enter surgery.

“My nana prayed for me. And she prayed for you too.”

I hear the boy’s mother inhale and exhale loudly at this information, and I know she’s trying to be brave for her son. For herself. Maybe even for me. I run my hand through his hair. It is brown and long and fine – still more baby than boy. He tells me he just had a birthday.

“Do you want me to explain again what’s going to happen today, Champ, or are you ready?” He likes it when I call him Champ or Buddy.

“I’m going to sleep. You’re going to take the Ugly Thing out of my head so it doesn’t hurt anymore. Then I see my mommy and nana.”

The “Ugly Thing” is a medulloblastoma, the most common malignant brain tumor in children, and is located in the posterior fossa (the base of the skull). Medulloblastoma isn’t an easy word for an adult to pronounce, much less a four-year-old, no matter how precocious. Pediatric brain tumors really are ugly things, so I’m OK with the term. Medulloblastomas are misshapen and often grotesque invaders in the exquisite symmetry of the brain. They begin between the two lobes of the cerebellum and grow, ultimately compressing not only the cerebellum but also the brainstem, until finally blocking the pathways that allow the fluid in the brain to circulate. The brain is one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen, and to explore its mysteries and find ways to heal it is a privilege I have never taken for granted. …

I know both Mom and Grandma are scared. I hold each of their hands in turn, trying to reassure them and offer comfort. It’s never easy. A little boy’s morning headaches have become every parent’s worst nightmare. Mom trusts me. Grandma trusts God. I trust my team.

Together we will all try to save this boy’s life.

***

Benefactor. (Photo: L.A. Cicero)

The surgeon assisting me is a senior resident in training and new to the team, but he is just as focused on the blood vessels, and brain tissue, and minutiae of removing this tumor as I am. We can’t think about our plans for the next day, or hospital politics, or our children, or our relationship trouble at home. It’s a form of hypervigilance, a single-pointed concentration almost like meditation. We train the mind and the mind trains the body. There’s an amazing rhythm and flow when you have a good team – everyone is in sync. Our minds and bodies work together as one coordinated intelligence.

I am removing the last piece of the tumor, which is attached to one of the major draining veins deep in the brain. The posterior fossa venous system is incredibly complex, and my assistant is suctioning fluids as I carefully resect the final remnant of the tumor. He lets his attention wander for a second, and in that second his suction tears the vein, and for the briefest moment everything stops.

Then all hell breaks loose.

The blood from the ripped vein fills the resection cavity, and blood begins to pour out of the wound of this beautiful little boy’s head. The anesthesiologist starts yelling that the child’s blood pressure is rapidly dropping and he can’t keep up with the blood loss. I need to clamp the vein and stop the bleeding, but it has retracted into a pool of blood, and I can’t see it. My suction alone can’t control the bleeding and my assistant’s hand is shaking too much to be of any help.

“He’s in full arrest!” the anesthesiologist screams. He has to scramble under the table because this little boy’s head is locked in a head frame, prone, with the back of his head opened up. The anesthesiologist starts compressing the boy’s chest while holding his other hand on his back, trying desperately to get his heart to start pumping. Fluids are being poured into the large IV lines. The heart’s first and most important job is to pump blood, and this magical pump that makes everything in the body possible has stopped. This four-year-old boy is bleeding to death on the table in front of me. As the anesthesiologist pumps on his chest, the wound continues to fill with blood. We have to stop the bleeding or he will die. The brain consumes 15 percent of the outflow of the hear and can survive only minutes after the heart stops. It needs blood and, more important, the oxygen that is in the blood. We are running out of time before the brain dies – they need each other – the brain and the heart.

(What happens? Read the rest of the story below…)

(more…)

“You’ve got to sell your heart”: the author at 25.

It is a strange thing to write for a living. I’ve never really done anything else, since I was a teenager. And because I do it for a living, I write whether I feel like it or not. It has its good days and it has its bad. The last few weeks have been particularly grinding. So I found the blunt advice of F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of The Great Gatsby, to two young women writers of his acquaintance oddly bracing. “It is an awfully lonesome business,” he writes. And also, “Nothing any good isn’t hard.”

Letter #1 is to his to the daughter of a family friend, Frances Turnbull, a Radcliffe sophomore, who had sent the author a short story she had written. (You can read about the Turnbull home where famous writers visited, in an interview with her years later, here.) Letter #2 is to his own 15-year-old daughter, Frances Scott Fitzgerald. (She went on to write for The Washington Post and The New Yorker.)

The letters are from F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters. (And thanks to Maria Popova at Brain Pickings for finding them three-and-a-half  years ago.)

LETTER #1

November 9, 1938

Dear Frances:

I’ve read the story carefully and, Frances, I’m afraid the price for doing professional work is a good deal higher than you are prepared to pay at present. You’ve got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions, not the little minor things that only touch you lightly, the little experiences that you might tell at dinner. This is especially true when you begin to write, when you have not yet developed the tricks of interesting people on paper, when you have none of the technique which it takes time to learn. When, in short, you have only your emotions to sell.

This is the experience of all writers. It was necessary for Dickens to put into Oliver Twist the child’s passionate resentment at being abused and starved that had haunted his whole childhood. Ernest Hemingway’s first stories ‘In Our Time’ went right down to the bottom of all that he had ever felt and known. In ‘This Side of Paradise’ I wrote about a love affair that was still bleeding as fresh as the skin wound on a haemophile.

The amateur, seeing how the professional having learned all that he’ll ever learn about writing can take a trivial thing such as the most superficial reactions of three uncharacterized girls and make it witty and charming—the amateur thinks he or she can do the same. But the amateur can only realize his ability to transfer his emotions to another person by some such desperate and radical expedient as tearing your first tragic love story out of your heart and putting it on pages for people to see.

That, anyhow, is the price of admission. Whether you are prepared to pay it or, whether it coincides or conflicts with your attitude on what is ‘nice’ is something for you to decide. But literature, even light literature, will accept nothing less from the neophyte. It is one of those professions that wants the ‘works.’ You wouldn’t be interested in a soldier who was only a little brave.

In the light of this, it doesn’t seem worth while to analyze why this story isn’t saleable but I am too fond of you to kid you along about it, as one tends to do at my age. If you ever decide to tell your stories, no one would be more interested than,

Your old friend,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

P.S. I might say that the writing is smooth and agreeable and some of the pages very apt and charming. You have talent—which is the equivalent of a soldier having the right physical qualifications for entering West Point.

LETTER #2

Grove Park Inn
Asheville, N.C.
October 20, 1936

Dearest Scottina:

… Don’t be a bit discouraged about your story not being tops. At the same time, I am not going to encourage you about it, because, after all, if you want to get into the big time, you have to have your own fences to jump and learn from experience. Nobody ever became a writer just by wanting to be one. If you have anything to say, anything you feel nobody has ever said before, you have got to feel it so desperately that you will find some way to say it that nobody has ever found before, so that the thing you have to say and the way of saying it blend as one matter—as indissolubly as if they were conceived together.

Let me preach again for one moment: I mean that what you have felt and thought will by itself invent a new style so that when people talk about style they are always a little astonished at the newness of it, because they think that is only style that they are talking about, when what they are talking about is the attempt to express a new idea with such force that it will have the originality of the thought. It is an awfully lonesome business, and as you know, I never wanted you to go into it, but if you are going into it at all I want you to go into it knowing the sort of things that took me years to learn. …

Nothing any good isn’t hard, and you know you have never been brought up soft, or are you quitting on me suddenly? Darling, you know I love you, and I expect you to live up absolutely to what I laid out for you in the beginning.

Scott

Julia Fiedorczuk, the young Warsaw poet, has written some beautiful verse – well, we wrote about that here, after a magical April night in Berkeley that ended at Chez Panisse. Most of the poems that were read that evening came from a new anthology Scattering the Dark. But one, inspired by Czesław Miłosz, was not. I was not able to use print it at the time, since it was under consideration for publication by the Poetry Foundation, and Julia kindly gave us Psalm 2 instead. We’re pleased to say that Julia’s “Psalm 31,” was not selected (Psalm V was, and is published online here). So here is Psalm 31, all these months later, below. “The whole cycle rhythmically and poetically alludes to Miłosz’s translation of the Hebrew Psalms,” the poet said. We think so, too. Tell us which of the three psalms you like the best (all translated by Bill Johnston). I still think this one has the most Miłoszian bent. She sent it with her love from beautiful Warsaw:

Psalm XXXI

for R. K.

a chickadee had perched on the window-sill like a message
generated by the mist, October
was turning into November in the birches oaks alders,
in the frost-resistant flowers, in the cemeteries
where our fathers wrote no memoirs,
where they would not recognise our children, our
poems, ourselves. The television was showing Poland
that had perished, and then had not perished, and then
again had perished, and then not, and then the sun
flung up a mesh of branches, all at once
the chickadee was absorbed by sky before I could say
remember, remember me.

The multi-faceted Yezzi at Hopkins…

Poet, librettist, and playwright David Yezzi, a former Stegner Fellow at Stanford, writes about the late great Geoffrey Hill in the New Criterion, where he is poetry editor: “I remember him scolding an audience once for needing poems to be ‘What’s the word?’ he growled. ‘Accessible?’ He drew out the vowels like they were poison on his tongue. So much for any hope of wide popularity.”

More from Yezzi about the English poet who died earlier this month:

“He was not a popular poet, to that the extent that poets can be popular, and in a sense he was not of his time. If this rankled him at all, it did not affect the way that he wrote. One gets the sense in reading Hill that he did not measure his poems by any contemporary lights but by his eminent precursors and sometime models such as Hopkins, Milton, and, more recently, the modernism of Tate and Eliot. His poems are moral without being religious in any conventional sense, skeptical of power and the duplicity of language, and tonally fluent in ways that recall both the Jeremiad and the Psalm.

Not popular, and he didn’t care about it.

“He was that rarest of things: a musician of genius, able to strike in language a new “pitch” (his prized word adapted from Hopkins). Perhaps that is why he was so little known in the end; his copious and original gift was for something that few readers of poetry and even many poets truly understand, let alone value—a language able to convey precise shades of emotion through sound as well as sense. It is telling of how dependent poetry has become on subject matter to the exclusion of much else these days. It’s not that Hill has no subjects; quite the contrary. His books range over huge spans of history, literature, and intellectual life. He is also one of the greatest pastoral poets of the English landscape.”

Read the whole thing here, with links to poems, reviews by William Logan, and an additional essay by Yezzi.

Running a blog ain’t easy. It’s time-consuming, it exposes you to nasty comments, and it pays (for most of us) diddly squat. So it’s nice when a blog gets kudos and sometimes, even a little cash. My friend Abbas Raza started 3QuarksDaily a dozen years ago … well, actually, our friendship began on 3QD, though I have yet to visit him in his idyllic village in the Italian Alps, where I will be able to sample some of his exquisite North Indian and Pakistani cooking.

Abbas Raza & poet Robert Pinsky – wife Margit Oberrauch looks on.

That will be a future pleasure. The past pleasure is that Humble Moi and the Book Haven have been regularly featured on 3QD, just as we’ve regularly featured 3QD gleanings on our pages. We’ve always been pleased as punch about it, but we must say that it’s been taken to a new level with Thomas Manuel‘s article, “Why the Web Needs the Little Miracle of 3QuarksDaily,” in The Wire today:

The need for filters, aggregators and curators to navigate the web isn’t new. Arts and Letters Daily, the inspiration for 3QD, was founded by the late Denis Dutton way back in 1998. It in turn was inspired by the news aggregator, Drudge Report, which started in 1995. But each of these had their own niche (literary humanities and conservative politics respectively) while Raza envisioned something more all-embracing – which ironically turned out to be a niche of its own. His plan was to “collect only serious articles of intellectual interest from all over the web but never include merely amusing pieces, clickbait, or even the news of the day… to find and post deeper analysis… and explore the world of ideas… [to] cover all intellectual fields that might be of interest to a well-educated academic all-rounder without being afraid of difficult material… [and to] have an inclusive attitude about what is interesting and important and an international outlook, avoiding America-centrism in particular.”

Morgan Meis is proud, too.

In practice, this elaborate vision looks deceptively simple. According to Morgan Meis, one of the editors of 3QD, all you had to do was “get a few reasonably smart people together, have them create links to the sorts of things they would want to read across the web, on any given day. Voila! You’ve got an interesting website. Then, don’t fuck that simple formula up. Don’t get cute. Stay the course.”

As Raza figured, an editorial team of ‘reasonably smart people’, by dint of their own diverse interests, would automatically bestow the site with a broader perspective. Currently this team, apart from Raza and Meis, consists of Raza’s old friend, Robin Varghese, his two sisters, Azra and Sughra Raza, poetry editor, Jim Culleny and assistant editor, Zujaja Tauqeer.

Varghese and Raza met at Columbia University in 1995 while they were both graduate students. Varghese, who posts much of the political content on 3QD, was pursuing a doctorate in political science while Raza had taken up philosophy after studying engineering as an undergraduate. Varghese still lives in New York and works in the development space while Raza currently lives with his wife in Brixen, a small town in the Italian Alps, where his major occupation, apart from running the website, is cooking elaborate North Indian and Pakistani style meals.

The article has a nice overview of the current predicament of the cyberspace echo chamber, and how 3QD really is different:

Today, information discovery comes in all shapes and sizes – from the New Yorker Minute that does a number on theNew Yorker, to Amazon’s book recommendation behemoth. There isn’t a doubt that the latter is a remarkable feat of software engineering, as are the algorithms employed by Netflix, Spotify, Facebook and Google. Netizens depend on these wonders – relying on them to suck in chaos and spit out order.

Hobbies.

Yet these same sites are also examples of total moral capitulation. Underlying the logic of many algorithms is the idea that to find what people want, we need only look for what similar people have wanted. Apart from engendering near total surveillance, a mechanism built around the urgency of giving people what they want ignores the importance (or even the existence) of a responsibility to give people what they might need. This isn’t a surprising stance for profit-driven corporations to take. However, as citizens who value democratic access to resources and knowledge, it’s dangerous to allow ourselves to become complacent with gatekeepers who don’t acknowledge their own roles as stewards or see their power as weighted by responsibility to the community. It’s the logic of giving people what they want that’s made virality the metric for deciding what makes the news and triggered the current race for the bottom that has marked the new culture wars.

In stark contrast stands the purpose of 3QD as outlined by Raza in a radio interview with the National Endowment for the Arts. Laying out the three classical realms of knowledge – the realm of beauty, the realm of morality, the realm of truth, he stressed that all three were “immensely important to all human beings”. It’s a safe assumption that he didn’t learn this through a market survey.

What’s their secret? According to Morgan Meis, another 3QD friend: “It is the people and the relationships,” he said. “That’s the core of it. It is, to be terribly corny, love that has always held the thing together.”

Read the whole thing here. And go to 3QuarksDaily here.

Having been nominated for a prestigious prize, and then lost it, poet Kim Addonizio learned that one judge had characterized her as “Charles Bukowski in a sundress.” Hence the title of her newest collection of essays.

Meredith Maran reviews the volume in the Chicago Tribune‘s “‘Bukowski in a Sundress’ by Kim Addonizi: Don’t call it oversharing.” (We hope the Trib will correct the misspelling of her name by the time you read this blogpost.)

If this sample is at all representative, I want the whole book:

“Necrophilia is a term that is commonly misunderstood. You probably think it means being so attracted to dead people that you skip the dating part and go straight to their place with a little wine …. What necrophilia is, really, is this: sexual obsession for men who are incapable of having a real relationship because they have no heart in their chest cavity. What they have is an empty socket that will electrocute you if you try to get close and touch it or maybe just point a flashlight that way to see what’s wrong.”

From a chapter called “How I Write”: “I write and it’s good and I am queen of the kingdom and every flower is for me. I write and it’s not good enough; I go and read someone who is very, very good and feel inspired, and go back and write again.” Well, it’s a good thing it doesn’t make her feel envious and frustrated and wanting to break something and move to a remote island and whittle sticks for the rest of her life, which is how Humble Moi tends to feel in the same circumstances.

Maran concludes:

The best memoirs have a paradoxical effect on their readers. On the one hand, they make us attach to their authors, which in turn makes us wish they hadn’t suffered the indignities that spawned the tale. On the other, we’re grateful for the pearl that came from the irritation, the rich gift of the book. If there is any justice at all in the literary world (a premise Addonizio might dispute), “Bukowski in a Sundress” will have that effect on the wide-ranging audience its brave, brilliant author deserves.

Read the whole thing here.

Postscript on 7/10: It occurred to me that some of you may not know who Bukowski is, in the first place. Charles Bukowski (1920-1994) is a Los Angeles poet who has been called “the laureate of American lowlife.” You get the picture – booze, women, and hard livin’. Photo at left. He smoked, too.

The poet…

“Yves Bonnefoy, who was generally regarded as France’s pre-eminent poet of the postwar era, as well as its leading translator of Shakespeare and a wide-ranging art critic in the spirit of Baudelaire, died on Friday in Paris. He was 93.” So begins the New York Times obituary. You can read the rest of it here. He published many major collections of verse, several books of tales, many studies of literature and art, and an extensive dictionary of mythology.

I think I prefer this comment from friend and poet Alfred Corn: “I had one meeting with him in New York, on the occasion of the U.S. publication of his monograph on Giacometti, in preparation for a review I did of it. A cool, self-possessed, silvery manner, his French speech elevated and polite. Any chummy effort at ingratiation was clearly not his intention, as it would have struck him as mere mauvaise foi. His surname in itself precluded that.”

In a statement, French President François Hollande called Bonnefoy “one of the greatest poets of the 20th century” and praised him for “elevating our language to its supreme degree of precision and beauty.”

He was a close friend of several of my friends. One of them, Canadian poet and translator Beverley Bie Brahic, was his translator as well, of his collection, The Present Hour.  She’s also a poet in her own right: her poetry collection, White Sheets, was a finalist for the Forward Prize and a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Her other translations include Guillaume Apollinaire:The Little Auto, winner of the Scott Moncrieff Prize, and Francis Ponge: Unfinished Ode to Mud, a finalist for the Popescu Prize for Poetry in Translation.

The Book Haven asked her to send us a few personal reflections on the great French poet. Here’s what she wrote:

 I began translating Yves Bonnefoy, for my own enrichment, about ten years ago and, if I recall correctly, with what is still my favorite book, Début et fin de la neige. I was drawn by the haiku-like sequence of New England poems, such as this one:

The Apples 

And what to think
Of these yellow apples?
Yesterday, they astonished us, waiting so, naked
After the leaves fell.

Today they charm,
Their shoulders so
Modestly stitched
With a hem of snow.

…and his translator. (Photo: Leslie Roth)

Translating these poems from Snow (the collection is available in Emily Grosholz’s fine translation, Beginning and End of the Snow) with their simple but resonant images gave me intense pleasure and led me to other books, and eventually to Bonnefoy’s study on a hillside in Montmartre: I came with translations and a sheaf of questions, and left with more translations, enthusiastically published by Naveen Kishore and his marvelous international enterprise, Seagull Books.

However many times I made the journey to Montmartre I usually found Bonnefoy more interested in talking—about California, where he had taught, Provence, whose landscapes figure prominently in many of his poems, or Italy and its paintings—than in puzzling over the fine points of translation of books that were by then behind him. His confidence was empowering. The author of many essays on translation, he understood that something must always be sacrificed in a poem’s move from one language to another, and he supported the translator’s freedom to adapt the source text, though he could be a stickler for details. One kind of frog was not another kind of frog! He was less interested, it seemed to me—perhaps because the problem had arisen too often—in the translation of philosophical terms such as “evidence” (tricky) than in pinning down the precise kind of rock that figured in a poem set in Provence.

Bonnefoy was a philosophical poet, but one who could catch the present moment with all its sensuousness in a sonnet as limpid as this one from The Present Hour (Seagull Books, 2013):

Low Branches 

Instant that wants to endure, but how
Wrest eternity from the branches
Protecting the table where light
And shade play on my white page of this morning?

Two trees, and around them the grass,
Then the house, then time, then tomorrow
Opening to oblivion, that already dissipates
Yesterday’s fruit fallen close to the table.

Over there is far. Though mostly
Here and now are what’s out of reach;
Easier to go into the future

Taking, for later, some pieces
Of this ripe fruit, by whose grace
Blue and green merge in the night of the grass.

Favorite quote from The Paris Review, 1994: “We are deprived through words of an authentic intimacy with what we are, or with what the Other is. We need poetry, not to regain this intimacy, which is impossible, but to remember that we miss it and to prove to ourselves the value of those moments when we are able to encounter other people, or trees, or anything, beyond words, in silence.”