Archive for April, 2019

With the Russian poet Regina Derieva in Stockholm, 2007 (Photo: Tomas Oneborg)

The Nobel evaded him, and now he shall never get it, though he was considered among the greatest poets of our era. The Australian poet Les Murray died peacefully yesterday at 80. In 2012, the National Trust of Australia classified Murray as one of Australia’s 100 living treasures, but he was much more than that, from the beginning.

David Mason – a new Australian

David Mason, writing in today’s First Things: “Murray grew up in dire poverty on a farm with no electricity or running water, and always felt exiled from the privileged classes. Largely self-educated, at university he was so poor he ate the scraps he found on plates in the cafeteria. Profoundly asocial, he once called himself ‘a bit of a stranger to the human race.’ He also suffered at times from debilitating depression, and was bullied in school for being bookish and fat. Yet he transformed his sense of personal injury to a poetic voice of rigor and flexibility, humor and empathy, and enormous formal range. He was a generous anthologist and editor as well as an essayist, poet, and verse novelist. ‘It was a very great epiphany for me,’ he once said, ‘to realize that poetry is inexhaustible, that I would never get to the end of its reserves.’”

We had mutual friends, among them Alexander Deriev, whose wife was the late Russian poet Regina Derieva, and the poet Dave Mason himself, who is now an Australian poet by choice rather than birth. He had corresponded with Murray, who published some of his poems (presumably in the Australian Quadrant, where Murray was poetry editor) but they never met face to face.

Here’s another treat: if you want to know something about him, you might go to this soundcloud 1985 PEN recording of Joseph Brodsky, Derek Walcott, and Richard Howard in conversation with Murray. I’m still listening to it…

“The body of work that he’s left is just one of the great glories of Australian writing,”said his agent of three decades, Margaret Connolly. “The thought that there will be no more poems and no more essays and no more thoughts from Les – it’s very sad and a great loss.”

David Mason, writes: “Murray deserves to be ranked among the best devotional poets—from Donne and Herbert to Eliot and Auden—but his work has an earthiness and irreverence of its own, a tragic sense of human life and a Whitmanesque sympathy for the lives of animals. His wordscapes and landscapes were local, Australian, with everything that distinction signifies—including the transported convict’s sense of justice and the nation’s thoroughly multicultural heritage. His art wasn’t bound by pieties, political or otherwise, because he understood the position of poetry—and of language itself—in relation to reality.”

Faced with the theological question “Why does God not spare the innocent?,” Murray replied in a quatrain that is perhaps one of his best known poems, perhaps because of, rather than despite, its economy of words:

The answer to that is not in
the same world as the question
so you would shrink from me
in terror if I could answer it.

Les Murray, Daniel Weissbort and Alexander Deriev having meal after the Ars Interpres Poetry Festival. Stockholm, 2004.

David notes that the poem, called “The Knockdown Question,” is a minor epigram in the Murray oeuvre, “but it partakes of the same theological experience as Eliot’s Four Quartets. Murray was not always so blunt.”

David Malouf told the ABC that Murray was “utterly unorthodox” and described his work as “undoubtedly the best poems anybody has produced in Australia.”

“He knew that he could be difficult — nobody pretends that he wasn’t — but he was always difficult in an interesting way.”

He told the Paris Review:  I’m a dissident author; the deadliest inertia is to conform with your times.”

Alan Harvey directs Stanford U’s press. (Photo: L.A. Cicero)

Prof. Peter Stansky opened his annual “A Company of Authors” event on Saturday with a somber comment: “Those in the Stanford community who are interested in books may be interested to know that the provost of the University has decided, it appears, to terminate significant financial support of the Stanford University Press which will result in the downgrading of the press, making it unworthy of this University. In fact the University should increase its support and pursue a search of an endowment for the Press that would make it, as is the university of which it is a part, a press as strong as those at its peer institutions such as Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.  It is peculiar thinking that the Press, unlike the rest of the University, should be self-supporting.” 

I didn’t realized the story had already appeared the day before in The Chronicle of Higher Education: The article began this way: 

“Stanford has the world’s third-largest university endowment, valued in 2018 at $26.5 billion. Yet it is crying poverty to explain why it can no longer provide yearly $1.7-million subsidies to its acclaimed press. The announced cut, which became public in a Faculty Senate meeting on Thursday, has confounded and outraged faculty members and other press supporters, and is seen by many as a backhanded way of closing the scholarly publisher.

“‘This is a reprehensible moment for one of the richest universities in the world and a diminution of intellectual inquiry. It really boggles the mind,’ said Woody Powell, a Stanford sociology professor, a former member of the press’s editorial board, and a current adviser to it.”

Read the rest here.

Hundreds of signatures have already been collected on a petition (below). Anyone with a Stanford affiliation is urged to sign the online petition here. People not affiliated with Stanford, but support academic presses, sign here.

A University Press is a Vital Part of Stanford’s Identity as a University.

It is Not Meant to Be a Profit-Making Entity.

To President Marc Tessier-Lavigne and Provost Persis Drell:

A letter from members of the Stanford academic community has been circulating in support of Stanford University Press. We are members of the larger academic community who rely on the Press for our own work. We want to add our voices to those of your own scholars at Stanford. The intellectual value of Stanford University Press extends far beyond your campus.

You have announced the elimination of the modest annual subsidy (~$1.7 million) to Stanford University Press, a move that will be severely damaging and likely fatal to the Press. Academic presses are vital to the life of the university and to the world of learning. They are the means by which we communicate the results of our research, and the entire university mission of teaching and scholarship relies upon them. Stanford University Press is the oldest press in the western United States, with a long tradition of publishing major works in many areas of inquiry. It provides a vital public service that Stanford should be proud of.

If we use a purely financial metric to assess the value of academic books, the scholarly mission of the academy will be lost. Presses will publish only profitable books, graduate students will write only profitable dissertations, and tenure will be awarded based on scholarship that is profitable. This will skew research and publication in exactly the wrong direction, away from the mission and purpose of a university, which is pursuit of knowledge and truth, and toward marketability The proposed elimination of Stanford University Press’s subsidy is an attack on academic freedom and free inquiry.

While of course a university needs enough money to continue functioning, no single unit need be “self-sustaining,” much less profitable, when viewed in isolation. We note that, according to Stanford Daily, the “net annual cost [of the athletic department at Stanford] is … around $67 million.” The Stanford Athletic Department thus appears not to be “self-sustaining.” Why have you chosen to single out the University Press for this application of supposed “business models” when other units on campus similarly do not turn a profit? The point of a University Press, or any academic department, is not profit. Nor, obviously, is this the mission of a major (non-profit) research university.

We urge you to rethink your approach to the Press and to recommit Stanford to its long tradition of fostering new knowledge, path-breaking intellectual work, and free inquiry. The Press forms part of the core mission of the great university that Stanford is and that, we hope, it will remain.

Please join us for the “Another Look” book club discussion of Madame de LaFayette’s The Princesse de Clèves. The final event of our seventh season will take place on Wednesday, May 1, at 7:30 p.m. at the Bechtel Conference Center of Encina Hall, 616 Serra Street on the Stanford campus.

Madame de LaFayette’s The Princesse of Clèves was published anonymously in 1678. Although the title character is fictional, most of the others are historical, and the people and their intrigues are rendered with precision and authenticity.

The plot centers on the 16-year-old heiress Mademoiselle de Chartres, who comes to the court of Henry II to make a good match. The beautiful and virtuous girl marries the stolid Prince of Clèves, but then falls in love with the dashing and seductive Duke de Nemours. Considered by some to be the first modern novel, The Princesse of Clèves portrays a milieu of appearances and deceptions, rife with suspicion, passions, temptations, and jealousy. This penetrating, finely wrought novel reveals a society where competition is unending – whether in war, in courtly games and gestures, or amorous adventures.

Nota bene: this is a historical novel, with Madame de Lafayette writing about events that took place in the previous century, when Mary Queen of Scots is still a 16-year-old girl and Queen of France. This seems to confuse a lot of publishers choosing cover illustration, who often get the wrong period. The Oxford World Classics edition edition, for example, features Anne of Cleves (no relation), the fourth wife of Henry VIII and a generation earlier before the action of this novel.

Speaking personally, I’m excited by this little book (it’s one of three novellas in the Oxford edition), not only a forerunner of the modern psychological novel, but an important work by a largely overlooked woman. That’s not why I adore it, however. The story is absolutely gripping.

Panelists include: Another Look Director Robert Pogue Harrison; Chloe Edmondson, a Stanford graduate student studying French literary and cultural history; and a special guest, Yale Prof. Pierre Saint-Amand. The Yale expert in the philosophy of the Enlightenment (photo at left) will be a real treat for Bay Area audiences – the inside word is that he’s great fun! However, he has suggested that readers be patient for the first twenty pages, which introduce many names and titles from the French court. After the characters are in place (and you’ve sorted out the names and titles), the pace accelerates to its inexorable conclusion.

Oh yes, the most important part: The event is free and open to the public! Come early for best seats! (The parking areas closest to Encina Hall are Memorial Drive and Parking Structure 7, located off Campus Drive, underneath the Knight Management Center-Graduate School of Business. For parking information, contact the Parking and Transportation Department’s Visitor Parking page.)

It’s that time of year again. For the 16th consecutive year, an impressive array of Stanford writers will be discussing their recently published books. The Book Haven has often presented at the event – last year for Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard, the year before for the Another Look book club (those events discussed here and here). But this year I will be mercifully silent, except for moderating one of the panels. (See schedule below.)

Here’s how it works: each author will make a brief presentation and be available for conversation and book signing. The even takes place Saturday, April 27, 2019, beginning at 1:00 p.m. at the Stanford Humanities Center, 424 Santa Teresa Street. The event is free and open to the public.  Light refreshments will be served. Come when you can, stay as long as you like. The event has been called the literary equivalent of “speed-dating.”

This program is hosted as always by the genial Peter Stansky, emeritus Field Professor of History. Better yet, spend the entire afternoon in the company of these bright, entertaining, and stimulating writers.

At the event, the Stanford Bookstore will sell books at a 10 percent discount, and authors will sign copies. There will even be a few copies of Evolution of Desire at the event.

Here’s the line-up:

1:00 pm: Welcome (Peter Stansky) 

1:05-1:35 pm: War and Its Study
Peter Stansky, Chair
Joan Ramon Resina, Josep Pla: Seeing the World in the Form of Articles
Elena Danielson, Hoover Tower at Stanford University
Lisa Nguyen, ed., We Shot the War: Overseas Weekly in Vietnam 

1:45-2:15 pm: The World Beyond
Cynthia Haven, Chair
Alexander Key, Language Between God and the Poets Ma’na in the Eleventh Century
Ari Y. Kelman, Shout to the Lord: Making Worship Music in Evangelical America
Fiona J. Griffiths, Nuns’ Priests’ Tales: Men and Salvation in the Medieval Women’s Monastic Life 

2:25-2:55 pm: The Wider World
Larry Horton, Chair
Rob Reich, Just Giving: Why Philanthropy Is Failing Democracy and How It Can Do Better
John L. Hennessy, Leading Matters: Lessons from My Journey
Francis Fukuyama, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment

3:05-3:45 pm: History Here and There
Paul Robinson, Chair
David Como, Radical Parliamentarians and the English Civil War
Jonathan Gienapp, The Second Creation: Fixing the American Constitution in the Founding Era
Ana Raquel Minian, Undocumented Lives: The Untold Story of Mexican Migration
James T. Campbell, Mississippi Witness: The Photographs of Florence Mars 

3:55-4:25 pm: Poetry, Feminism, and Design
Charles Junkerman, Chair
Karen Offen, Debating the Woman Question in the French Third Republic, 1870-1920
Albert Gelpi and Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi, Adrienne Rich: Selected Poems, 1950-2012 and Adrienne Rich’s Poetry and Prose
Ge Wang, Artful Design: Technology in Search of the Sublime 

4:30-5:00 pm: Fictions
Tania Granoff, Chair
Daniel Mason, The Winter Soldier
Jennifer deVere Brody, ed. of James Baldwin’s Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood
Peter Stansky, afterword of Elisabeth de Waal’s Milton Place 

This program is co-sponsored by Stanford Continuing Studies and the Stanford Humanities Center, with special thanks to the Stanford Bookstore. 

Defiantly pro-Easter for today’s parade. (Photo: Zygmunt Malinowski)

It’s been a sobering Easter – beginning with Monday’s castastrophic fire at Notre Dame, and concluding today, with the church and hotel terrorist bombings in Sri Lanka. But New Yorkers were, as always, ebulliently defiant. Photographer Zygmunt Malinowski writes: “It was unusually crowded at the morning service celebrated at St. Patrick’s Cathedral by Cardinal Dolan, with a joyful atmosphere on Fifth Avenue, which was closed to traffic to make way for the Easter parade. Folks dressed up with their own creations: women with colorful headgear with flowers, bunnies, eggs, or other seasonal themes; children in their very best outfits. Men were decked out, too – see above.”

After Monday’s catastrophic fire at Notre Dame, I posted the drawing below on the social media. It’s received more than 500 hearts and 42 retweets on Twitter to date, and pushing 170 “likes” on Facebook, so I thought it might be worth a share here. The image was drawn by a teenage boy in about 1942 – let me dissemble no more, gentle reader, it was my father, the artist and cartoonist Richard Hill, as a 17 or 18 year old young man. It circulated in our family for years as his pen-and-ink drawing of Notre Dame de Paris. In the larger original, you can see the eyes of Quasimodo peering out from one of the darkened archways, and a doorbell at the entrance. Well … my father … He died twenty years ago this month, on April Fool’s Day. I suspect it was the date he would have chosen for himself.

The attribution is wrong, however: the cathedral is not the Notre Dame de Paris, but a lookalike, Notre Dame de Reims. That is the cathedral where Charles VII was crowned, as Joan of Arc looked on. There are more than fifty “Notre Dames” in France, and a grand one in Montreal as well.

Whether you are celebrating Easter or Passover this weekend, may it be rich and meaningful and memorable, in a good sort of way. A joyous Easter, and חַג כָּשֵׁר וְשָׂמֵחַ!