Archive for September, 2021

A guest post from Joe Loya, screenwriter and author of The Man Who Outgrew His Prison Cell: Confessions of a Bank Robber. We’ve written about him here, and published his previous guest post here.

His newest aperçu from his Los Angeles digs:

A homeless man walked up to me at a gas pump in L.A. His outfit was one dark smudge. He could barely hold up his pants. I was unscrewing my gas cap.

He was ten feet away from me when I heard him gently ask for change. I looked at the guy as I grabbed the pump. He was my height. 30 years younger. 165 pounds lighter. I started gassing up.

“Nah,” I said. “Sorry, but I literally just gave all my change to a homeless man down the block.”

Which was true.

I suppose I didn’t want him to think I was heartless. That’s the only reason I can think of for responding with such an idiotic reply. Selfish and thoughtless. Then he said something I will always remember. He said with absolute genuine solidarity in his voice, “Yeah. I feel ya.”I loved that boney mendicant so hard right then. He tried to let me off the hook.“

“Yeah. I feel ya.” Four darling words.

I laughed for a few minutes when I got in the car because I’m overweight, I got a car, I was driving with a dear loving friend, I’d just eaten two delicious tacos, making money using my creativity, and he said he could feel me.

I’m not certain about much but I’m certain he couldn’t feel much of my life right now.

But in that moment he could feel something. And his kindness — his sweet “Yeah. I Feel Ya” — felt utterly pristine. And a little bit holy.

Some days I love and delight in the human material more than other days.

Grzegorz Kwiatkowski is fast becoming one of the most vital poetic voices from today’s Poland, with six volumes of acclaimed poetry and translated editions on the way. He is also celebrated as a musician: his internationally known post-rock band Trupa Trupa has been featured on NPR, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere.  At noon, on Friday, October 8, I’ll be having a zoom conversation with him, sponsored by CREEES (the Center for Russian, East European & Eurasian Studies). The link to register is at the bottom of this page.

Kwiatkowski’s minimalist poems explore not only conflicted pasts of Eastern Europe – for example, the Nazi “Aktion T4” euthanasia program – but also the paradoxes of contemporary genocides. As he said, “I’m intrigued by the combination of ethics and aesthetics in one person, one life, one story.” His poems have been perceived as quasi-testimonies, provocative and lyrical utterances delivered by the dead.  

“My grandfather was a prisoner in Stutthof, the Nazi concentration camp east of what used to be the Free City of Danzig. Later he was forced to become a Wehrmacht soldier,” Kwiatkowski said. His poems also explore the paradoxes of contemporary genocides, for example in Rwanda.  “I am not a moralist – as the third generation, I am simply trying to understand what happened in the past and what is increasingly happening around me now.” 

Yale critic Richard Deming said that Kwiatkowski’s work “reveals that the unforgettable is also the undeniable. Is it beautiful? I say it is powerfully necessary, unrelentingly direct. I say it burns.”  

Kwiatkowski has hosted workshops at the University of Oxford, and lectured at the University of California (Berkeley), the University of Chicago, Johns Hopkins University, and others.  

This zoom discussion will be moderated by Cynthia L. Haven, a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar. Her Czesław Miłosz: A California Life will be out with Heyday Books in October.

Register here: https://stanford.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_LxeMQGD0TR6axiTNg76L-g

The legendary Martha Graham’s memorable advice to the young dancer and choreographer Agnes de Mille comes to us courtesy the poet Katherine Levy. Since what would have been Ms. de Mille’s 116th birthday is tomorrow, let this mark the moment with her words:

The greatest thing she ever said to me was in 1943 after the opening of Oklahoma!, when I suddenly had unexpected, flamboyant success for a work I thought was only fairly good, after years of neglect for work I thought was fine. I was bewildered and worried that my entire scale of values was untrustworthy. I talked to Martha. I remember the conversation well. It was in a Schrafft’s restaurant over a soda. I confessed that I had a burning desire to be excellent, but no faith that I could be. 

Martha said to me, very quietly: “There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open.  As for you, Agnes, you have so far used about one-third of your talent.”

“But,” I said, “when I see my work I take for granted what other people value in it. I see only its ineptitude, inorganic flaws, and crudities. I am not pleased or satisfied.”

“No artist is pleased.”

“But then there is no satisfaction?”

“No satisfaction whatever at any time,” she cried out passionately. “There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.”

Please join Stanford’s Robert Pogue Harrison, Maria Florence Massucco, and Tobias Wolff, for a webinar discussion of Dorothy Strachey’s 1949 novel, Olivia.The event will take place 5:00-6:30 p.m. (PST) on Wednesday, October 13. Given the ongoing COVID situation, this will be a virtual event.

Stanford’s Prof. Robert Harrison, an acclaimed author and director of Another Look, will lead the discussion, joined by the eminent novelist Tobias Wolff, founding director of Another Look and a National Medal of Arts winner. Massucco, a PhD candidate in Italian Studies who specializes in the 20th century novel, will round out the panel.

André Gide called Olivia“a little masterpiece,” and we think you’ll agree. The story traces the intense emotional currents among the girls and teachers in a finishing school outside Paris. Olivia, a 16-year-old English girl, finds herself falling under the spell of the charismatic Mademoiselle Julie, a founder of the school. The Times (London) praised Olivia’s “strange combination of strength and delicacy” and the Wall Street Journal noted that the book is “extravagantly French in its sensibilities.”

Dorothy Strachey and her famous brother, the writer Lytton Strachey, were prominent in the Bloomsbury group. Olivia is her only novel.

The book is available through Amazon (also on Kindle), as well as Stanford Bookstore (650-329-1217) Kepler’s in Menlo Park (650-324-4321), and Bell’s Books in Palo Alto (650-323-7822). Secondhand copies are also available on Abebooks as well. If all else fails, you can order directly from Penguin at 800-793-2665, but allow for delivery time and shipping costs.

Like all our events, this webinar is free and open to the public, but please register on the link below. See you on Zoom!

https://stanford.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_jIXoLGUWTKeS6HCyhVaibw

Somehow the whole Burning Man phenomenon blew by me these last few decades. I hate crowds, anyway. You never know what a crowd will do … but maybe that’s the point. Jazz scholar and music historian Ted Gioia links the history of music with ancient ritual violence over at “The Honest Broker,” his Substack column. And in his excellent piece, “Why Do They Burn a Man at Burning Man?” he makes striking connections with the work of the French theorist René Girard, the member of the Académie Française who was a longtime Stanford professor.

“How do you celebrate Labor Day weekend?” Ted Gioia asks. “At the annual gathering known as Burning Man, enthusiastic participants set fire to a large wooden effigy—which they call The Man. This is truly sticking it to the man, in the parlance of the counterculture. And the stick here is a log, soaked in fuel and bacon grease, then set ablaze with a large magnifying glass.”

The event regularly draws as many as 80,000 participants. This year, possibly more – because like everything else in the COVID era, it’s gone online. You’ll be able to watch the “virtual burn” here, should it cross your mind to do such a thing.

Ted continues that “the arbitrary nature of the sacrificial victim is essential to the success of the ritual. That is one of the key learnings we draw from René Girard (1923-2015), a pathbreaking thinker who life’s work focused on the importance of ritualized sacrifice in human culture. I believe that Girard’s 1972 book Violence and the Sacred is one of the most significant scholarly works published during my lifetime—full of rich implications for anyone who cares about the origins of our commercial and cultural institutions, or even about contemporary phenomenon, such as social media and generational conflict.”

So why isn’t René Girard mentioned more frequently in the connection to, say, rock concerts? Music history is rife with ritual sacrifice, he notes. And then he describes the gruesome history of that music – drums and flutes that were used to drown out the screams of sacrificial victims. The examples he cites are memorably grisly.

“In fact, drums are linked to sacrificial ritual in every region of the world. In some places (Africa, South India, etc.), the sacrifice is made to the drum—which is believed to embody a deity or powerful spirit. In other instances, for example among the Incas, the skin of the sacrificial victim is turned into the drum. But whatever the particulars, the drum is viewed with awe, perhaps even fear, in the context of these ritualistic connections.”

Think that’s a thing of the ancient past? Not so fast, says Ted. He remembers a hideous example: “the notorious Altamont concert on December 6, 1969—remembered today for the stabbing death of Meredith Hunter in front of the stage during a performance by the Rolling Stones. But just a few weeks earlier, the murderous Charles Manson gang relied on the Beatles’s song “Helter Skelter” as an anthem in their own quasi-ritualistic killing spree. How strange that the decade would come to a close with the music of the two defining bands of the era—so focused on peace and love, according to the leaders of the counterculture—having their songs co-opted in senseless murder.”

Read the whole thing here. And below, a reminder of how much Sigmund Freud was on the same trail as Stanford’s eminent French thinker.

“We aim to take market share and usurp, but we’re very much operating within the system.” ~ Vlad Tenev

In 2013, Vlad Tenev launched the “Robinhood” platform to democratize financial markets. So what common ground does the Bulgarian-American entrepreneur share with Entitled Opinions host and humanist Robert Pogue Harrison, who claims that teaching, thinking, and writing about cultural history has been his lifelong vocation?  

The Stanford professor made a guest appearance on Tenev’s half-hour podcast series “Under the Hood” to explore the connections. Here’s an obvious one: the CEO also started at Stanford, where he envisioned a trading platform to encourage young investors by not requiring minimum accounts or charging commissions. You can listen to the conversation at the Los Angeles Review of Books here.

The fugitive “Robin Hood” was another link. Tenev suggested that Robin Hood’s intent was to democratize resources, adding that “he wanted to open up the forest and have it not just the purview of the king, but open for everyone to hunt.”

Harrison, the author of Forests: The Shadow of Civilization, drew an analogy between the outlaws’ Sherwood Forest and the markets of Wall Street, adding, “Your platform is trying to get the underdogs or the least privileged into a system which traditionally enriches the already rich.”

Both men also share an interest in the work of the late French theorist René Girard, who taught at Stanford for decades. Girard said society’s last taboo is envy, which drives today’s social media. Recalling Girard’s most famous protégé, the early Facebook investor Peter Thiel, Harrison observed, “Facebook is a machine of engendering envy, and people keep upping the ante of how happy they are, how beautiful their kids are, and how wonderful their vacations and meals are. You enter into this mad mimetic escalation of self-representation on one hand, and the envy of your friends and rivals on the other. “ Yet Tenev noted that Robinhood also started with social media, allowing people to interact in ways unimaginable a decade before.

“In our capitalistic society, there’s not just one king. There are several kings. They are the banks, the corporations, the hedge funds, the investment bankers.” ~ Robert Pogue Harrison

The recording of the conversation is over at the Los Angeles Review of Books here.

More potent quotes:

“In our capitalistic society, there’s not just one king. There are several kings. They are the banks, the corporations, the hedge funds, the investment bankers.” ~ Harrison

“You can’t just throw prudence out of the equation altogether.” ~ Harrison

“Do these trading platforms have a declared sense of responsibility in caring for the investors who use it? How does one go about trying to protect the users?” ~ Harrison

“Your Robinhood platform is not revolutionary because it’s not trying to overthrow.” ~ Harrison

“You can’t just throw prudence out of the equation altogether.” ~ Harrison

“We aim to take market share and usurp, but we’re very much operating within the system.” ~ Tenev