Archive for 2024

Poet and former National Endowment for the Arts chairman Dana Gioia has been busy. He’s just published a spate of new books: Poetry as Enchantment and Other Essays (Paul Dry Books); Dana Gioia: Poet & Critic (Mercer University Press, edited by John Zheng and Jon Parrish Peede); and last and shortest (205 pages), Weep, Shudder, Die: On Opera and Poetry, also with Paul Dry Books. He calls the last “an idiosyncratic book about the extravagant and alluring art of opera.” He also calls opera “the most intense form of poetic drama.” We couldn’t agree more.

From the Preface:

“This is a poet’s book about opera. To some people, that statement will suggest writing that is airy, impressionistic, and unreliable, but a poet also brings a practical sense of how words animate opera, lend life to imaginary characters, and give human shape to music. And a poet knows about love. There is no art that I love more than opera. I have written this book for those who, sharing the devotion, have wept in the dark of an opera house.”

He adds that “the libretto is not a shabby coat rack on which the magnificent vestments of music are hung. Operas begin with their words. Strong words inspire composers, weak words burden them. Ultimately singers embody the words to give the music a human form for the audience.”

A mutual friend of ours, poet Boris Dralyuk, author of My Hollywood and Other Poems, concurs: “As an opera lover myself, I agree with him. Especially when it comes to the way that libretti tends to be overlooked for music: “The literary elements of opera are misunderstood. There is an assumption that in opera words hardly matter, that great operas can be built on execrable texts. But the libretto is not a shabby coat rack on which the magnificent vestments of music are hung. Operas begin with their words. Strong words inspire composers, weak words burden them. Ultimately singers embody the words to give the music a human form for the audience.”

He continues: “Dana Gioia has done as much as any living poet in the last half century to restore music and drama to the increasingly tuneless and predictable realm of American verse. Now, with Weep, Shudder, Die, the fruit of a lifelong love affair with opera, he restores poetry and drama to their rightful place in the realm of classical music. Gioia argues that ‘in opera the words come first,’ but that the real gift of the medium—to poet, composer, performers, and audience—is the opportunity to collaborate in the creation and experience of a uniquely stirring work of art, a meeting of Muses like no other. This brief book is itself a showcase of critical acuity and stylistic flair, which, like the best librettos, will leave you humming long after the performance is complete.”

To borrow a thought from Measure for Measure, we are not dead though we have slept.

The Book Haven has been gone for over a month – and we’re coming back!

According to my “Google alert”, a welter of Book Haven sites seems to have cropped up in our absence. Today alone, we learned of the Bronx Book Haven, Helen’s Book Haven connected with Junior Eurovision, and a Book Haven in Kenya.

Be at ease. The Book Haven at Stanford has encountered some technological difficulties and limitations, but we carry on… with news about the book world, poets, and writers.

p.s. Meanwhile, you might want to check out our Substack, here: https://substack.com/@cynthiahaven?utm_source=user-menu

A letter from Alexander Deriev, husband of the late poet Regina Derieva. The Russian couple have a helluva back story. I wrote about her in “Writ on Water,” an 2014 essay for the Times Literary Supplement here. And I’ve written about her on the Book Haven here and here and here.

She and her husband have a helluva back story. from the age of six, she lived obscurely in Karaganda, Kazakhstan, “perhaps the most dismal corner of the former Soviet Union – once the centre of a vast prison camp universe, later just a gloomy industrial city,” according to the distinguished Lithuanian poet Tomas Venclova. For him, Derieva’s precise, epigrammatic poems limn “the concentration camp zone, where space is turned into emptiness, and time turned into disappearance”.

The couple met at the Karaganda black market, while buying books. She was a pianist and the daughter of a KGB higher-up, he is an artist The two shared a love of Andrei Platonov and Truman Capote. They were Russian Jews, then fled to Latvia to convert (bypassing the corrupt Russia Orthodox Church, which has notorious state ties). Then they settled in Israel, before finally relocating to Stockholm, where she is buried after her death in 2013.

Now she has a new book out, Selected Clouds with Bondarenko M. O. , notwithstanding her death a decade ago. Deriev writes:

“Dear Cynthia, on Friday, September 20, Russian troops attacked Odessa again with ballistic missiles. Despite the bombing, the launch of Regina’s Selected Clouds in Odessa’s Literary Museum went well. About 40 or 50 people attended). However, several more presentations of this book will be arranged in other localities soon.” Photographers Stepan Alekyan and Vladimir Bogatyrov documented the event, which included translator Oleksandr Hint, and Kateryna Chernenko, the librarian of Odessa Regional Scientific Library.

The reading continued smoothly as the missiles fired. Grace under pressure.

Postscript: The poet Regina Derieva was also a great collector of seashells – many of them now housed at the Swedish Museum of Natural History. Alexander recently found one gastropod that bears the name Cynthia. See the attached photos of this shell. Canefriula cynthia (H. C. Fulton, 1902) – 36 mm, Humboldt Bay, New Guinea. He notes: “It is unlikely that the British malacologist, Hugh Coomber Fulton (1861-1942), when naming the newly discovered mollusk, had in mind the verses of Propertius addressed to Cynthia. Most likely, he used the epithet of the Greek goddess Artemis.” I’m flattered.

“I’d say you’re always involved personally with the biography you’re writing, no matter how hard you work to muss the trail.” That’s what friend and fellow author James Marcus told me some time ago.

He ought to know. He’s the celebrated author of Glad to the Brink of Fear: A Portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson, newly out with Princeton University Press. I’ve been following James’s long labor for a dozen years. It has been more than a “personal” saga for the author of Amazonia: Five Years at the Epicenter of the Dot.com Juggernaut.

I’ve been on the road, so I’m a bit late to the table. Here’s what Lawrence A. Rosenwald concluded in his New York Times review: “If this were a show — a staging of a masterpiece — I would pay good money to see it. Not because it is perfect or unprecedented, but because it is alive and provocative.“

More words. This from Connor Harrison’s in the U.K.’s Review 31:

Glad to the Brink of Fear: A Portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson is, before anything else, a personal text. That is a difficult distinction, generally, especially when addressing Emerson, and even more so when discussing a biography about him. ‘All history becomes subjective,’ he writes in ‘History,’ ‘in other words there is properly no history, only biography.’ What has passed before our time remains a dead text without translation. It is only at the point of contact — at the moment of subjectivity — that history can be said to exist at all. When Emerson says biography he of course means the life we have now, as it grows and will be read in another present. But Marcus has not written a traditional biography, though biography certainly occupies the majority of his book. Glad to the Brink is a personal text because it is about Marcus, the point at which Waldo became subjective, or when the former discovered in the latter something of ‘[h]is own secret biography [. . .] in lines wonderfully intelligible to him, dotted down before he was born.’

“A portrait, then, is an appropriate subtitle, since it is made up as much of the sitter as it is of the paintbrush. Glad to the Brink moves from chapter to chapter, decided not by chronology or analysis, but by emotion; by proximity; the occasions when, as Marcus puts it, the spectre of American letters ‘spoke to me most directly’.

“The result is a flesh-and-blood Waldo, ageing and suffering the degradations of lecture tours and unwanted social calls, the humid nights spent with women and men on his mind, days and years worn into his desk, relatives passing out of his hands and into the Sleepy Hollow cemetery. Marcus’s prose, as well as his choice of scenes, complements this physicality. Unlike Waldo, he is conversational, practical. ‘When do you become yourself?’ he writes in the first chapter. ‘[T]he question is trickier than it sounds. At birth, we are presented with the raw materials of identity. But these are almost random. They are winnings from a game of genetic roulette, just waiting to be cashed out. What comes next is a long trek down the wind tunnel of childhood, the buffeting impacts of family and society and religion.’”

Andrew Epstein writing in The Times Literary Supplement, which calls him a “marvellous stylist.” He writes: “For Marcus, Emerson ‘was an aphorist forever seeking the minimalist blow to the head.'”

In Albert’s Camus’ 1942 The Stranger, a French shipping clerk named Meursault shoots an Arab man on the Mediterranean beach. Algerian author Kamel Daoud retells Camus’ famous story from the point of view of the dead man’s family: “My brother’s name was Musa. He had a name. But he’ll remain ‘the Arab’ forever.” 

Another Look discussed The Stranger in 2015 – now we’ll read Daoud’s 2013 retelling of the story, seventy years later. Please join us at 7 P.M. (PST) on Wednesday, November 13, 2024, at the Stanford Humanities Center when Another Look presents Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation. James Campbell,writing in the Wall Street Journal, calls it “a shrewd critique of a country trapped in history’s time warp.”

Panelists will include Stanford Prof.  Robert Pogue Harrison, author, director of Another Look, host of the radio talk show and podcast series Entitled Opinions, and a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, and Stanford Prof. Tobias Wolff, one of America’s leading writers and the founding director of Another Look, as well as a recipient of the National Medal of Arts.  

Stanford lecturer Michaela Hulstyn will round out the panel. Her Unselfing: Global French Literature at the Limits of Consciousness was published with the University of Toronto Press in 2022. Her research interests encompass the global French literary world, including texts by modernist figures in France and Belgium along with writers from Algeria, Rwanda, and Morocco. 

Like Camus, Daoud was born in Algeria. He says Camus “cured” him in a time and place where ideology has become preeminent.  “His priority is not an ideology, but his life, his body,” according to The Financial Times. 

“The problem was I liked doubt,” Daoud said.”I was deeply wary of totalitarian explanations. I was born in a collectivist period. The primary value was the group, not the individual. And I am profoundly individualistic.” He now lives under a fatwa.

We are announcing our fall event a little bit early, to allow you time to revisit The Stranger and reacquaint yourself to Camus’s timeless classic. You’ll want to keep it handy.

Register on the link below:

https://stanford.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_z2rkF4XhS1ay3pIoJvFJAg

It’s possible to get too much writing advice from famous writers, but so far I don’t think I’ve hit that threshold. I love hearing other writers explain what “works” for them. So below, some long-ago advice Oxford don and Narnia expert C. S. Lewis, shared with an American schoolgirl way back in 1959.

Incidentally, Lewis famously answered every letter he got, no matter who the sender was. Consequently, he spent hours every day in correspondence.

As for the letter below, my favorite chunk of advice is #6. I’ve long adhered to it: “When you give up a bit of work don’t (unless it is hopelessly bad) throw it away. Put it in a drawer. It may come in useful later. Much of my best work, or what I think my best, is the rewriting of things begun and abadoned years earlier.” (I should add that many large plastic bins stored in the garage testify to my adherence to this advice.)