Excellent, excellent article on Steve Wasserman, one of the nation’s leading public intellectuals, this weekend at the San Francisco Chronicle. I’ve written about Steve in past posts on the Book Haven (here and here and here), and have been a big fan ever since I wrote for the Los Angeles Times Book Review during his nine-year editorship, when it was the best book review in the country, bar none. Now he heads Berkeley’s Heyday Books, after serving most recently as an editor at large for Yale University Press and even earlier stints (before LATBR) at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Time Books/Random House literary agent with Boston-based Kneerim & Williams. He is one of the chief architects behind the successful Los Angeles Festival of Books.

The article, by Steven Winn, a former arts and culture critic for The Chronicle, begins:

Steve with some of his books.

Books weigh heavily in the life of Steve Wasserman, the new publisher and executive director of Berkeley’s Heyday Books. So much so that when he moved from Connecticut to take the job, he shipped his 14,000-pound personal library and installed it on pristine white shelves that fill most of the wall space in the company’s warren-like offices on University Avenue.

But books, as Wasserman clearly exudes, walking a visitor through his carefully devised shelving system of some 15,000 volumes, aren’t just objects of pride and possession. They mean things, signify things in a culture that can seem indifferent if not hostile to what they embody.

“Ideas matter,” he says. “Writing well is the best revenge.”

Steve was reared in Berkeley, so his return to his roots at age 64 is fitting. A good thing for California, too: “He’s probably as knowledgeable about books and ideas as anyone alive,” said Robert Scheer, the Southern California author and journalist who has known Steven for nearly half a century. “To find someone who is both an excellent editor and agent and doesn’t feel competitive with you as a writer is very rare. He’s the total package.”

And we’d like to know a little bit more about that “carefully devised shelving system.” We could use one ourselves.

Read the whole thing here.

Over at Lithub, an hour-long phone conversation with Pulitzer prizewinning Junot Díaz, a MacArthur “Genius” Fellow, and Paul Holdengraber. We always find the Dominican American author intriguing – here are a few excerpts:

On writing slowly…

Looking for the stories that death tells us.

Part of it is bad habit. But part of it is an attempt at a different kind of methodology. I have noticed that what matters to me is to reflect very, very long on what I might call my materials or very, very long on what I might call the sources of inspiration. Lately I’ve been thinking of my writing as—what interests me more than anything—is grinding these slow lenses. What I mean is giving events, giving history, giving people the time to unfold, the time to mean—to give forth their meaning.

On pain…

Often our pain encourages us to isolate ourselves. The truth of it is our pain is a badge for how we are members of this larger community. Recognizing this and recognizing our shared humanity is not a small insight. The ego pushes us towards individual, pushes us towards fantasies of achievement of power… and all of those things pull us away from our common link, our common clay… We are made of a common clay, and among the most prevalent minerals in that clay is our fragility.

On stories from the dead…

There’s also the stories that death tells us. What are the stories that the dead tell us? That’s not a language that’s easy to crack. It’s a language that I’m trying to master—that I’m trying to become sensitive to the nuances, sensitive to the phonemes, but it has been resisting me.

Go here for more.

Thanks to Lufthansa, I had a blissfully uneventful trip homeward to California and warmer weather. But my mind was still on Kraków, and last week’s conference on Zbigniew Herbert. During a stopover at the Munich airport, I idly paged through Herbert’s The Collected Prose: 1948-1998, and found this pertinent essay on the use of language. Here’s an excerpt from “Shield us from the dark word…”

From all of this a certain lesson can be drawn for readers: let them try to penetrate the value of a word not only by way of its meaning but also by its back stairs, its lining. Let them try to hear its sound, see its shade, its light and weight. And let them not be ashamed of naïve perceptions. If Słowacki‘s stanza dazzles them with bright radiance, or they hear in Norwid‘s funeral rhapsody the harsh rattle of armies, they will be closer to poetry than those who conceal their literary deafness under a wreath of learned platitudes.

But the word must return to its mother port – meaning. This not just an aesthetic problem but also a moral one. Naming objects and things human conduces to their understanding and judgment. Particularly after a chaos of ideas, after the last war, after a flood of lies, poetry must take on the labor of the moral reconstruction of the world by rebuilding the value of words. We have to part good from evil, light from darkness once again.

For that reason the last stanza of a beautiful poem by Jerzy Liebert is the prayer of all poets concerned not only with aesthetic problems but also with the ethical, social dimension of poetry:

Breathe in us, may your hand
pour olive oil onto our breast.
Shield us from the dark word,
From the dark word, save us!

A few days ago we posted one of Artur Sebastian Rosman‘s photos of Kraków, taken last week. Artur, who runs the Cosmos the in Lost blog, was in Poland’s cultural capital for the same reason I was: an international conference on Zbigniew Herbert, hosted by the Józef Tischner Institute.

We kindly asked him for permission to publish a few more of his black-and-white studies of the city, and he kindly gave it. Here goes:

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Rynek Główny, viewed from a sidestreet.

An old man walks along the Planty, Kraków’s city park.

And the rooftops are decorative, too!

Prof. Grzegorz Bak Trzebunia Niebies of Madrid speaks, with Tischner’s photo behind him.

There’s a reason for our silence. We have returned to lovely Kraków for a conference about the poet Zbigniew Herbert.

The international event is sponsored by the Józef Tischner Institute, and includes scholars, translators, poets, and others from Siberia, Brazil, London, Madrid, Rome. From America, Artur Sebastian Rosman and Humble Moi are holding down the fort.

So that’s why we’ve been so silent. There has been plenty of eating and drinking to do. Above, with Anatol Roitman from Novosibirsk. He’s a noted translator of Czesław Miłosz from Polish to Russian – so we met several years ago at the Milosz centenary. This is our first reunion. The event is documented by Artur (who, by the way, runs the Cosmos the in Lost blog).

At right, one of Artur’s shakier efforts, after plenty of wine at Wesele, a restaurant on Rynek Główny. The original building goes back to about the 13th century. This is a portion of a the original ceiling. One of many reasons it’s glorious to be back in Poland.

At work in his Stanford home. (Photo: L.A. Cicero)

I’m at the Times Literary Supplement this week, writing about the historian and poet Robert Conquest, and his lifelong balance between Clio and Euterpe:

An excerpt:

Until a few days before his death last year at the age of ninety-eight, Robert Conquest was busy finishing his memoir, completing a poem or two, and sending off a steady stream of letters to a wide international circle of friends. As always, his serenely successful life was divided between poetry and prose. Most of the obituaries concentrated on his groundbreaking work as a historian: The Great Terror (1968), Harvest of Sorrow (1986) and other books had exposed the genocidal horrors of Stalin’s regime and earned Conquest the disapprobation of left-wing intellectuals and the admiration of, among others, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.

With Poland’s Radosław Sikorski in 2009.

But he was also a poet of note; not just for the light verse and bawdy limericks with which he entertained fellow guests at social gatherings (a selection of these, A Garden of Erses, was published in 2010 as the work of “Jeff Chaucer”), but for serious verse that is lyrical, sensual and exactingly observed. …

He wrote about the joys of the flesh even as he wrote, at other times, about the worst atrocities of the twentieth century. For decades after the publication of The Great Terror, Russians would tell Conquest that they had just learned how their loved ones had perished under torture, or by forced starvation, or by being worked to death in Arctic camps. Perhaps his poems were his clearest protest in an age where, as he wrote, “Shiva walks on and on / Down Coventry Street”, of the governments he saw as “the organization of absence of love”. His response to history’s monsters was not only to reveal their horrors; he answered them with his own love poetry, erotic poetry, and even limericks, which asserted an earthy humanity of their own.

Read the whole thing here.